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Message:: [QUOTE="I Like Trees, post: 290561, member: 10463"]Let's be deci-sive. <img src="http://www.geocities.com/brianjacob2/duodecimal_ruler.gif" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" />I guess the rulers at your house look like this (finally finished pic), unless you're using inches, feet, and yards as a base 10 system. In that case, I suppose you express what would normally be -C"- as 12". Britons wrote "£4/19/11" not "£4/J/B". (for "Four Pounds, 19 Shillings, and 11 pence) I suppose this means they were on a base ten monetary system. To quote the first sentence of the Wikipeida at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal: "The decimal (base ten or occasionally denary) numeral system has ten as its base." [Wikipedia's bolding, not mine.] Expressing something is a decimal writing system [FONT=&quot]– [/FONT]which is the same thing as a base ten writing system[FONT=&quot] – [/FONT]does not make it a base ten or decimal measurement of anything. Just as writing the senatance "我能请有一些鞋带吗?" as "Wǒ néng qǐng xiē xié dài ma?" does not make Mandarin a romance language. Ten minutes after 9:99 could not be 9:109 because 9 is the largest number than can fit in a single place value. That is how number-writing systems tend to work. When you fill up one place value you carry over to the next place value dividing by the base of the number system. "1" ten plus "9" tens is "10" tens 10/10=1 so you carry "1" to the next place. 9:99 would not be 9:109 for the same reason that 67+4 is not Sixty-Eleven (611). The fact that 9:99+0:10 does not equal 9:109 is not evidence that we are in base ten. The fact that you do not fill the "tens" place in minutes before changing the number in the hours place however proves we are not in base ten/decimal/denary/number of fingers of my hands/whatever you want to call it.[/QUOTE]

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