111–120 of 122 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even China, which is officially on one timezone, has local "un-official" timezone.
That's very interesting, I had no idea. Could you elaborate?
Ürümqi Time (UTC+6), two hours behind Beijing. Although this is not officially recognized, it is the time observed locally by most residents.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's arbitrary to a degree, but having a single timezone for Russia, or even the US, would amplify the effect. It's no big deal now because you are used to season changing, sunrise changing, etc - but if suddenly you had to get up for work and endure, say, 5 hours of darkness, or perhaps only 1 hour of daylight left..... it would be ugly. That's why we have timezones.
Couldn't you just get up at, say, noon, work from 2pm until 10pm, and go to bed at 4am? This would be a bit confusing at first but it's basically what people do now. Solar noon would be at a different chronological time for everyone outside of GMT but you'd only have to make the adjustment once, plus it would provide an economic stimulus to compass manufacturers :-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Choosing a radix is a balance between the number of prime factors (and brevity) and the number of symbols to keep track of. I think twelve strikes a good balance as well.
In that case 3 is your number. (Because it's the closest number to e, 2.71) There is a currency based on it (with the provably least number of coins necessary to make any kind of change), ternary logic, balanced ternary is especially cool, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why stop there? Lets have base 1024, you can count to that on your fingers too! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_binary
Because it makes it so that the number four has another meaning that, for whatever reason, people can't get past. I've tried to explain it to people before, but we never manage to count past four without someone laughing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In that case 3 is your number. (Because it's the closest number to e, 2.71) There is a currency based on it (with the provably least number of coins necessary to make any kind of change), ternary logic, balanced ternary is especially cool, etc.
Why is being close to e a good thing?
Having base b for number n, you need log_b n digits where each digit is an element of (0..b-1). So working on those representations takes something like f(log_b n, b) operations. Where the function f depends on the operation you are looking at.
A good base should keep f small in relation to all n.
One very natural choice for f, I can't remember which at the moment, leads to e being the best base in theory---so 3 being good in practice.
If you are working with something like trees on disk (yes, data structures are very intimately related to numbering systems---read Okasaki's Purely Functional Data Structures for more information) a very big b, i.e. branching factor in this case, like 1024 is useful: Loading a new digit/node from disk into memory takes a long time, but once it's in memory, your operations will be fast.
Hope that Berlusconi in one of his delirious of madness will do the same for Italy. But I want to stay always in DST, that in Italy means more daylight.
If you want to get up an hour earlier to have more light, then just get up an hour earlier.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do farmers bother they cows with DST, then? Can't they just get up at the same (real) time?
I think one of the problems is that the milk trucks and the rest of the industry do respect DST so if you lose one hour the milk might spoil. At least it's what I heard a farmer say on the TV a couple years ago.
That's a great precedent! I hope the US abandons winter time, too.
Lousy farmers...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, you can represent it with your fingers but not count it. By 'count' I mean an ordinal traversal of the sort you teach kids.
Use gray code.