Tags for this video have been changed from 'youtube, video, views, count' to 'youtube, video, views, count, numberphile' - edited by RhesusMonk

Looks like your vote (for http://videosift.com/video/Do-numbers-EXIST-Numberphile) is what finally ticked me over to a bronze star. Thanks! :-)

404'd!>> ^BoneRemake:

>> ^Kofi:
As soon as I saw the calculator all I thought of was 5318008.

101

>> ^Kofi:

As soon as I saw the calculator all I thought of was 5318008.


101

>> ^Bidouleroux:

>> ^EvilDeathBee:
Meh, I prefer the current, short system. Seems to make more sense to me, who's not a mathematician and is just someone who occasionally needs to say large numbers.

In French we only use the long system and it makes sense to everyone, even to non-mathematicians. What's your point?


Oh, I'm sorry. I thought I was being perfectly clear. What I was saying; to me, someone who was taught the short system, it is preferred. Also, as someone who doesn't need to use large numbers in every day use I don't need to get pedantic about the name of numbers. No sense in getting your knickers in a twist over a name.

>> ^EvilDeathBee:

Meh, I prefer the current, short system. Seems to make more sense to me, who's not a mathematician and is just someone who occasionally needs to say large numbers.

In French we only use the long system and it makes sense to everyone, even to non-mathematicians. What's your point?

>> ^probie:

I've always wondered why there were 360 degrees in a circle.


I was just making the case to a cousin and my father a couple of months ago that I figured a circle had 360 degrees because the circle of the year just about had 360 days! My skeptic scientific dad was cool with it, but my French cousin poopoo'd it, or whatever dismissive sound they make in French...

In addition to the Egyptian theory stated above, I'd like to add the Sumerians into the mix. They invented the sexagesimal system (base 60) and used a unit of length called the "beru". A beru is about 10km and, given a walking speed of 5 km/h, was also used as a unit of time by the Babylonians later on, measuring in at 120 minutes. Since an average day is 12 beru long, it fit rather nicely into their base 60 system and corresponded equally well to the 12 moon cycles in a year.

The Egyptians used seasonal time, meaning their hours didn't have a fixed length -- a mix of seasonal and proper hours was used. The Babylonians, however, used "hours" of a fixed length (~120 minutes), which the Greeks split in half to end up at 24 hours a day.

Or maybe not, can't remember.

Additional tidbit of information: if a positive integer has more divisors than any smaller positive integer, we call it a "highly composite number".>> ^lampishthing:

Anybody know why there's 24 hours in a day? Apart from it being two twelves...

>> ^lampishthing:

Anybody know why there's 24 hours in a day? Apart from it being two twelves...
Ok, so supposedly day and night were divided into twelve because of the 12 moon cycles in a year, or maybe it was because Egyptians liked counting in 12s as much as the Babylonians liked 60. Then there's this guy who proposes a variant on my completely fabricated-on-the-spot theory. So, sounds like we might or might not know the answer to your question.

>> ^lampishthing:

Anybody know why there's 24 hours in a day? Apart from it being two twelves...
Similar to other units of measurement based off the human body (e.g. feet), the resting human heartrate is around 60 beats per minute, so around one beat per second. Using their preference for 60, we start with 60 beats and call it a minute, then up from 60 minutes to set an hour, and find that it comes out to 24 of these "3600 second" hours in a day. Once you've got that there are roughly 24 hours in a day, you can set your mark by that and work backward to define seconds more precisely.


When you've gotten to end, you're confronted with the fact that just because something makes sense, that doesn't mean it's true. (i.e.: I have no idea, and will probably post back once I find out the truth.)

Your video, 60 - Numberphile, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This achievement has earned you your "Pop Star" Level 1 Badge!

We spent a loooong time writing big numbers around the room -- and then talking and learning about the large numbers we were writing around the large classroom at the time, walking around with our short little 12 year old legs.

>> ^conan:

>> ^Trancecoach:
I remember writing a googol across three blackboards in grade school -- must've taken an hour or longer to do it.

Even if writing a single "0" took you 5 seconds, writing 100 of them would only take you 500 seconds, i.e. a little over 8 minutes. Your sense of time back in grad school has obviously been influenced by weed or similar :-)

>> ^Trancecoach:

I remember writing a googol across three blackboards in grade school -- must've taken an hour or longer to do it.


Even if writing a single "0" took you 5 seconds, writing 100 of them would only take you 500 seconds, i.e. a little over 8 minutes. Your sense of time back in grad school has obviously been influenced by weed or similar :-)

Hey, thanks for taking the time to explain. Much appreciated. Rock on, srd. :-)


In reply to this comment by srd:
Well, this explanation is what happens on the hardware level, i.e. in the wiring inside the CPU. On the software side you can emulate the carry-over by allocating several pieces of memory and checking bounds and doing carry-over manually. So you're manually programming around the hardware constraints.

Trouble here is, the programmer has to anticipate that the given constraint isn't sufficient for the use case and needs to be worked around. For scores this was obviously the case. For the levels, I'm pretty sure that noone ever really anticipated that someone would go through 255 levels of pacman.

It's basically the same expectation management on a human level that brought us the fear of the Y2K problem.