Thursday, May 25, 2006

Five Score and Seven Years Ago

While I work on my Magnum Opus about last night's season-ender of Lost (I need to watch it again to see if I missed any of what seemed like thousands of references and mirrorings of the issues at stake in Enlightenment thought -- "Lance Corporal Desmond David Hume," forsooth!), I'd like to take this short interval to make an Announcement.

Al Franken, in reaction to the Senate's profoundly silly vote to make English the official language of the United States, has proffered other laws that he feels should be passed. Among these are a statute making Base Ten the United States' official numeral system.

(I can't seem to type "United"; consistently rendering it instead "Untied." Hmm.)

As an act of civil disobedience against this proposed deeply unjust, discriminatory and ill-considered law, from this moment on, I, my family and my henchmen will conduct all our arithmetic business in Base Eight. I urge all my readers (all 12, old-style 10, of you) to follow suit. Yes, check-writing will be somewhat more complicated, but frankly I don't think most of you write all that many checks anyway.

2-4-6-10! Decimal digits is what we hate!
Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Two of these fingers got to go!

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Query for Lisa Simpson:
Do eight-fingered cartoon characters (Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, etc.) use base eight?

H. Rumbold, Master Barber said...

So that would make today 31 May 3726, right? I think I need a refresher course and will review Tom Lehrer's New Math.

That was one of Franken's rare clever bits. I also remember Fahrenheit as the official temperature scale (I'd rather see Kelvin) and right as the official handshaking hand (option for left in cases of amputation).

H. Rumbold, Master Barber

Anonymous said...

Telling time will be fun under the new base ten system. Two ten hour half days? One hundred minute hours? Whatever it takes to prove we're Murrican!

Anonymous said...

A Geek Speaks:

It's simple: there are only 10 kinds of people in the world anyway.

Those who understand binary, and those who don't.

A Big Fat Slob said...

What's wrong with these damned Republicans -- what's with this trying top make a foreign language the officeial language of this country. Don't they know "English" comes from England?!! They should be making American the offical language. We gotta get rid 'o dem bums.

Anonymous said...

octal is subversive, but hexadecimal is much more fun.

you can spell DEADBEEF in hexadecimal (aka 3,735,928,559). you can't spell anything but "00000" in octal.

Anonymous said...

Dislexics Untie!

J. Andrew Boyle said...

The wife and I are already screwin gup our children since we are in the typesetting trade and tend to talk in base-12.

Don't know WHERE I am going to live...

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