Adopting the binary numeral system for everyday use in the future?

[Red Iron Crown]

That's just your cultural inertia talking, it only seems that way because you're used to decimal. I've heard similar arguments about the metric system, and how pounds, inches and miles are more intuitive than kg, mm and km.

People can think in binary. Link

[Sillychris]

Is it my cultural inertia speaking when I say I need words and not individual letters?

I will admit that people can think in binary, but I feel it would slow things down since the data is so not-compressed.

The idea of a rocket is one object in my mind. Not 6 letters that I later derive to be a rocket. You say rocket, I picture cylinder. It would be unwieldy to s-a-y-[space]-r-o-c-k-e-t.

The human mind can learn more than 2 symbols. Why would you restrict it to 2?

[Sillychris]

People can think in binary. Link

Your link proves my point more than it does yours. "They find that the former Mangarevans combined base-10 representation with a binary system. They had number words for 1 to 10, and then for 10 multiplied by several powers of 2. The word takau (which Bender and Beller denote as K) means 10; paua (P) means 20; tataua (T) is 40; and varu (V) stands for 80. In this notation, for example, 70 is TPK and 57 is TK7"

Symbol heavy. Not binary.

[Red Iron Crown]

I personally wouldn't restrict it to two, but that doesn't mean it's not possible.

We have words for orders of magnitude; hundred, thousand, million, etc. We don't say 1-0-0-0-0-0-0, we say million. I think it is safe to assume we would develop a word for 1000000 in binary, too.

[Sillychris]

That's a good point, I guess coming from a physics background, I'm biased towards more compressible numbers (which is why I vote for a move towards hexadecimal). You run out of orders of magnitude a lot less quickly with 10^x than you do with 2^x

[Skyler4856]

WHY?!?!?!?!? Early education would be a pain, and arithmetic would put me in physical pain...

[StrandedonEarth]

There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't

On a more serious note, I can agree with hexadecimal. If I am thinking it through right, a base-9 or base-16 system would have a rational number for the square root of 2

[KOCOUR]

Humans will never use other system than decimal in everyday life.

2 reasons:

1. There is no need for change.

2. 10fingers.

[Nuke]

other number systems come into play when you fail to pay back your local loan shark.

Edited March 4, 2014 by Nuke

[andrewas]

On a more serious note, I can agree with hexadecimal. If I am thinking it through right, a base-9 or base-16 system would have a rational number for the square root of 2

Afraid not, an irrational number is irrational in every rational base. And if you use an irrational base, you have other problems.

[Moon Goddess]

I'm quite adept with binary, I surprised my networking teacher in that I was the only person in the class who could do binary math in my head. I'm still super against this idea.

[Nuke]

a full adder isnt that complicated. its only like 5 gates per bit. all of the bitwise operations are 1 gate per bit. shift registers take a flipflop per bit (about 5 gates). and with all those you can construct basic operators and from there every math operation known to man (to a finite approximation).