On Sep 15, 2008, at 9:52 AM, John Cowan wrote:
Rob Seaman scripsit:
Decimal and sexagesimal notation persist because over centuries and
millennia lay people have demonstrated the ability to reach a minimal
level of competency. Which is to say that, for whatever reason, they
are better tailored to our purposes.
That's vulgar Darwinism. Base 10, like English spelling and the
QWERTY
keyboard, are good enough, and may even constitute a local minimum.
But it's absurd to suppose that they are necessarily a global minimum.
Which was the point of some of my earlier comments.
Binary is, however, not good enough for day-to-day human purposes.
And to bring this back to the topic of the mailing list, "good enough"
civil timekeeping requires a close mimicry of mean solar time. Vulgar
or not, Darwin certainly recognized the selective value of mimicry.
Do you suppose that the reason that francophones go on speaking
French is
because in some sense French is better suited to those particular
people
than English, or Dogon, or Mandarin Chinese? Hardly. They continue
to speak French because children continue to acquire French from their
francophone parents and peers.
And do we expect society to be show any less inertia in its diurnality?
Rob
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