Off Topic: Governor General's Coat of Arms has a binary stream [was: OT-GG binary]

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Oct 05, 2010 at 10:23:52AM +0000, Peter wrote:
> Well the Romans used biquinal abacii. And they were not new when they started
> using them apparently. Biquinal means base-2-and-base-5 which is actually
> clever, you only have one free hand to check things off on fingers while holding
> an abacus in the other. Of course 2 came from having 2 hands in total (used 1 at
> a time). Later 2*5 became our current base 10. Apparently biquinal is tightly
> connected to Roman numbers, the numbers from 1 to 10 clearly reflect this,
> including the built-in shorthand notation (IIX = 8 instead of VIII etc).

I have never seen IIX although it has apparently been seen in rare cases.
It is shorter, but not by much.

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_abacus
> 
> According to this calculus may have meant 'playing with pebbles' to someone way
> back then...

-- 
Len Sorensen
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