This episode contains a small amount of salty language.

Listener discretion is advised.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's damn interesting.

It's time to do the research.

It's time to make the research. It's time to sit and write.

It's time to make the content of them interesting tonight.

It's time to make the music.

It's time to grab the mic.

It's time to make the podcast of them interesting tonight.

Hello, listeners.

Alan Bellows here, founder of Damn Interesting.

This month, September 2015, we at Damn Interesting are celebrating our 10th birthday.

Because we modern humans use a base 10 numbering system, 10 and multiples of 10 naturally feel

like big milestones.

But base 10 is actually a pretty poor base for a numbering system, having only a few divisors,

one, two, and five.

So when we do mathematical division, we very often end up with messy fractions.

Probably the only reason we use base 10 is because we happen to have 10 fingers.

12 would be a much better base, because it has 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 as divisors.

Sorry metric system.

Ancient Egyptian and Babylonian mathematicians used a base 60 system, which has 10 divisors,

and it is therefore very easy to cleanly subdivide.

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