Consistentliness and a New Number System
by Dave Tufts - July 26, 2006 / 4:03pm View more articles
Before iMarc launches a site, we run it through a formal quality control process. The QC team tests every page, validates all HTML, tries to break all the dynamic tools, and submits bugs to our bug-tracking system if when something goes wrong.
Usually, about half the issues submitted pertain to inconsistencies. One error message is red, another is black. The phone number has dots on one page, dashes on another.
Today, Fred submitted an issue about the inconsistency of a page title.
At the bottom of his bug, he added:
Consistentliness is next to Godliness.
My current pet-peeve is inconsistencies in English numbers.
Let's examine.
My 4-year old daughter is learning to count, and if our number system was consistent, she'd be able to count to infinity by now.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine - No problems yet.
Let's skip "ten" for a minute. Eleven? What's that? Though it should, the word has nothing in common with "one", "twenty-one", "thirty-one", "forty-one". Maybe it should be "one-teen". Better yet, call it "onety-one".
Good: forty (except for the spelling), sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety
Bad: ten (should be onety), twenty (should be twoty), thirty (should be threety), fifty (should be fivety)
Thirteen should be "onety-three", Fifteen should be "onety-five" (or at least, fiveteen).
Imagine how easy it would be to learn (and teach four year olds) how to count beyond ten if all the numbers followed a consistent pattern.
one, two, three...
onety, onety-one, onety-two, onety-three...
twoty, twoty-one, twoty-two, twoty-three...
threety, threety-one, threety-two, threety-three...
fourty, fourty-one, fourty-two, fourty-three...
fivety, fivety-one, fivety-two, fivety-three...
sixty... Everything from 60 - 99 could stay as-is.
If Fred were around to submit a bug report when the guy who invented numbers was giving them names, we'd have a lot more free time, and a consistently named number system.
I hope you enjoyed my twoty-eighth Communiqué.
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8 Comments
You just start over and put the words "one hundred and" before everything.
Then "two hundred and", "three hundred and"... etc... After nine hundred and ninety nine, you move on to thousands, which work fine as-is, until you get to the current, ten-thousand.
In the new number system (NNS) that will be called "Onety Thousand", then "Twoty Thousand" - it all stays consistent.
As an apostle of the NNS I tried "spreading the lore" last night to a group of people. All was going well until "twoty-two", at which point the NNS was widely acknowledged as the ALNS (alternate lifestyle number system).
Point the second, another problem with English is in the ordinal naming system. "First"? What the heck is that? "Onest"! Similar "fiveth" would be better than "fifth" though obviously, harder to pronounce.
Point the last, "sixths" is really hard to enunciate.
It would already have been widely adopted if it hadn't been for the nay-sayer conspiracy holding it back. I'm even willing to say that these people are 'ANTI-NUMBER'. Not everyone remembers the sheer horrors of Mathnet, featured prominently on Square One Television.
Of course, then they have two different counting systems... one for round cylindrical objects and another for everything else.
But all logic aside, change is resisted. RE: metric.
I tried this with one of my kids, but met a lot of distaff resistance. English is very inconsistent, but we manage despite that.
There are 10 kinds of people: those who understand binary; and those who don't.