Elegant dentistry and number systems

[radiantfracture]

I'm very pleased by the work the dentist did on the cracked filling, which wobbled alarmingly in my mouth all through December. She's created a sculptural surface with two smooth planes, very pleasant to run the tongue across.

The fix itself was faster than I expected. Then she spent a long time refining her work, for which I am grateful -- now.

During the more arduous passages I was comforted by having recently discovered the details of the Sumerian sexagesimal number system (base 60). I knew about the twelves but not the sixties.

Base 60 sounds huge, insurmountable, but what I learnt was the small essential detail that you count it using the phalanges of your fingers.

(I can't do the long/short months count across my knuckles because I'm short a knuckle, but I have access to a full set of phalanges.)

I don't know how the Sumerians did the counting, but I found you can run your thumb rapidly up the inside of each finger, marking by pressure three on each finger, twelve on each hand, and then the five fingers of the other hand make it beautifully fast to count to 60 -- nothing more natural, using the body's sense of itself I would even say eloquently. I found it quicker and easier than counting tens -- you can store three on each finger instead of just one. (Though I was of course translating into Base 10 numerals, more or less).

So I did that, counted eloquently, while the various drills and grinders sang their high- and low-pitched songs.

Weirdly, I've always found counting by threes a natural way to divide numbers, though I did not use my finger-joints.

During the most arduous bits I could not really think clearly at all, except of what I might have for breakfast once my mouth unfroze.

{rf}

Comments

[sylvanfae]

I've adapted the ogham tree alphabet to be days of a lunar month, by adding a few more trees (three-to-four at the end of the month... sometimes the fourth one gets skipped), and hand ogham works just like this. Each aicme is five trees, so the first aicme goes across all the bottom phalanges, and I kind of consider an aicme like a week. Five "weeks" plus a few days in each month.