60sRefugee , vor 2 Monaten

@foone Maybe not; merchants using scales figured out early that a set of binary weights (base weight then each is double the previous) could be combined to any value up to 2x-1 where x was the largest weight. Now if some genius had figured out a way to combine this with an abacus...

tinebeest , vor 2 Monaten

@foone @lowqualityfacts did you know this one?

dcoderlt , vor 2 Monaten

@foone
tfw you need 10X programmers and the recruiters only bring you C programmers

PJ_Evans , vor 2 Monaten

@foone
They did pretty well with their abacuses.

SnoopJ , vor 2 Monaten

@foone turns out the losers who killed Archimedes weren't particularly keen on maths

HoustonDog , vor 2 Monaten

@foone

what is zero ... in Roman Numerals?

foone OP , vor 2 Monaten

So you think the ancient Romans ever called porn "thirty"?

skaverat , vor 2 Monaten

@foone sigh

scottmichaud , vor 2 Monaten

@foone I assume they'd call them by their stage name.

jonathankoren , vor 2 Monaten

@foone oh yeah. LXIX. Nice.

jtlg , vor 2 Monaten

@foone Isn’t this where “thirsty” comes from?

flyingsaceur , vor 2 Monaten

@foone Rule XXXIV

jonhendry , vor 2 Monaten

@foone

"So are these frescoes soft-core or wha-"
"No man, they're thirty. So thirty."

ppxl , vor 2 Monaten

@foone Thirty for thirsty, romance for the romans

fishidwardrobe , vor 2 Monaten

@foone They literally said "thirty", not the latin for 30. No-one could work out how to write it down, though.

Felice , vor 2 Monaten

@foone Rhymes with dirty!

Kierkegaanks , vor 2 Monaten

@foone yet they invented decimation

Disputatore , vor 2 Monaten

@foone that and lead piping.

gsuberland , vor 2 Monaten

@foone yeah I mean imagine setting your monitor resolution to MXXIVxDCCLXVIII

18+ jordan , vor 2 Monaten

@foone XXC COLVMN PVNCH CARD?

k_kuhlman , vor 2 Monaten

@foone I for one love Roman numeral puns

mhoye , vor 2 Monaten

@foone little-endian v. Big-endian societies is an interesting idea.

acb , vor 2 Monaten

@foone if they had Lisp, they’d have been fine, as addition on Roman numerals is just a normalise, a merge and a denormalise. As long as they didn’t need negative numbers, that is.

jtlg , vor 2 Monaten

@foone “One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs." – Robert Firth

nyrath , vor 2 Monaten

@foone

Yeah, I found out the hard way that doing long division manually with Roman numerals is a nightmare.

zhenech , vor 2 Monaten

@foone I thought they failed to configure Nero Burning ROM to create proper backups of their most important data 🤔