3,700-year-old Babylonian stone tablet gets translated, changes history

floofloof@lemmy.ca to News@lemmy.world – 368 points –
3,700-year-old Babylonian stone tablet gets translated, changes history
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Yeah fuck that upworthy spam. Here's the original article from The Guardian.

Not significantly better:

"which scientists claim are more accurate than any available today."
No they obviously do not. Yeah the fractions are easier in base 60, but they are not more accurate than just using rational numbers or radicals in any other base.

I'm partial to base 36

  • "10" is a square that's also the product of two squares, 4 and 9

  • highly divisible, being able to simply express halves, thirds, quarters, sixths, and ninths, also twelfths and eighteenths but those are less common portions in daily use

  • you can represent it as [0 - Z], as in "...8, 9, A, B, C...", it's literally achieved by just adding the alphabet to the numeral system.

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