Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Base

2022-01-07 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
Base
Votey panel for Base
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

This comic is a simple but clever math joke. One person asks another: "Hey you! What's the best base system for math?" The other responds: "Obviously base-10." The first person emphatically agrees: "Damn right. Goddamned right."

The caption at the bottom reads: "Technically, this works for any base system."

The joke hinges on a subtle mathematical truth: in ANY base system, that base is written as "10." In base-2 (binary), two is written as "10." In base-8 (octal), eight is written as "10." In base-16 (hexadecimal), sixteen is written as "10." So no matter what base you actually use, you would always call it "base-10" because that is how you represent the base number within its own system.

This means the exchange is a tautology -- every user of every base system would say their base is "base-10" and they'd all be correct. The comic highlights a fun quirk of positional numeral systems and the self-referential nature of how we name them.

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