I like the detail that there alien has 4(10) fingers as opposed to the 10(22) that the human has.

Can we all use base 12?

It will be a shower of shit for like 50 years but then it will be marginally better for pretty much everyone.

There are 10 types of people: Those who understand binary and those who don't.

Based.

I like that the alien has 4 fingers. Fitting!

There are only 10 ways of doing things: the right way and the wrong way. (Programming joke)

Huh, that's a good point. A better universal naming system would be something like "Base x+1", with x being one integer lower than 10. So humans would use Base 9+1, and the alien would use Base 3+1.

*This has been on my mind all day and the more I think about it, the more obvious it becomes how fundamentally terrible the name "Base-10" is. How did this never occur to the people who coined the term? Even the system I suggested is flawed as it's still trying to incorporate the same bad logic.

A better system would be something like Base 9, stopping shy of the respective 10 in each system, or if it needs to be clarified, Base 9+0, as 0 is the extra digit in the first place, not 10.

Wow I never thought about that.

But it is always like this:

let there be any base "b"
That can represent a number by the sum of their positional digits:

number = sum(d_i * b ^ i)
   where i is the position index and d_i is the digit at this position. (note: index starts with 0, from the least digit farthest to the right)

So the (decimal) number 4 in base 4 is then

1×4¹ + 0×4^0 = 10

And (decimal) number 8 in base 8 is

1×8¹ + 0×8^0 = 10

And 10 in base 10:

1×10¹ + 0×10^0 = 10

All your base belong to us

Octal is base 8. Decimal is base A. Hexadecimal is base G. Any questions?

I get this comic which is about translation errors.

Comments are wildly off ....

....BASE!

Only when written, which is the whole point of notation. "Ten" is still a fixed amount, and so is four.

Looks like 0100 rocks to me

This one took me a bit.

Fuck I am so lost

Took me a moment

The most reliable way to communicate bases would probably be using unary. Now if your alien is using unary, that might not work, but it should for all higher bases.