Persistent, Niggling Questions

[Zeke]

I might hold out for junior high, but we basically agree. And it was even sillier at the time New Math was actually developed -- computers were nowhere near as important as they are today, and programming is really the only field where knowing other bases is of practical importance. (Yes, this means that before computers came along, other bases were just a curiosity. That's still true of all bases except 2, thanks to one of the great insights of the last century: if you can represent everything with 1s and 0s, you can do it with open and closed circuits.)

That said, I love mathematical curiosities. There's quality time to be spent at Wikipedia looking up different bases and their obscure applications. Did you know a couple of cultures have used base 8 because they counted by spaces between fingers, not by fingers themselves?