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

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

All your base belong to us

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

Took me a moment

Fuck I am so lost

This one took me a bit.

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.