In 1859, far ahead of its application in computing, engineer John W. Nystrom proposed that we adopt base 16 for arithmetic, timekeeping, weights and measures, coinage, and even music.

“It is evident that 12 is a better number than 10 or 100 as a base, but it admits of only one more binary division than 10, and would, therefore, not come up to the general requirement,” he wrote. “The number 16 admits binary division to an infinite extent, and would, therefore, be the most suitable number as a base for arithmetic, weight, measure, and coins.”

He named the 16 digits an, de, ti, go, su, by, ra, me, ni, ko, hu, vy, la, po, fy, and ton, and invented new numerals for the upper values. Numbers above this range would be named using these roots, so 17 in decimal would be tonan (“16 plus 1”) in Nystrom’s system. And he devised some wonderfully euphonious names for the higher powers:

Base 16 Number	Tonal Name	Base 10 Equivalent
10	ton	16
100	san	256
1000	mill	4,096
1,0000	bong	65,536
10,0000	tonbong	1,048,576
100,0000	sanbong	16,777,216
1000,0000	millbong	268,435,456
1,0000,0000	tam	4,294,967,296
1,0000,0000,0000	song	1612
1,0000,0000,0000,0000	tran	1616
1,0000,0000,0000,0000,0000	bongtran	1620

So the hexadecimal number 1510,0000 would be mill-susanton-bong.

The system was never widely adopted, but Nystrom was confident in its rationality. “I know I have nature on my side,” he wrote. “If I do not succeed to impress upon you its utility and great importance to mankind, it will reflect that much less credit upon our generation, upon scientific men and philosophers.”

His book is here.

The classic three-circle Venn diagram on the left has threefold rotational symmetry, and the more complex five-ellipse diagram on the right (discovered by Branko Grünbaum in 1975) has fivefold symmetry. Pleasingly, it turns out that a Venn diagram with n curves having an n-fold rotational symmetry exists if and only if n is prime.

(The diagram below has four curves and fourfold symmetry, but properly speaking it’s not a Venn diagram because it doesn’t represent all possible intersections of the sets.)

(Stan Wagon and Peter Webb, “Venn Symmetry and Prime Numbers: A Seductive Proof Revisited,” American Mathematical Monthly 115:7 [2008], 645-648; Frank Ruskey, Carla D. Savage, and Stan Wagon, “The Search for Simple Symmetric Venn Diagrams,” Notices of the AMS 53:11 [2006], 1304-1311.)

Here’s a way to find tangents to an ellipse from a point outside it, say E. Use E to draw any two chords CD and FG. Now lines CF and DG will meet at H, and CG and DF will meet at J. The line HJ intersects the ellipse at A and B, and EA and EB are the tangents we sought.

In 2001 David Bloom of Brooklyn College wrote, “I owe the above to a course I took in 1958, taught by O. Zariski. The result seemed so beautiful that I’ve never forgotten it.”

(“Miscellanea,” College Mathematics Journal 32:4 [September 2001], 317-318.)

Another time-lengthening effect, the ‘watched-pot’ phenomenon, has been studied by Richard A. Block. Actually using the old adage ‘a watched pot never boils’ as the impetus for his experiments, Block tested the subjective time experiences of observers watching a pot of water as it was heated slowly to the boiling point. One group of subjects, told that they would subsequently be asked for a time estimate, attended carefully to the passage of time. They felt that the time interval was long. A second group, instructed that the experiment involved visual perception, attended to time less carefully and therefore estimated the duration to be shorter. One of Block’s conclusions is that attention to time has a strong influence on perceived length.

— Jonathan D. Kramer, The Time of Music, 1988

(Richard A. Block, Edward J. George, and Marjorie A. Reed, “A Watched Pot Sometimes Boils: A Study of Duration Experience,” Acta Psychologica 46:2 [1980], 81-94.)

From Reddit: Stare at the red dot on this woman’s nose for 30 seconds, then look at a white wall and blink.

Erasmus Darwin, 1786:

I was surprised, and agreeably amused, with the following experiment. I covered a paper about four inches square with yellow, and with a pen filled with a blue colour wrote upon the middle of it the word BANKS in capitals, and sitting with my back to the sun, fixed my eyes for a minute exactly on the centre of the letter N in the middle of the word; after closing my eyes, and shading them somewhat with my hand, the word was distinctly seen in the spectrum in yellow letters on a blue field; and then, on opening my eyes on a yellowish wall at twenty feet distance, the magnified name of BANKS appeared written on the wall in golden characters.

To interest his students in the nomenclature of organic chemistry, Hofstra University chemist Dennis Ryan designed compounds in the shapes of little figures. Shown here are oldmacdenynenynol, cowenynenynol, and turkenynenynol; he also designed a goose, a snake, a giraffe, and a duck.

See Small Business and A Little Story.

(Dennis Ryan, “Old MacDonald Named a Compound: Branched Enynenynols,” Journal of Chemical Education 74:7 [1997], 782.)

This relationship can be utilized as a trick by writing 12345679 and asking a person to select his favorite digit. Mentally multiply the digit he selected by 9, then write the result under the number above. Then say that inasmuch as he is fond of that digit he shall have plenty of it. Multiply the two numbers together and the digit he selected will result. Thus suppose 4 was selected; multiply 12345679 by 36, resulting in 444444444.

— Albert Beiler, Recreations in the Theory of Numbers, 1964