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Science & Tech
bunch of numbers
© tostphoto/Fotolia

In our everyday lives, we use a counting system in which we count from 1 to 10. That seems only logical because our hands are already in what is called base 10, which means the number 10 serves as the base of our number system. Each place in a number corresponds to a different power of 10. For example, 285,553 = (2 × 100,000) + (8 × 10,000) + (5 × 1,000) + (5 × 100) + (5 × 10) + 3. (The final 3 can be considered as 3 × 100, where the zeroth power of 10 is 1.)

However, although base 10 seems logical, that doesn’t mean that it has been universally used. The ancient Babylonians used a base-60 system, which they inherited from the Sumerians. No one knows why they used such a base. It has been speculated that 60 has the mathematically pleasing property of being the smallest number divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, though if a lot of divisible numbers are wanted, a base 12 gets you 1 through 4 and 6 but with a much-less-unwieldy system.

With base 10 being a counting system based on fingers, if you bring in the toes, then you can have a base-20 system. Base 20 shows up in French, where 80 is “quatre-vingts,” or “four twenties.” In Danish, 50 is “halvtreds,” or “two and a half times twenty.” Once all the fingers and toes have been used, the body seems finished as the basis of a counting system, but the Oksapmin people of Papua New Guinea have a base-27 body-derived system. The fingers are 1 through 5, and then counting goes up the arm, with the wrist 6, mid-forearm 7, up the arm to the neck at 11, an ear at 12, an eye at 13, the nose at 14, and back down the other side of the head, neck, and arm to the fingers on the other hand being 23 through 27.

Vestiges of other counting systems survive too. The Babylonian base 60 appears in the number of minutes in an hour and seconds in a minute. Base 12 appears in measurement; 12 inches in a foot, 12 months in a year, etc. Base 20 gives the Gettysburg Address some of its rhetorical power, with “Four score and seven years ago” sounding more inspiring than the base-10 “Eighty-seven years ago.”

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American bison (Bison bison) also known as buffalo or plains buffalo on the prairie, western U.S.
Jack Dykinga/U.S. Department of Agriculture

It’s easy to understand why people confuse bison and buffalo. Both are large, horned, oxlike animals of the Bovidae family. There are two kinds of bison, the American bison and the European bison, and two forms of buffalo, water buffalo and Cape buffalo. However, it’s not difficult to distinguish between them, especially if you focus on the three H’s: home, hump, and horns.

[Watch a video to learn more about the difference between buffalo and bison]

Contrary to the song “Home on the Range,” buffalo do not roam in the American West. Instead, they are indigenous to South Asia (water buffalo) and Africa (Cape buffalo), while bison are found in North America and parts of Europe. Despite being a misnomer—one often attributed to confused explorers—buffalo remains commonly used when referring to American bison, thus adding to the confusion.

Another major difference is the presence of a hump. Bison have one at the shoulders while buffalo don’t. The hump allows the bison’s head to function as a plow, sweeping away drifts of snow in the winter. The next telltale sign concerns the horns. Buffalo tend to have large horns—some have reached more than 6 feet (1.8 meters)—with very pronounced arcs. The horns of bison, however, are much shorter and sharper. And, if you want to throw a B into the mix, you can check for a beard. Bison are the hipsters of the two animals, sporting thick beards. Buffalo are beardless.