16 (number) old days, weighing was done with a beam balance to make equal splits. It would be easier to split a heap of grains into sixteen equal parts through successive divisions than to split into ten parts. Chinese Taoists did finger computation on the trigrams and hexagrams by counting the finger tips and joints of the fingers with the tip of the thumb. Each hand can count up to 16 in such manner. The Chinese abacus uses two upper beads to represent the 5s and 5 lower beads to represent the 1s, the 7 beads can represent a hexadecimal digit from
Thumb war Thumb war A thumb war (also called thumb wrestling, pea-knuckle or pea-knuckle war in New Zealand, and a "Guerre des pouces" in France) is a game played by two players in a tournament called a thumb-a-war (or thumb war) using the thumbs to simulate fighting. The object of the game is to pin the opponent's thumb, often to a count of three. The "San Francisco Chronicle" called the game "the miniature golf of martial sports." The players face each other and each holds out their left hand or right hand in a "thumbs up", and they link hands such that