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
This Old Man This Old Man "This Old Man" is an English language children's song, counting and nursery rhyme with a Roud Folk Song Index number of 3550. The origins of this song are obscure. The earliest extant record is a version noted in Anne Gilchrist's "Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society" (1937), learnt from her Welsh nurse in the 1870s under the title "Jack Jintle" with the lyrics: <poem> My name is Jack Jintle, the eldest but one, And I can play nick-nack upon my own thumb. With my nick-nack and click-clack and sing a fine song, And all