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
Counting toes). Older finger counting used the four fingers and the three bones in each finger (phalanges) to count to the number twelve. Other hand-gesture systems are also in use, for example the Chinese system by which one can count to 10 using only gestures of one hand. By using finger binary (base 2 counting), it is possible to keep a finger count up to . Various devices can also be used to facilitate counting, such as hand tally counters and abacuses. Inclusive counting is usually encountered when dealing with time in the Romance languages. In exclusive counting languages such as