Why delete your comment ? Take your downvotes like the man your father wish you was . <| sep |> A beer or two a day doesn ' t hurt you , probably helps most people . <| sep |> Takes a while but it ' s worth it . The Bloody Nines debut is one of the greatest ' spiritual ' action sequences ever written . I ' ve reread the book 3 times just to get to that scene . <| sep |> I ' m ruined for life . Before I even clicked on ' load more comments ' the word wizard had immediately made me think of this . You as well it seems . <| sep |> Hexademical is base 16 . Which means you need 16 distinct symbols to represent the numbers from zero to fifteen . We decided to use the symbols 09 which already existed from out base 10 system . But that still left over a need of six more symbols . The symbols from AF were chosen , probably because most people already knew them and wouldn ' t have to learn new symbols . However , there is no reason that we choose the 09 and AF symbols . We just need 16 distinct symbols . This is of course also true for base 10 . The symbols we use do not have meaning outside of the meaning we give them .