This is a great idea and I concur with your line of thought - there is room for expression in the realm of number representations .. have you considered building an ImHex plugin that would illustrate your point? The use of octants is particularly intriguing ..

One thing I often ponder on, along similar lines, is whether I can write some clever plugin that would put FF ChartWell - a font which uses ligatures to render useful graphs out of boring numerical data - into use, within ImHex. Seen how ligatures can be used this way?

https://typographica.org/typeface-reviews/chartwell/

Your idea of discovering new means of representing numeral data put me in mind of ligature hacking, in any case ...