• nudny ekscentryk@szmer.info
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    1 year ago

    Ehhhh, no. There are very important reasons we divide the time this way. 24 is a highly composite number (a number with more divisors than all numbers preceding it; like an opposite of a prime number). This allows us to easily divide the day into halves, thirds, quarters and sixths. So is 60, with even more divisors.

    My guess is the same thing goes for the switch from Roman to Julian calendar (ten to twelve months in a year).

    Interestingly, the same goes for 360 degrees in a full angle.

    • setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The history of the calendar in Roman times is actually an entire topic to itself.

      The pre-Julian calendar required fine tuning every year in winter to keep the rest of the months aligned with the seasons.

      Technically not a difficult job to keep the calendar running smoothly and consistently, but the person in charge of the calendar in Rome was a politician, so they would play political games with the length of the year.

      Caesar wanted a calendar that would run on auto-pilot to strip power away from those politicians.

      By sheer coincidence when Caesar made his reform, during the the changeover of calendars while he was in charge, he got to rule over a 400+ day long year.

    • xx3r@lemmy.studio
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      1 year ago

      We should have a base 12 metric system but the French already established the 10

      • Zerush@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Yes, the French, however, have a rather twisted counting system based on 20, for example 96 in French is translated as 4 times 20 + 16, forcing you to do calculations just to say a number.

        • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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          1 year ago

          I mean you only have to do calculations if you’re used to base10. If you’re used to base20 then it should come just as naturally as base10. Reading through the Wikipedia page, the linguistic remenants really suggest that it did come quite naturally.

          Changing bases is actually really cool and can be useful if you ever want to play with big numbers on paper and make the comprehendable!

  • hawkwind@lemmy.management
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    1 year ago

    We should just use second notation for everything.

    I’ll be there in 5 min? I’ll be there in 2 or 3 hundo!

    See you tommorow? See you in in 86K!

    Next week? About half a Megasec!

    Doesn’t Megasecond sound better than Fortnite?

  • hglman@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The reason for 12-hour clocks is most cultures worldwide have variable length hours of over a year. For Western times this comes from Greeks who had 12 day and 12 night hours. Early water clocks in antiquity would attempt to make that adjustment automatically.

  • ELLIOTTCABLE@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    When I was a kid, I was such a nerd, that I invented my own decimal timekeeping system.

    Even wrote a little macOS menubar clock for it — I was dead-serious.

    Edit: omg the website still works, even though I never put any real content there …

    http://yreality.net/UJD/

    Edit 2: Found this old explanation I apparently put together in July 2010, according to my image archive:

    • SpooneyOdin@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      That’s pretty cool! The French actually had a decimal time system after the revolution, but they eventually abandoned it.

      • kambusha@feddit.ch
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        1 year ago

        All I can gather, is that the number furthest to the right seems to be 100ms, so the second digit from the right is counting seconds. When those 3 digits reach 000, they’ve counted 100 seconds.

        I see 19567288000 currently. If I remove the last zero, that number should be in seconds. So 1956728800 seconds = ~62 years. The year 2023 - 62yrs = 1961.

        Maybe it’s counting the number of seconds since a date in 1961? Unix time uses 1970-01-01 but not sure what significance 1961 has.

  • Zerush@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    The inventor of the imperial units used by the US, this one really sniffed glue.

    • MeetInPotatoes@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I’m with you on metric vs. standard units all day, it’s downright embarrassing that we still haven’t switched to metric…but Month, Day, Year makes far more sense. The numerical day of the month is pointless by itself, there are 12 of each number (except 29-31) every year so the number says nothing at all without the context. It makes no sense to start reciting a date with the least important and least descriptive bit of information. The month is the piece of information that gives the most detail on its own and cuts down on the number of words to say the date. Instead of “The 12th of May” we just say “May 12th” cutting two completely unnecessary words from British English. It also lets you know the season of the year right off the bat. If we ask when a movie, game, or book is coming out, “in March” is the best way to say it if you had to choose only one piece of data of the three. “This year/Next year” or “the 25th” give less info. We leave off the year if the future event is in the current year so that comes last naturally. As objectively as possible, we improved the date format.

      • holgersson@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Counterpoint: be consequential and go from most generic to most specific with year-month-day.

        If something is obviously in the current year, just leave the year part.

        • BigNote@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          While what you say makes perfect sense and is logical, the truth is that anyone who has an ounce of intelligence can easily parse this information in a few seconds regardless of its format.

          This is not an argument for maintaining the status quo, but rather, is meant to put it into perspective as the deeply unimportant detail that it is.

          • TehPers@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            anyone who has an ounce of intelligence can easily parse this information in a few seconds regardless of its format.

            1/4/2023

            yyyy/mm/dd makes the most sense in my opinion and is the order used in ISO 8601 and similar specs (though in the format yyyy-mm-dd), but we already have enough culture-specific stuff that date formats are the least of our issues.

      • emberwit@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        If we ask when a movie, game, or book is coming out, “in March” is the best way to say it if you had to choose only one piece of data of the three.

        This is only true if both people know you are talking about the future or the past (already released or not released yet) and then implies that the last or next instance of the month is meant. In other words, using just the month only works if the year is already known. Talking about a movie from 2008, the month it released does not give you more information than its year. Using just the month has very limited and short term validity. Which is fine for day to day conversation, but not for written documents or anything else that will be read more than once. In order of the highest information value it’s clearly Y, M, D, most significant information to least.

      • Zerush@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        This can still be a valid option, although what in daily use is primarily interested in the day of the month, since the month takes, well, a month to change and everyone knows which it is. However, he is mainly interested in how many days he will receive his salary or how much time he has left on vacation or how many days until an event premieres. If we ask for the time, we are not interested in hearing that it is afternoon, which we already know, but rather to know the exact time so as not to miss the train or how long it takes to finish the workday. This is why the chronological order is used, seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years.

    • BastingChemina@slrpnk.net
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      1 year ago

      The decimal time was introduced at the same time than the rest of the units.

      In this system days are 10 hours long, hours are 100 minutes and minutes 10 seconds.

      Unfortunately the system did not stick at the time and we reverted to the old system.

  • Squirrel@thelemmy.club
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    1 year ago

    Why hasn’t the Metric world found a better way? I want a clock based around multiples of 10, dammit!

    • mlfh@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      One benefit of base 12 and base 60 over base 10 for everyday use with things like time is simple factorization. You can divide 12 hours evenly into halves, thirds, quarters, and sixths, and 60 minutes evenly into halves, thirds, quarters, fifths, sixths, tenths, etc. With base 10, you’ve just got halves and fifths.

      • kvn@midwest.social
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        1 year ago

        Another benefit of base 12 is that you can count to 12 easily with one hand by using your thumb to count each of the 3 segments on your 4 fingers.

        I learned that on that other website prior to the great migration and it blew my mind then.

      • Squirrel@thelemmy.club
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, I know all about that, but I don’t think we’ll convince people to change everything to base 12, so let’s go with a base 10 clock.

        • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
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          1 year ago

          A base-10 unit circle would be abhorrent. 1/2 of a circle is an important concept, but 1/5th and 1/10th of a circle are rarely used in geometry or trigonometry. Meanwhile, a right angle (1/4 of a circle) would require an ugly fraction, and the angle of an equilateral triangle (1/6th) would require a repeating decimal.

          Think of 12-hour clocks and 360-degree circles as paper bags. When we’re fucking with angular concepts, you do not want to take those bags off Decimal’s head.

        • Andrew@mander.xyz
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          1 year ago

          I just want everything to be switched to 24 instead of 12. Why everyone want to complicate things?

          • Andrew@mander.xyz
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            1 year ago

            I didn’t put in a secret punchline. It’s a genuine thought. What do you think I did?

            • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              Well, I thought I was replying to squirrel, but they say we’ll never get everyone to use base 12 systems so we had better just go to base 10…

              When the entire sae/imperial/whatever is either base 12 or divisible by it already.

              There’s already a perfectly good base 12 system in everyday use, but we’ll never get anyone to accept that so we gotta accept inferior base 10. See the joke?

                • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  i’m reading here on .ml and it looks like my reply was to squirrel and then you replied to me. what are you seeing?

      • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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        1 year ago

        That’s extremely elegant. Plus if you have days of rest every first, fifth and tenth day of the week then you have 3 or 4 days of work in a row at a time (of course im sure at the time they were far more stingy with days of rest)

    • mlc894@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Some people briefly tried that during the French Revolution, but it never caught on.

      • SpooneyOdin@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        There is a logical reason why numbers like 12, 24, and 60 are used in a lot of systems. They are highly composite numbers so they have lots of prime factors which means there are lots more options to break them into whole groups.

  • marduk@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    Chad American broken clocks: right twice per day Virgin Bri‘ish broken clocks: only right once per day

    pwnd

  • Metal Zealot@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Also each part of the world will offset by half an hour or so.

    Also military will operate by a 24 hrs.

    Also fuck you

  • MeetInPotatoes@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    “The day will start when the sun comes up?” No, when the sun is the furthest away it can be from us.