Ah, yes, good old metric time.
They tried it in France after the revolution IIRC. Didn’t work all that well :)
I think it was 10 day week with only one day weekend. So 9 days of work instead of 6. Not sure why people didn’t like it.
You probably grew up in the era of digital clocks and watches. If you used an analog watch you would know why it was easier to say a quarter to 10. 😁
Because that means the person is old and can’t count from 10 to 9 and change 1/4 to 3/4?
No it means that they grew up using a 12 hour, 60 minute circular time system. Habits form when you learn stuff and can last a lifetime.
Most people I know would simply say 9:45 instead of 1/4 to 10 when looking at an analog clock. We were taught to mentally do some minor math, same habits, just better I guess.
For me, it’s because when I look at an analog clock, it’s easier to see that there’s a quarter of the cycle left on the minute hand than to convert 9 to 45 mins. So if someone asks me for the time and I looked at an analog clock, I would be more likely to respond with the relative position of the minute hand than with the exact minutes. If I am looking at a digital clock, then I will read exactly what the clock says.
This is the correct explanation. Having grown up in a house full of analog clocks and preferring them still today, it’s hard for me to understand the difficulty so many people have using analog, or why it’s hard to interpret the logic used in conveying it. But it really is just a matter of immersion and perspective. People who prefer analog appear to perceive time in fractions and circular cycles. Half to/past, quarter to/past, etc. are how we actually view and perceive the day. It’s more than just a number.
9.75
Hate to be a stickler, but wouldn’t 9:75 actually be a quarter AFTER 10 seeing as how it’d be 10:15 equivalent?
In 1788, Claude Boniface Collignon proposed dividing the day into 10 hours or 1,000 minutes, each new hour into 100 minutes, each new minute into 1,000 seconds, and each new second into 1,000 tierces (older French for “third”). The distance the twilight zone travels in one such tierce at the equator, which would be one-billionth of the circumference of the earth, would be a new unit of length, provisionally called a half-handbreadth, equal to four modern centimetres. Further, the new tierce would be divided into 1,000 quatierces, which he called “microscopic points of time”. He also suggested a week of 10 days and dividing the year into 10 “solar months”.[7]
I prefer saying it’s 9:270°
