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 …
Edit 2: Found this old explanation I apparently put together in July 2010, according to my image archive:
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.
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.
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.
We should have a base 12 metric system but the French already established the 10
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.
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!
The History of the clock is actually pretty interesting https://www.britannica.com/topic/12-hour-clock
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?
There is a fun fun sci-fi book called “Deepness in the Sky” by Vernor Vinge. The Humans use epoch time with si prefixed Seconds for time,
Did you say sequels??? I’ve read A Fire Upon the Deep and a Deepness in the Sky. There are others???
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.
The inventor of the imperial units used by the US, this one really sniffed glue.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
