Why hasn’t the Metric world found a better way? I want a clock based around multiples of 10, dammit!
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.
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.
I just want everything to be switched to 24 instead of 12. Why everyone want to complicate things?
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.
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.
Pros scale that up to base 60 by counting to 12 and using the other hand to count how many times they have counted to 12.
It was called the French Republican Calendar. Didn’t last very long.
Because base ten sucks for practical use and anything that needs division.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time?wprov=sfla1
The French tried at the same time they adopted the rest of the metric system but it just didnt offer much advantage vs changing out clocks.
With digital clocks it would be simpler now.
Chad American broken clocks: right twice per day Virgin Bri‘ish broken clocks: only right once per day
pwnd
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.
Inventor for sure used the imperial barbarian measuring system
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???
