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60 seconds, 60 minutes, 24 hours, 7 days, 365 days, 52 weeks.
Can't we get modernised or would it be too complicated? 😉
Because the babylonians were right.
Base 60 rools!
Brexit, innit.
We did.
People rejected it.
Not everything works in tens. It's a very revolutionary, republican thing to assume that it should/could.
My guess is that it would be fairly complicated to alter the earth's orbit round the sun. Yeah but apart from that......good idea!
There's nothing we can do about the number of days in a year. The rest is pretty arbitrary though.
I think I heard that that's going to be the main feature of the next Apple watch..?
They had a go at it in post revolutionary France (late 1700s) -the 10 month calendar and 10 day weeks lasted for a few years but the clock never properly took off.
Plus we would have to change units of speed for vehicles/travel and also music, computer/electronic 'clock' etc.
There's nothing we can do about the number of days in a year. The rest is pretty arbitrary though.
We could have 100 weeks in the year and 10 weeks in a month?
No problem, just google stardate converter
Why would we when it works fine as it is?
Bin done in part. ( I actually bought one of the Swatches 😳 ).
https://www.timeanddate.com/time/internettime.html
but the clock never properly took off.
What did it need?
Oh also Swatch tried something like it a number of years ago too: ' internet time' I think they called it.
Some people still use imperial for weight etc... and we still use it for roads. Imagine the chaos when one set of people are using 60 minute hours and another 10 minute hours!
Easy, just have new minutes and new hours.
I use serial time quite a lot working with time series data. Number of days elapsed since a defined start date and then the decimal fraction of a day.
60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour and 24 hours in a day are pretty good quantities. It's easy to calculate a half, a third and a quarter of each of those periods. All that base 10 values are good for are dividing by 5 - and 60 handles that too.
I know that some argue for calendar revision though, and there seems to be a bit more of a point to that. One complaint is that the quarters in a year are different lengths to each other. Monkeying around with the length of a week would be very perilous though - any change to the weekdays/weekend ratio would be guaranteed to piss off many people.
and we still use it for roads
For using roads.
Not for designing building or maintaining them.
We'd never get the Brexiteers on board, maybe when time turns to dust they'll realise.
What Chris says, its about division. All originates from navigation and that to the stars, orbit and the moon. You can study the phases of the tides too. All divides by 6ths quite nicely.
There's nothing we can do about the number of days in a year. The rest is pretty arbitrary though.
Not when you have not choice but to factor a series of 24-hour cycles into 365.25, it isn't.
What did it need?
A conveyor belt.
I use serial time quite a lot working with time series data. Number of days elapsed since a defined start date and then the decimal fraction of a day.
Wierdly, if you use excel long enough it starts to look right.
any change to the weekdays/weekend ratio would be guaranteed to piss off many people.
True, but I think there could be advantages if employers could be encouraged to abandon the traditional 5 on 2 off pattern. You could simoultaneously have GP's working every day (same number of hours per year, they'd just be working a different ratio of on/off days), at the same time everyone else's work get's spread out over weekends as well. So people can also see their GP in the week too.
Quieter weekend trails.
Less of a staffing issue for retail (who need everyone in work, when everyone else isn't).
Quieter roads.
No idea what you'd do about schools though.
If bike manufacturers made watches you can bet they would! They'd have at least 3 time standards.
Most people would frown upon digital watches
1/2 of us would try and build our own in rejection of the whole charade.
A select few would wear grandfather clocks on their wrists because they are better in the snow.
Every watch club would have at least 1 member who still wore a sun dial on his wrist.
We could have 100 weeks in the year and 10 weeks in a month?
3.6 day weeks, or 7.5 seasons a year?
We could have 36 weeks a year, but they'd be 10 days long, the Tories and UKIP would no doubt call for a 'traditional' 2 day weekend, that'd be shit - 8 days in work on the bounce. We'd also need a 'leap' 5 days at the end of the year to keep the seasons static.
The most logical way to do it would be 5 day weeks, 73 weeks a year, 14 months a year of 5 weeks each and write off 3 weeks at the end for 'Crimbo' - which is 15 days which is roughly how long it last now. It doesn't seem massively metric though sadly.
Now all I need to do is get every country on earth to agree with me - piece of piss.
[quote=ade9933] 1/2 of us would try and build our own in rejection of the whole charade.
50% of us purlease!
50% of us purlease!
lol
I say we should abandon the whole idrea of months and weeks. Old fashioned idea encouraged by euro types like the Greeks and Romans . That way we could divide our lives into chuncks to suit ourselves. Base 8 for me.
P-Jay - MemberThe most logical way to do it would be 5 day weeks, 73 weeks a year, 14 months a year of 5 weeks each
I'm not sure you've fully grasped this decimalisation malarkey.
I always liked the idea of 12 x 30 day months and 5 ( or 6) day year end holiday / festival
What Chris says, its about division.
Damn you now I've just wasted an hour trying to find a c program I once wrote to calculate the smallest integer divisible by all in range 1-n. Couldn't find it or remember how to implement it (not a maths genius obvs). Was going to add a further condition to it: the number must also have an integer square root - the square root would then become the new number of seconds in a minute, minutes in an hour. Or something.
Does this mean my compass will be in 100* increments rather than 360*? Or 1000 instead of 6400mils?
60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour and 24 hours in a day are pretty good quantities. It's easy to calculate a half, a third and a quarter of each of those periods. All that base 10 values are good for are dividing by 5 - and 60 handles that too.
Thats true of all the imperial measurements really- they start from a whole and divide it up- so the increments used are based on physical actions to portion something out whether its cutting a pound of cheese into portions or whatever - every time you half it you arrive on a whole unit. If you're using decimal units you can only half things a few times before you get into funny fractions - 10 - 5 - 2½ - 1¼ - ? .... who's got a ? button on their keyboard? - or a mark on their tape measure at ?cm?
So imperial units are derived from physical devisions of 'stuff' where as decimal works better as a means of adding things together or counting things out.
Our increments for time are based on manually dividing up a circle and treating that circle as representative of a whole day, or whole hour or whole minute- you can draw a circle and without adjusting the compass quickly divide it into 6 perfectly equal parts - they give you a datum for all the subsequent divisions and do all that accurately and precisely at any scale - whether you're making a 12 hr clock face or a 60 second stopwatch or a 360° protractor.
There's nothing stopping you from counting time in decimal. I can give you a 10 second head start or record a mix tape on a 90 minute cassette or speculate what the president will do in his first 100 days in office. But 'telling the time', rather than specifying an amount of time, works better in base 12 / 60
ade9933 - Member
If bike manufacturers made watches you can bet they would! They'd have at least 3 time standards.Most people would frown upon digital watches
1/2 of us would try and build our own in rejection of the whole charade.
A select few would wear grandfather clocks on their wrists because they are better in the snow.
Every watch club would have at least 1 member who still wore a sun dial on his wrist.
Who cares about decimalising time scales when there's watches for singlespeeders?....
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It's too late to do it now because all the Strava times would need re-calibrating. Or the world would be destroyed by everybody trying to get the KOMs.
OP you're welcome to come and tell my wife that she has to decimalise her manstural cycle because her non decimal monthly cycle is a bit inconvenient for your mental arithmetic. I just don't want to be in the vicinity when you do.
I can give you a 10 second head start or record a mix tape on a 90 minute cassette
ah the mix tape. What a shame.
maccruiskeen Thanks a really good explanation.
Actually your hands and fingers count in base 12.
Use your thumb to point to each section of each finger and you will see 3 per finger and 4 fingers on each hand.
So you can simply, by using your thumb, count out 12 per hand.
We should just use rels, and multiples (or divisions) of rels for larger or smaller lengths of time. It's ridiculous to have all these different names for different lengths of time. How could you ever conquer the universe thinking like that?