I don’t actually know the answer and I know I could just look on wikipedia but I thought it might stir some interesting discussion.
Why isn’t time decimalised? it’d make it easier to teach to kids and easier to calculate when working out time stuff.
Was it just because some old guy pre-industrialisation decided that was the way it should be and by the time they figured out it would be better decimalised it was already entrenched?
Flip the question round if you like with ‘why is time split into 60?’
Enlighten me.

The ancient Sumerians (i think it was them) used a number system based on 60. They were the 1st to divide up the day and we’ve just carried on using their system.

blame the sumarians. Beaten to it. Better would be to ask why we don’t use base 60 now when it’s so much more divisible than base 10.

60 is a number that can be divided in half, in thirds, in quarters, in fifths, tenths, twelfths and more. 100 isn’t as flexible.

There’s actually a reasonable amount of sense to some of the bases that pre-decimalisation systems used. The inconsistencies between the various systems were more of a problem than the fact that they didn’t use base 10 for everything, in my opinion.

What would be the basis? 100 hours in a day, 100 minutes in an hour etc? Seconds would be really fast!

Or a whole new system entirely? That would be very hard to get used to and would probably outweigh any benefits.

You can’t really change days or other larger (calendar related) time periods.

What would be the basis? 100 hours in a day, 100 minutes in an hour etc?

100 days in a year? That’d make me really really old

it is if you are doing any kind of data science or time-series analysis. its just humans that need some sort of easily readable time/date.

Unix Time Stamp – Epoch Converter

I think there’s been more effort made towards reforming the calendar so that the months and quarters in the year are more similar in length to each other than they are now than there has been in reforming the clock.

Hmm, be quite a hard changover wouldn’t it. Not really like having a few new coins in your pocket.. or saying that’s 15cm long now. And what if there was some stupid country like England who decided not to change…

It’s gotta one of the only things that is agreed upon in every country in the world.
Is that correct? (wary of making statements here as you get pulled to bits if you’re wrong.)
That is curious considering the language and social differences that exist between nations.
Do all nations agree on a 12 month calendar system too?
so the only thing agreed upon by all nations is time and the calendar? that and the fact that Amercia is mental.

(wary of making statements here as you get pulled to bits if you’re wrong.)

No you don’t – show me the evidence

that and the fact that Amercia is mental.

have you seen their time/date format? animals.

Radians. The world spins. The world circles the sun. Time is all about (near) circles, and dividing them up. Their have been attempts to decimalise time for human use… but the benefits aren’t great… even if it is surprisingly hard to teach young kids time as we currently divide it up. Of course, computers don’t care… so time (of day) is broken up in all sorts of ways there.

Do all nations agree on a 12 month calendar system too?

the French revolutionaries had a go at changing this with new names and month lengths. I’d say it’s not that resolved internationally with the lunar month, our weird rules for Easter, and Ramadan moving round the year because of lack of calendar adjustment.

We’ve reached the point now where the second is intertwined too deeply in the SI system.
And the day is also kind of fixed for practical reasons.

Suggestions for how to decimally split up the 86400 seconds better than our current system?

I’m still upset that Swatch Internet Time didn’t take off.

have you seen their time/date format?

what happened on the 9th of November?

What exactly would be the benefit?

I’m still upset that Swatch Internet Time didn’t take off.

I actually use the combination of Beats and Julian day for all sorts of things that are never exposed to human understanding.

🤓

that and the fact that Amercia is mental.

have you seen their time/date format? animals.

I’m actually with the US on their month-day approach, they just put the year in the wrong place. Every single other measurement we use is big-endian, dates should be yyyy-mm-dd.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

I have a plan to carve the year into 73 weeks of 5 days. 3 working days a week, 2 day weekend. The weeks are then perfectly divisible into the year so working dates are fixed. Obvs every 4 years we ratchet on a day.

We all get more weekends and less work stress.

Haven’t decided what to do about the months yet but I’ll come up with an idea.

You heard it here first.

Why do we need months? 😉

Leave time and calendars alone… it is how it is. Leave any rationalisation to the robots.

I’m actually with the US on their month-day approach, they just put the year in the wrong place

It’s their failure to choose an endedness that is the problem. Choose one don’t jump around.

Napoleon beat you to it

Do all nations agree on a 12 month calendar system too?

There are quite a few calendars in use, the obvious ones that spring to mind are the Gregorian one we use, and the Islamic lunar one.

The biggest problem is it would really upset roadies and runners strava stats lol.

Next you’ll be wondering why trouser sizes are in inches. And women’s clothes 10,12,14.. what’s that all about?

I never actually thought about this to be honest. Good luck with trying to change it now though!

Speaking as a scientist, measuring in seconds and minutes is kind of annoying. How do you compare something that takes 5’33s to something that takes 4’58s? The answer is you have to convert it to the number of seconds, which is surprisingly easy to get wrong (if you do the calculations in your head). YBMV.

I remember seeing a ‘metric stopwatch’ once, maybe on the antiques roadshow. It was owned by a science teacher IIRC.

The second is the S.I. unit of time. It’s effectively decimalized when it’s used in science and engineering. One hour is 3.6 x 10^3 seconds and one year is 3.15576 x 10^7 seconds, for example.

In everyday use, the day/minute/second thing works well enough and changing it would be an enormous disruption.

Do all nations agree on a 12 month calendar system too?

Nope. Ethiopian’s have 12 months of 30 days, and a 13th to mop up the remaining 5 or 6. However, they’re also 7-8 years behind us, due to the disputed date of the birth of Jesus (not the football player).

The second is the SI unit but it’s not actually the ultimate unit of time; that is the frequency of a caesium 133 atom ground state transition, which never changes. 9,192,631,770Hz. And since a second is 1Hz^1 you can now relate seconds to observing that transition. The clocks a few paces from my office are doing that right now.

Gradually all the SI units have transitioned from artefacts to the definitions based on fundamental constants.

https://www.npl.co.uk/si-units/the-redefinition-of-the-si-units

But if you actually look at the true definitions of the 7 SI units, in the end they come back to a few physical constants and the second, or in one case, the mole.

So for example the metre is defined from the speed of light in vacuum (a constant, c), if you can measure the time absolutely you know the distance absolutely, which we define in m  (but really is a fraction of c)

More complex – a kilogram

The kilogram is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the Planck constant, ℎ, to be 6.626 070 15 × 10-34 when expressed in the unit J s, which is equal to kg m^2 s^−1.

But we just determined that distance is defined by measuring time accurately, so in the end the m part of it is really a time measurement.

Another….The candela is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the luminous efficacy of monochromatic radiation of frequency 540 × 1012 Hz, Kcd, to be 683 when expressed in the unit lm W−1, which is equal to cd sr W^−1 or cd sr kg^–1 m^–2 s^3 (sr = steradians)

But the metre is related back to the second, and the kg is related to the metre and the second (so, the second and the second again)

Know the second – and you can work out the rest

one last SI / unit fact. If you’re not sure whether the unit is capital or lower case – units that are named after people are upper case. So W = watt, J = joule, K = kelvin, etc. but kg = kilogram, s = second)

Never get that wrong again.

Know the second – and you can work out the rest

I’m not sure who the “you” is that you refer to, it certainly isn’t me.

I think the next idea Boris will have when he needs to distract our attention (later today) is that months will be furlongs (8 to the year), days will be pounds (14 to the furlong), hours will be shillings (20 to the pound) minutes will be pints (8 the shilling) and seconds will be ounces (16 to the shilling.

If you did , it would bugger up maritime navigation

Never get that wrong again.

Join me in my lifelong campaign to get people to use “cm” rather than “CM”.

My campaign would be to use 10mm instead of CM. And I am still upset that the sensible c/s (cycles per second) got changed to Hz.

Join me in my lifelong campaign to get people to not use use cm or CM at at all.

🤣

I also try to push everything to “mm” rather than “cm” where I can… but the resistance is too high… one to admit defeat on.