4 ms·

The reason decimal time did and always will fail is that no matter how you slice it, 365.24ish is not divisible by 10. Moreover there is nothing inherently nat

by ChoHag 10y ago

The reason decimal time did and always will fail is that no matter how you slice it, 365.24ish is not divisible by 10. Moreover there is nothing inherently natural about 10 as a base. Like many of our modern conveniences it is entirely arbitrary and about the worst possible option. Fin

seszett 10y ago
> The reason decimal time did and always will fail is that no matter how you slice it, 365.24ish is not divisible by 10. It's not divisible by 60 or 24 either, so I don't see the point. Decimal time only deals with units from the day down. Decimal calendar deals with days, weeks, months and years. Its adoption went far better than decimal time. > Moreover there is nothing inherently natural about 10 as a base. No base is inherently natural, 60 certainly isn't. 10 just happens to be the one we use as a standard.
- ChoHag 10y ago
  That is the point. There is no way to cleanly divide up the time taken by the earth's orbit by the time taken by the earth's rotation. They are simply incompatible. It is impossible to say objectively that any one scheme is better than another, with one exception: the current scheme is always better than all the others by virtue of being current. And consider this: Leap seconds are a thing.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    Your point about years is completely irrelevant to how you divide a day into hours, minutes, and seconds, which is what 'decimal time' talks about.
    - ChoHag 10y ago
      The advantage of decimalisation is the geometric expansion it engenders which cannot happen because the year is not 10, 100, 1000 or any other multiple of 10 days. It is not an integer multiple of anything days. It is evidence that no matter how much we try and break the universe up into nice coherent chunks, the universe has other ideas. Fighting reality will fail. The advantage to breaking up the day into units less than 1 day is the factorisation that can be applied. 24 factors much better than 10. Pretty much everything factors much better than 10. There is no advantage to decimalising the day except to give basement-dwellers a boner.
      - Dylan16807 10y ago
        24 and 60 equally fail when you try to turn days into years. That doesn't mean you give up on picking a good system for fractions of days and multiples of years. There is no[1] advantage to having a smattering of small factors. People make much too big a deal about dividing into thirds. [1] "no" in the same way that decimalization has no advantage, in that the advantages of either system are small and unnecessary.
        ChoHag 10y ago
        We didn't give up. We found one and we stuck to it. I don't care about factoring, that's a minor cool hack. The point is simple: Adding or removing dots from the face of a clock is a complete waste of (heh) time. If you people really need to wank over a calender, pick one with jugs in it or get rid of timezones and daylight savings. That would be actually helpful.
        Dylan16807 10y ago
        > Adding or removing dots from the face of a clock is a complete waste of (heh) time. Nobody was advocating for doing that. You started an argument about doing so, in reply to a post merely saying that it would be "as convenient" as the current system, and that decimal time failed because we already had a unified time system. > If you people really need to wank over a calender Nobody had even mentioned calendars until you showed up. "you people" = "ChoHag".
marak830 10y ago
I'm not sure if I'm missing something but wouldn't that be 36.524? (Metric user here, I honestly think I'm missing the point).
- ChoHag 10y ago
  So a month will be 36.524ish days. Where in the metric regularity does 36.524ish fit? I can see that it's somewhere between the 10s and the 100s column... A year isn't 100 days, it isn't 1000 days, and the whims of naked apes with a penchant for euclidean geometry isn't going to change that.
  - marak830 10y ago
    Ahh I see what your getting at, I was a little lost by end of the chain. Well we could just convert a second, day, month, year into metric. (Thanks for the answer btw, was curious :-) )
    - ChoHag 10y ago
      We could, but we gain nothing but more work. We can't not consider current timekeeping. There is exactly 0 chance we can get everybody to change in the same instant and even if they did history is still there. Education, and thus civilisation's shared consciousness, will include the old timekeeping until the renaissance, industrial revolution, the inventions of computers and space travel and the near-ELE cataclysm of the final death knell of religion are all historical footnotes. Computers will need to understand the old timekeeping forever. We won't reduce the amount of bullshit humans deal with, we will have increased it. And with all that, the earth's orbit still won't be 1000 days. And all for what? So I can count the hours in a day without getting my feet cold? Woo!
      - marak830 10y ago
        Well we use to use cubits and chains for measuring everything too. Science is slowly moving to si, we should probably all start cobaidering a proper system for time that works around metric. I don't like the idea of explaining to my children that we use this system, because it's the way it has always been done. That's a horrible idea .

by ChoHag 10y ago

seszett 10y ago

> The reason decimal time did and always will fail is that no matter how you slice it, 365.24ish is not divisible by 10. It's not divisible by 60 or 24 either, so I don't see the point. Decimal time only deals with units from the day down. Decimal calendar deals with days, weeks, months and years. Its adoption went far better than decimal time. > Moreover there is nothing inherently natural about 10 as a base. No base is inherently natural, 60 certainly isn't. 10 just happens to be the one we use as a standard.

ChoHag 10y ago
That is the point. There is no way to cleanly divide up the time taken by the earth's orbit by the time taken by the earth's rotation. They are simply incompatible. It is impossible to say objectively that any one scheme is better than another, with one exception: the current scheme is always better than all the others by virtue of being current. And consider this: Leap seconds are a thing.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  Your point about years is completely irrelevant to how you divide a day into hours, minutes, and seconds, which is what 'decimal time' talks about.
  - ChoHag 10y ago
    The advantage of decimalisation is the geometric expansion it engenders which cannot happen because the year is not 10, 100, 1000 or any other multiple of 10 days. It is not an integer multiple of anything days. It is evidence that no matter how much we try and break the universe up into nice coherent chunks, the universe has other ideas. Fighting reality will fail. The advantage to breaking up the day into units less than 1 day is the factorisation that can be applied. 24 factors much better than 10. Pretty much everything factors much better than 10. There is no advantage to decimalising the day except to give basement-dwellers a boner.
    - Dylan16807 10y ago
      24 and 60 equally fail when you try to turn days into years. That doesn't mean you give up on picking a good system for fractions of days and multiples of years. There is no[1] advantage to having a smattering of small factors. People make much too big a deal about dividing into thirds. [1] "no" in the same way that decimalization has no advantage, in that the advantages of either system are small and unnecessary.
      - ChoHag 10y ago
        We didn't give up. We found one and we stuck to it. I don't care about factoring, that's a minor cool hack. The point is simple: Adding or removing dots from the face of a clock is a complete waste of (heh) time. If you people really need to wank over a calender, pick one with jugs in it or get rid of timezones and daylight savings. That would be actually helpful.
        Dylan16807 10y ago
        > Adding or removing dots from the face of a clock is a complete waste of (heh) time. Nobody was advocating for doing that. You started an argument about doing so, in reply to a post merely saying that it would be "as convenient" as the current system, and that decimal time failed because we already had a unified time system. > If you people really need to wank over a calender Nobody had even mentioned calendars until you showed up. "you people" = "ChoHag".

marak830 10y ago

I'm not sure if I'm missing something but wouldn't that be 36.524? (Metric user here, I honestly think I'm missing the point).

ChoHag 10y ago
So a month will be 36.524ish days. Where in the metric regularity does 36.524ish fit? I can see that it's somewhere between the 10s and the 100s column... A year isn't 100 days, it isn't 1000 days, and the whims of naked apes with a penchant for euclidean geometry isn't going to change that.
- marak830 10y ago
  Ahh I see what your getting at, I was a little lost by end of the chain. Well we could just convert a second, day, month, year into metric. (Thanks for the answer btw, was curious :-) )
  - ChoHag 10y ago
    We could, but we gain nothing but more work. We can't not consider current timekeeping. There is exactly 0 chance we can get everybody to change in the same instant and even if they did history is still there. Education, and thus civilisation's shared consciousness, will include the old timekeeping until the renaissance, industrial revolution, the inventions of computers and space travel and the near-ELE cataclysm of the final death knell of religion are all historical footnotes. Computers will need to understand the old timekeeping forever. We won't reduce the amount of bullshit humans deal with, we will have increased it. And with all that, the earth's orbit still won't be 1000 days. And all for what? So I can count the hours in a day without getting my feet cold? Woo!
    - marak830 10y ago
      Well we use to use cubits and chains for measuring everything too. Science is slowly moving to si, we should probably all start cobaidering a proper system for time that works around metric. I don't like the idea of explaining to my children that we use this system, because it's the way it has always been done. That's a horrible idea .