12 ms·
The reason 12, 24, 60 are so useful is how many factors they have. You can divide the first two in half and thirds, and 60 additionally by 5ths and 10ths withou
by roywiggins 10y ago
The reason 12, 24, 60 are so useful is how many factors they have. You can divide the first two in half and thirds, and 60 additionally by 5ths and 10ths without resorting to fractions.
Being able to more simply divide by thirds and sixths might not be important most of the time, but it's not completely useless, and you can't do it in base-10.
- Dylan16807 10y agoEasy thirds are really unimportant in the grand scheme of clock uses. If we were used to decimal time, it would work just as well.
- ChoHag 10y agoActually while they're useful, they're not that useful. The point is that being able to divide the day up into 10 chunks, which is just about the only thing we can't yet evenly divide it up into[+], is even less useful. It's certainly less useful than the gargantuan international effort it would take to change one arbitrary system for another. [+] And that's not even so bad - 2.4 or 2:24