4 ms·
The two senses of the word minute ("tiny" and "1/60th of an hour") are etymologically related -- a minute is called a minute because it's a tiny division of an
by lemoncucumber 7y ago
The two senses of the word minute ("tiny" and "1/60th of an hour") are etymologically related -- a minute is called a minute because it's a tiny division of an hour.
The one that was more surprising to me is the etymology of "seconds". They're called seconds because they're the second division of an hour (the first being minutes).
- acheron 7y agoYep. "pars minuta prima" -- first small part, and "pars minuta secunda" -- second small part.
- schoen 7y agoI had never considered whether anyone had continued dividing time beyond "first minute" and "second minute", but apparently yes, there have been partes miniutae tertiae too: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second#Trivia https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second#Trivia One natural way of adapting this into English would be "terce" (like the religious service), although I guess we could also just call it a "third" -- about 17 milliseconds. According to some stuff I was reading last week, this is just about the smallest time interval that a human being can learn to notice in many contexts, or just about the smallest timing accuracy with which a person can learn to react to an anticipated event. For example, it's about the timing accuracy needed for a frame-perfect action in a NES speedrun. So there is a human use for such a small time interval!
- GreedCtrl 7y agoIs the convention of 60 frames per second related at all?
- schoen 7y agoHuh, that's certainly a more fundamental reason that the NES frame is that length...! I wonder if people involved with early film and video had a lot of 60:1 gearing available because of clocks or something (or just thought it was a very intuitive division to use).
- hndamien 7y agowell 60 * 17 = 1020 (about as close as you can get to a millisecond with integers), so it lines up pretty well.
- schoen 7y agoYeah, the ~17 ms frame duration is indeed based on a ~60 fps frame rate.
- Khoth 7y ago60 frames per second is because (in the USA) electricity suppliers standardised on 60Hz mains frequency, and in the early days of TV it was easiest to make the refresh rate match the mains supply. (In the UK the mains frequency is 50Hz, as is the standard TV refresh rate)
- pkroll 7y agoBTW, because of choices made for color TV, it's almost never actually 60 fps... it's 59.94. https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/whats-the-difference-between-5994fps-and-60fps https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/whats-the-difference-betwe...
- acheron 7y agoHa, I had never thought about "tertia" either. Interesting!