3 ms·

We're locked into days and years, but months, weeks, hours and minutes are arbitrary, no? Maybe we can't rationalize it all, but what's to stop us from dividin

We're locked into days and years, but months, weeks, hours and minutes are arbitrary, no? Maybe we can't rationalize it all, but what's to stop us from dividing a day into 10 hours with 100 minutes each? Fuck seconds.

lhorie 6y ago
> what's to stop us from dividing a day into 10 hours with 100 minutes each? Same reason you can't just change the official language of your country overnight. It requires widespread consensus both in terms of users ability to use it and their systems' ability to understand it.
rtkwe 6y ago
We totally could [0], it feels less metric though when we're limited to messing with the time in the days and the grouping of days and still have to deal with the messy remainder of roughly 5.25 days assuming we have 'metric-y' 10 day 'weeks.' [0] Minus societal inertia and that the current calendar works well enough for all it's aesthetic messiness.
- deleted 6y ago
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WorldMaker 6y ago
Arguably if we are sticking with the existing definitions of days and years the reason we use a base-60 is because that is a degrees system. We are respecting (approximate) circular travel. It would almost make more sense to express time in radians in that case as that is the metric measure of angle. We are about 3/4 Tau through this year, and I'm writing this at about 1.2 Pi on this day.
- rtkwe 6y ago
  60 also has a lot of nice divisors and lays out nicely on a circle. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30. If we're going to do radian measures why not just skip the extra tau and just say we're .75 through the year?
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    That's exactly what I think would happen if we tried to use angular units for days or years (or even months): we'd either end up back where we started with a ~360-based system with lots of divisors or a percentage system. Exactly why I choose to use Tau in at least one example because radian systems using Tau are much are obviously "percent of the pie chart" than Pi examples.

lhorie 6y ago

> what's to stop us from dividing a day into 10 hours with 100 minutes each? Same reason you can't just change the official language of your country overnight. It requires widespread consensus both in terms of users ability to use it and their systems' ability to understand it.

rtkwe 6y ago

We totally could [0], it feels less metric though when we're limited to messing with the time in the days and the grouping of days and still have to deal with the messy remainder of roughly 5.25 days assuming we have 'metric-y' 10 day 'weeks.' [0] Minus societal inertia and that the current calendar works well enough for all it's aesthetic messiness.

deleted 6y ago
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WorldMaker 6y ago

Arguably if we are sticking with the existing definitions of days and years the reason we use a base-60 is because that is a degrees system. We are respecting (approximate) circular travel. It would almost make more sense to express time in radians in that case as that is the metric measure of angle. We are about 3/4 Tau through this year, and I'm writing this at about 1.2 Pi on this day.

rtkwe 6y ago
60 also has a lot of nice divisors and lays out nicely on a circle. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30. If we're going to do radian measures why not just skip the extra tau and just say we're .75 through the year?
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  That's exactly what I think would happen if we tried to use angular units for days or years (or even months): we'd either end up back where we started with a ~360-based system with lots of divisors or a percentage system. Exactly why I choose to use Tau in at least one example because radian systems using Tau are much are obviously "percent of the pie chart" than Pi examples.