3 ms·

Nah we should go metric on time. 20 new-hours a day, 100 new-minutes per new-hour.

by zz865 6y ago

astrea 6y ago
And I thought time libraries were a mess already...
gerikson 6y ago
Bring back the French Revolutionary clock!
chriswarbo 6y ago
The existing system is perfectly rational, although using base-60 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal ) rather than base-10 (decimal). We can use the ideas of metric without base-10 (see http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2020-05-22-metric_red_herring.html http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2020-05-22-metric_red_herring.htm... ); and I would argue that base-60 is actually better, since it has many factors (see http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2020-05-22-improving_our_units.html http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2020-05-22-improving_our_units.ht... ). It's actually illuminating to trace the linguistic history: - The 'hour' used to be the base unit for time - Smaller intervals were called 'small parts', where a 'small part' is 1/60 of an hour (the sexagesimal equivalent to a 'decihour') - Even smaller intervals were called 'second small parts', defined as 1/60 of a 'small part' - Even smaller intervals were called 'third small parts', defined as 1/60 of a 'second small part' - And so on This was done by Latin speakers, whose phrase for 'small part' is "pars minuta". Hence 1/60 of an hour is a "pars minuta" ('minute' in English), and 1/60 of a pars minuta is a "pars minuta secunda" ('second' in English). Metric/SI units take the "second" to be their base unit, and give us shorthand multipliers like "kilo". Tracing this back, we find that a kilosecond is 1000/3600 of an hour! Likewise we don't tend to use thirds or fourths anymore, instead using multipliers like "milli" and "nano". I'm not aware of any shorthand multipliers for sexagesimal. In my blog post linked above I suggest “prota” for x60 and “defter” for x3600, so we could use "protasecond" instead of minute and "defersecond" instead of hour (I also suggest abbreviating second to "sec", since it's no longer used as an ordinal number ("second small"))

Nah we should go metric on time. 20 new-hours a day, 100 new-minutes per new-hour.

by zz865 6y ago

Nah we should go metric on time. 20 new-hours a day, 100 new-minutes per new-hour.

astrea 6y ago

And I thought time libraries were a mess already...

gerikson 6y ago

Bring back the French Revolutionary clock!

chriswarbo 6y ago

The existing system is perfectly rational, although using base-60 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal ) rather than base-10 (decimal). We can use the ideas of metric without base-10 (see http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2020-05-22-metric_red_herring.html http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2020-05-22-metric_red_herring.htm... ); and I would argue that base-60 is actually better, since it has many factors (see http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2020-05-22-improving_our_units.html http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2020-05-22-improving_our_units.ht... ). It's actually illuminating to trace the linguistic history: - The 'hour' used to be the base unit for time - Smaller intervals were called 'small parts', where a 'small part' is 1/60 of an hour (the sexagesimal equivalent to a 'decihour') - Even smaller intervals were called 'second small parts', defined as 1/60 of a 'small part' - Even smaller intervals were called 'third small parts', defined as 1/60 of a 'second small part' - And so on This was done by Latin speakers, whose phrase for 'small part' is "pars minuta". Hence 1/60 of an hour is a "pars minuta" ('minute' in English), and 1/60 of a pars minuta is a "pars minuta secunda" ('second' in English). Metric/SI units take the "second" to be their base unit, and give us shorthand multipliers like "kilo". Tracing this back, we find that a kilosecond is 1000/3600 of an hour! Likewise we don't tend to use thirds or fourths anymore, instead using multipliers like "milli" and "nano". I'm not aware of any shorthand multipliers for sexagesimal. In my blog post linked above I suggest “prota” for x60 and “defter” for x3600, so we could use "protasecond" instead of minute and "defersecond" instead of hour (I also suggest abbreviating second to "sec", since it's no longer used as an ordinal number ("second small"))