8 ms·

I've been thinking about this for years now. I could never understand why no one had ever set 100 "minutes" to an hour.

by jbm 17y ago

lionhearted 17y ago
I've thought about this too. Basically, once you switched, you'd obsolete a hell of a lot of stuff. For it to make sense, a large portion of the developed world would have to switch at the same time as you too. So unlikely to happen. At the same time, I'm still trying to figure out why the USA doesn't strike imperial measurement from the books.
- ckinnan 17y ago
  The US is a dual system-- people are free to use whatever system they want, but business is encouraged to use metric, especially for trade. There was a big push in the 1970s to teach and adopt the metric system on a broad basis-- I remember there were even km speed limit signs-- but it failed. Americans think in feet, inches, miles, gallons, and pounds....imperial still has the first-mover advantage 400 years later!
- anamax 17y ago
  Note that some things don't scale well. Cooking recipes are one example - all of the ratios matter and the mass/length ratios are different for metric than imperial. (Inches, for pans, and cups, for ingredients, have different relationships than centimeters and liters.) Screw threads are another example. Metric threads have different characteristics than imperial ones.
- CamperBob 17y ago
  Machinists also don't like the metric system much. There's no metric unit that's anywhere close to the mil (thousandth of an inch). So in fabrication work, you're forced to either use large, oddball numbers of micrometers, compromise your design by moving to 1/10 mm precision, or hose your budget by using micrometer-level precision.
axod 17y ago
64 would be more useful, and not too big a change.
- quizbiz 17y ago
  Any tiny change when it comes to systems is huge. U.S. teaches but does not rely on the metric system for that reason.
- jacobolus 17y ago
  What? 64 is only divisible by 2, 4, 8, 16, and 32. By contrast, 100 is divisible by 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, and 50, while 60 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30. 64 is only useful if you're writing numbers with binary digits. Since humans don't do that very often, day-to-day, I disagree with you that 64 is a good choice.
  - axod 17y ago
    You're correct that 60 is more useful when dividing, BUT: Say we had 32 hours in a day, 64 minutes in an hour, 64 seconds in a minute... You could do date arithmetic simply. You could work out the number of seconds by simple bitshifts, rather than having to multiply and divide by 60/24.
CamperBob 17y ago
My guess is that it's because you can divide sexagesimal time units into more useful fractions. That, in turn, might have simplified geartrain design in early timepieces. 100 = 2x2x5x5, while 60 = 2x2x5x3. A 100-minute hour would be divisible into twentieths, tenths, fifths, quarters, and halves, while a 60-minute hour would additionally be divisible by thirds, twelfths, and fifteenths. Other than that, I got nothing. Somebody on time-nuts would likely know.
- pavlov 17y ago
  The sexagesimal system for times and angles was already in use in Mesopotamia circa 2000 BC. It's probably even older than that because it's so widespread and well-established in Eurasian cultures.
- jacobolus 17y ago
  The "useful fraction" reason is the same reason that all the units for every kind of measurement used to be based on 12s, 24s, 60s, and 360s: angle, length, volume, weight, time, etc. And not just in ancient times. It's much nicer to do graphic design on paper broken into whole numbers of inches, with those inches broken up in to 6 picas of 12 points each, than it is to design for A4 (or A3 etc.) paper, made of √2-multiples of base-10 metric units. It's much nicer (day-to-day) to describe triangles in terms of easy whole-number angles, instead of radians (now that we have more sophisticated math radians are great), and base-10 angles would be awful. It's much nicer to count off days of 12 hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds than any base-10 alternative. Etc. I think this article posted is completely missing the point. 12 wasn’t chosen because it could be made with a human hand; the particular way of counting on one hand was chosen because it matched the base-12/60 number system.
pavlov 17y ago
After the French Revolution, the Republic adopted a base-10 calendar. The number of months remained at 12, but a month's length was made uniform: each was divided into three weeks of 10 days. The clock was modified accordingly: each day was divided into ten hours, each hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute had 100 decimal seconds. The decimal clock was officially used in France in 1793-95. (I'd imagine that any remaining clocks from that era are highly valuable antiques nowadays.)
- Xichekolas 17y ago
  I've thought about a system like this... but the problem is, you can never get entirely base-10 because the Earth isn't so kind to us. It inconveniently revolves ~365 times for every time it circles the sun, so if you went entirely base-10 your 'days' wouldn't line up with actual daylight. If you can't go entirely base-10, and only go halfway like the French... then it doesn't really buy you any convenience.
  - DannoHung 17y ago
    We could entirely ditch the notion that things have to line up and just go to stardates (or, well, something like that that actually makes sense).
  - pavlov 17y ago
    Why would you prefer to keep Earth's revolution around the Sun as the base unit, instead of Earth's revolution around its axis? I would argue that the latter is more relevant for ordinary people. (Consider that Imperial Russia was using the fixed-365-day Julian calendar up to 1918, and they didn't seem to be acutely concerned that calendar months were drifting increasingly out of sync with actual seasons.) I'd suggest adopting a 1000-day year instead. To make the transition easier, the word "year" could be deprecated entirely, and the unit of time would simply be called "kiloday" or "k-day". This proposal would significantly improve everyone's life by eliminating brainless smalltalk about whether it's particularly hot or cold this June compared to last year.
    - 17y ago
csomar 17y ago
simply said, the Babylonian, first inventer has a base-60 and then will work with multiple of 60. In our era we have base 10, so we find it more easier to work with multiple of 10.

I've been thinking about this for years now. I could never understand why no one had ever set 100 "minutes" to an hour.

by jbm 17y ago

I've been thinking about this for years now. I could never understand why no one had ever set 100 "minutes" to an hour.

I've thought about this too. Basically, once you switched, you'd obsolete a hell of a lot of stuff. For it to make sense, a large portion of the developed world would have to switch at the same time as you too. So unlikely to happen. At the same time, I'm still trying to figure out why the USA doesn't strike imperial measurement from the books.

ckinnan 17y ago
The US is a dual system-- people are free to use whatever system they want, but business is encouraged to use metric, especially for trade. There was a big push in the 1970s to teach and adopt the metric system on a broad basis-- I remember there were even km speed limit signs-- but it failed. Americans think in feet, inches, miles, gallons, and pounds....imperial still has the first-mover advantage 400 years later!
anamax 17y ago
Note that some things don't scale well. Cooking recipes are one example - all of the ratios matter and the mass/length ratios are different for metric than imperial. (Inches, for pans, and cups, for ingredients, have different relationships than centimeters and liters.) Screw threads are another example. Metric threads have different characteristics than imperial ones.
CamperBob 17y ago
Machinists also don't like the metric system much. There's no metric unit that's anywhere close to the mil (thousandth of an inch). So in fabrication work, you're forced to either use large, oddball numbers of micrometers, compromise your design by moving to 1/10 mm precision, or hose your budget by using micrometer-level precision.

axod 17y ago

64 would be more useful, and not too big a change.

quizbiz 17y ago
Any tiny change when it comes to systems is huge. U.S. teaches but does not rely on the metric system for that reason.
jacobolus 17y ago
What? 64 is only divisible by 2, 4, 8, 16, and 32. By contrast, 100 is divisible by 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, and 50, while 60 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30. 64 is only useful if you're writing numbers with binary digits. Since humans don't do that very often, day-to-day, I disagree with you that 64 is a good choice.
- axod 17y ago
  You're correct that 60 is more useful when dividing, BUT: Say we had 32 hours in a day, 64 minutes in an hour, 64 seconds in a minute... You could do date arithmetic simply. You could work out the number of seconds by simple bitshifts, rather than having to multiply and divide by 60/24.

CamperBob 17y ago

My guess is that it's because you can divide sexagesimal time units into more useful fractions. That, in turn, might have simplified geartrain design in early timepieces. 100 = 2x2x5x5, while 60 = 2x2x5x3. A 100-minute hour would be divisible into twentieths, tenths, fifths, quarters, and halves, while a 60-minute hour would additionally be divisible by thirds, twelfths, and fifteenths. Other than that, I got nothing. Somebody on time-nuts would likely know.

pavlov 17y ago
The sexagesimal system for times and angles was already in use in Mesopotamia circa 2000 BC. It's probably even older than that because it's so widespread and well-established in Eurasian cultures.
jacobolus 17y ago
The "useful fraction" reason is the same reason that all the units for every kind of measurement used to be based on 12s, 24s, 60s, and 360s: angle, length, volume, weight, time, etc. And not just in ancient times. It's much nicer to do graphic design on paper broken into whole numbers of inches, with those inches broken up in to 6 picas of 12 points each, than it is to design for A4 (or A3 etc.) paper, made of √2-multiples of base-10 metric units. It's much nicer (day-to-day) to describe triangles in terms of easy whole-number angles, instead of radians (now that we have more sophisticated math radians are great), and base-10 angles would be awful. It's much nicer to count off days of 12 hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds than any base-10 alternative. Etc. I think this article posted is completely missing the point. 12 wasn’t chosen because it could be made with a human hand; the particular way of counting on one hand was chosen because it matched the base-12/60 number system.

pavlov 17y ago

After the French Revolution, the Republic adopted a base-10 calendar. The number of months remained at 12, but a month's length was made uniform: each was divided into three weeks of 10 days. The clock was modified accordingly: each day was divided into ten hours, each hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute had 100 decimal seconds. The decimal clock was officially used in France in 1793-95. (I'd imagine that any remaining clocks from that era are highly valuable antiques nowadays.)

Xichekolas 17y ago
I've thought about a system like this... but the problem is, you can never get entirely base-10 because the Earth isn't so kind to us. It inconveniently revolves ~365 times for every time it circles the sun, so if you went entirely base-10 your 'days' wouldn't line up with actual daylight. If you can't go entirely base-10, and only go halfway like the French... then it doesn't really buy you any convenience.
- DannoHung 17y ago
  We could entirely ditch the notion that things have to line up and just go to stardates (or, well, something like that that actually makes sense).
- pavlov 17y ago
  Why would you prefer to keep Earth's revolution around the Sun as the base unit, instead of Earth's revolution around its axis? I would argue that the latter is more relevant for ordinary people. (Consider that Imperial Russia was using the fixed-365-day Julian calendar up to 1918, and they didn't seem to be acutely concerned that calendar months were drifting increasingly out of sync with actual seasons.) I'd suggest adopting a 1000-day year instead. To make the transition easier, the word "year" could be deprecated entirely, and the unit of time would simply be called "kiloday" or "k-day". This proposal would significantly improve everyone's life by eliminating brainless smalltalk about whether it's particularly hot or cold this June compared to last year.
  - 17y ago

csomar 17y ago

simply said, the Babylonian, first inventer has a base-60 and then will work with multiple of 60. In our era we have base 10, so we find it more easier to work with multiple of 10.