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 ari

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.