this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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Why hasn't the Metric world found a better way? I want a clock based around multiples of 10, dammit!
One benefit of base 12 and base 60 over base 10 for everyday use with things like time is simple factorization. You can divide 12 hours evenly into halves, thirds, quarters, and sixths, and 60 minutes evenly into halves, thirds, quarters, fifths, sixths, tenths, etc. With base 10, you've just got halves and fifths.
Another benefit of base 12 is that you can count to 12 easily with one hand by using your thumb to count each of the 3 segments on your 4 fingers.
I learned that on that other website prior to the great migration and it blew my mind then.
tries it
Whoa. Dude that's super useful.
I'm trying to think of a situation where I need to count to 12 on one hand 🤔
This would be useful if I was used to counting with base 12.
When ordering twelve beers
Wait until you find out that binary counting allows you to count to 31 with one hand.
Pros scale that up to base 60 by counting to 12 and using the other hand to count how many times they have counted to 12.
Thems rookie numbers. You can get to 144 using the twelve segments on each hand.
God tier is throwing your toes into the mix.
That is so cool! Thanks for the tip
Yeah, I know all about that, but I don't think we'll convince people to change everything to base 12, so let's go with a base 10 clock.
A base-10 unit circle would be abhorrent. 1/2 of a circle is an important concept, but 1/5th and 1/10th of a circle are rarely used in geometry or trigonometry. Meanwhile, a right angle (1/4 of a circle) would require an ugly fraction, and the angle of an equilateral triangle (1/6th) would require a repeating decimal.
Think of 12-hour clocks and 360-degree circles as paper bags. When we're fucking with angular concepts, you do not want to take those bags off Decimal's head.
I just want everything to be switched to 24 instead of 12. Why everyone want to complicate things?
Switch everything to Base24?! Ferb, I know what we're gonna do today!
Do we have base12? I know only base64 and maybe base32.
I see what you did there and it’s very funny.
I didn't put in a secret punchline. It's a genuine thought. What do you think I did?
Well, I thought I was replying to squirrel, but they say we’ll never get everyone to use base 12 systems so we had better just go to base 10…
When the entire sae/imperial/whatever is either base 12 or divisible by it already.
There’s already a perfectly good base 12 system in everyday use, but we’ll never get anyone to accept that so we gotta accept inferior base 10. See the joke?
Ah, so you just replied to the wrong guy? Ok then.
Yeah, I understood that joke.
i'm reading here on .ml and it looks like my reply was to squirrel and then you replied to me. what are you seeing?
Hold on. I did get notification with your comment, but... hmm... Since we both replied to the same guy, the app thought that it's logical to send notification about "adjacent/neighbor" reply. I thought that notifications are only about direct replies. Strange. Yes, you did not replied to me. Oopsy. :)
P.S. I'm currently using Liftoff.
that's crazy. over here on the .ml webui deep in the weeds comments dont expand right. excited to see what kind of api call sanitization ends pu getting implemented to make instances talking to each other and to clients end up getting implemented.
Because base ten sucks for practical use and anything that needs division.
So hex time it is!
"It's hex'o clock somewhere 😉"
Some people briefly tried that during the French Revolution, but it never caught on.
It was called the French Republican Calendar. Didn’t last very long.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar
That's extremely elegant. Plus if you have days of rest every first, fifth and tenth day of the week then you have 3 or 4 days of work in a row at a time (of course im sure at the time they were far more stingy with days of rest)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time?wprov=sfla1
The French tried at the same time they adopted the rest of the metric system but it just didnt offer much advantage vs changing out clocks.
With digital clocks it would be simpler now.
There is a logical reason why numbers like 12, 24, and 60 are used in a lot of systems. They are highly composite numbers so they have lots of prime factors which means there are lots more options to break them into whole groups.