When I was a kid, I was such a nerd, that I invented my own decimal timekeeping system.
Even wrote a little macOS menubar clock for it — I was dead-serious.
Edit: omg the website still works, even though I never put any real content there …
Edit 2: Found this old explanation I apparently put together in July 2010, according to my image archive:
That's pretty cool! The French actually had a decimal time system after the revolution, but they eventually abandoned it.
Okay but now you have to tell us how it works!
All I can gather, is that the number furthest to the right seems to be 100ms, so the second digit from the right is counting seconds. When those 3 digits reach 000, they've counted 100 seconds.
I see 19567288000 currently. If I remove the last zero, that number should be in seconds. So 1956728800 seconds = ~62 years. The year 2023 - 62yrs = 1961.
Maybe it's counting the number of seconds since a date in 1961? Unix time uses 1970-01-01 but not sure what significance 1961 has.
Ehhhh, no. There are very important reasons we divide the time this way. 24 is a highly composite number (a number with more divisors than all numbers preceding it; like an opposite of a prime number). This allows us to easily divide the day into halves, thirds, quarters and sixths. So is 60, with even more divisors.
My guess is the same thing goes for the switch from Roman to Julian calendar (ten to twelve months in a year).
Interestingly, the same goes for 360 degrees in a full angle.
The history of the calendar in Roman times is actually an entire topic to itself.
The pre-Julian calendar required fine tuning every year in winter to keep the rest of the months aligned with the seasons.
Technically not a difficult job to keep the calendar running smoothly and consistently, but the person in charge of the calendar in Rome was a politician, so they would play political games with the length of the year.
Caesar wanted a calendar that would run on auto-pilot to strip power away from those politicians.
By sheer coincidence when Caesar made his reform, during the the changeover of calendars while he was in charge, he got to rule over a 400+ day long year.
Ahhh. This is it. This is the good stuff. Lemmy is really coming along I missed this.
We should have a base 12 metric system but the French already established the 10
We should just use second notation for everything.
I’ll be there in 5 min? I’ll be there in 2 or 3 hundo!
See you tommorow? See you in in 86K!
Next week? About half a Megasec!
Doesn’t Megasecond sound better than Fortnite?
There is a fun fun sci-fi book called "Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge. The Humans use epoch time with si prefixed Seconds for time,
The reason for 12-hour clocks is most cultures worldwide have variable length hours of over a year. For Western times this comes from Greeks who had 12 day and 12 night hours. Early water clocks in antiquity would attempt to make that adjustment automatically.
It came from the Sumerians, not the Greeks.
The Greeks specifically build water clocks with variable length days.
The inventor of the imperial units used by the US, this one really sniffed glue.
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
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.
Wait until you find out that binary counting allows you to count to 31 with one hand.
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?
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.
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.
Swatch tried Internet Time: www.swatchclock.com
Yeah that didn't fly at all ..
Thank goodness for the stardate!
Chad American broken clocks: right twice per day Virgin Bri‘ish broken clocks: only right once per day
pwnd
A slow clock might not be right in your entire lifetime.
Wait until you hear about traditional Japanese timekeeping, where the hours had different lengths throughout the year, depending on daylight: https://youtu.be/1BJmnEa6YGE
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/1BJmnEa6YGE
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Also each part of the world will offset by half an hour or so.
Also military will operate by a 24 hrs.
Also fuck you
Military plus all of mainland Europe
"The day will start when the sun comes up?" No, when the sun is the furthest away it can be from us.
Man I just want everyone to use UTC
Time zones are kind of useful though.
The joys of a base-60 number system
12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
Oh and when the minute hand is 3/4s of the way to the 12 it's quarter too...5.