MobileTechGuyI think that guy was eating the glue
SquirrelWhy hasn’t the Metric world found a better way?
Some people briefly tried that during the French Revolution, but it never caught on.
because astronomers like the number 60 or smth
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.
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.
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.
AndrewI 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.
RivalarrivalA 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 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. :)
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.
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.
That is so cool! Thanks for the tip
tries it
Whoa. Dude that’s super useful.
NailbarI’m trying to think of a situation where I need to count to 12 on one hand 🤔
CurlyMoustacheWhen 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.
𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍Thems rookie numbers. You can get to 144 using the twelve segments on each hand.
God tier is throwing your toes into the mix.
It was called the 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)
The French actually tried that during the revolution.
Because base ten sucks for practical use and anything that needs division.
exuSo hex time it is!
“It’s hex’o clock somewhere 😉”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Holy moly I love stuff like this. Thank you! Awesome!
oriondInventor for sure used the imperial barbarian measuring system
hawkwindWe 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,
On the gripping hand, the Brownies could make way better clocks than we could.
That is a great book. Did you read the sequels?
Did you say sequels??? I’ve read A Fire Upon the Deep and a Deepness in the Sky. There are others???
Children of the Sky too.
I’ll have to check that out. I’ve enjoyed some of Vinge’s other work as well. The Peace War, Marooned in Realtime, and Rainbow’s End were all pretty great reads as I recall (been awhile).
Swatch tried Internet Time: www.swatchclock.com
SockenklausYeah that didn’t fly at all …
Thank goodness for the stardate!
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.
nudny ekscentrykEhhhh, 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)
SSTFThe 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.
Ahhh. This is it. This is the good stuff.
So make it 24 then. What’s this 12shit?
MasterNerdThe History of the clock is actually pretty interesting
www.britannica.com/topic/12-hour-clock
12-hour clock | Description, History, and Facts
12-hour clock, time convention that splits a 24-hour day into two equal 12-hour periods. The first is referred to as am, which stands for ante meridiem, “before midday” in Latin, while the second is referred to using pm, meaning post meridiem, or “after midday.” This nomenclature is based on the
