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:
Okay but now you have to tell us how it works!
That’s pretty cool! The French actually had a decimal time system after the revolution, but they eventually abandoned it.
Holy moly I love stuff like this. Thank you! Awesome!
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.
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.
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.
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?
Because base ten sucks for practical use and anything that needs division.
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.
Some people briefly tried that during the French Revolution, but it never caught on.
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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.
The inventor of the imperial units used by the US, this one really sniffed glue.
I’m with you on metric vs. standard units all day, it’s downright embarrassing that we still haven’t switched to metric…but Month, Day, Year makes far more sense. The numerical day of the month is pointless by itself, there are 12 of each number (except 29-31) every year so the number says nothing at all without the context. It makes no sense to start reciting a date with the least important and least descriptive bit of information. The month is the piece of information that gives the most detail on its own and cuts down on the number of words to say the date. Instead of “The 12th of May” we just say “May 12th” cutting two completely unnecessary words from British English. It also lets you know the season of the year right off the bat. If we ask when a movie, game, or book is coming out, “in March” is the best way to say it if you had to choose only one piece of data of the three. “This year/Next year” or “the 25th” give less info. We leave off the year if the future event is in the current year so that comes last naturally. As objectively as possible, we improved the date format.
Counterpoint: be consequential and go from most generic to most specific with year-month-day.
If something is obviously in the current year, just leave the year part.
I don’t mind that date format much at all and I know it’s ostensibly the universal standard. It makes more sense then day-month-year at any rate.
Maybe we could make a standard out of this…
This is why it should always be yyyy/mm/dd
While what you say makes perfect sense and is logical, the truth is that anyone who has an ounce of intelligence can easily parse this information in a few seconds regardless of its format.
This is not an argument for maintaining the status quo, but rather, is meant to put it into perspective as the deeply unimportant detail that it is.
anyone who has an ounce of intelligence can easily parse this information in a few seconds regardless of its format.
1/4/2023
yyyy/mm/ddmakes the most sense in my opinion and is the order used in ISO 8601 and similar specs (though in the formatyyyy-mm-dd), but we already have enough culture-specific stuff that date formats are the least of our issues.
This can still be a valid option, although what in daily use is primarily interested in the day of the month, since the month takes, well, a month to change and everyone knows which it is. However, he is mainly interested in how many days he will receive his salary or how much time he has left on vacation or how many days until an event premieres. If we ask for the time, we are not interested in hearing that it is afternoon, which we already know, but rather to know the exact time so as not to miss the train or how long it takes to finish the workday. This is why the chronological order is used, seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years.
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
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
Also, if military and show up late, fuck you, you’re fired. Which I’m actually OK with.
Dishonourable discharge, go back to your family that misses and loves you
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
“The day will start when the sun comes up?” No, when the sun is the furthest away it can be from us.
Inventor for sure used the
imperialbarbarian measuring systemTonne? You mean megagram?
