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.
Holy moly I love stuff like this. Thank you! Awesome!
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
Yes, the French, however, have a rather twisted counting system based on 20, for example 96 in French is translated as 4 times 20 + 16, forcing you to do calculations just to say a number.
I mean you only have to do calculations if you’re used to base10. If you’re used to base20 then it should come just as naturally as base10. Reading through the Wikipedia page, the linguistic remenants really suggest that it did come quite naturally.
Changing bases is actually really cool and can be useful if you ever want to play with big numbers on paper and make the comprehendable!
Thank you :) I love how lemmy has all the smart people.
So make it 24 then. What’s this 12shit?
The History of the clock is actually pretty interesting https://www.britannica.com/topic/12-hour-clock
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,
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).
On the gripping hand, the Brownies could make way better clocks than we could.
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.
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.
Maybe we could make a standard out of this…
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.
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.
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 is only true if both people know you are talking about the future or the past (already released or not released yet) and then implies that the last or next instance of the month is meant. In other words, using just the month only works if the year is already known. Talking about a movie from 2008, the month it released does not give you more information than its year. Using just the month has very limited and short term validity. Which is fine for day to day conversation, but not for written documents or anything else that will be read more than once. In order of the highest information value it’s clearly Y, M, D, most significant information to least.
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.
The decimal time was introduced at the same time than the rest of the units.
In this system days are 10 hours long, hours are 100 minutes and minutes 10 seconds.
Unfortunately the system did not stick at the time and we reverted to the old system.
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.
Wait until you find out that binary counting allows you to count to 31 with one hand.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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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.
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.
The Greeks also had variable length hours, and early water clocks attempted to adjust automatically over the year.
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
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
“The day will start when the sun comes up?” No, when the sun is the furthest away it can be from us.
The joys of a base-60 number system
Man I just want everyone to use UTC
Time zones are kind of useful though.
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.
