People like to shit on the imperial measurements for its inconsistensies, but why is it we have a similarly dogshit one for measuring time?

TL;DR: mostly ancient math and moon stuff.

This article suggests 60/60 came from the Sumerians who used a base-12 counting system. This and other articles note that 60 is more flexible than 100 in many ways as it’s divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

The Babylonians invented the 360 degree circle, and so understood the sun to move about 1 degree per day.

The number of days in a week and weeks in a month is based on lunar phases (month=moon, and in Chinese the word for month is the same as moon, 月). This article says the approximately 28 day month is traced to ancient Mesopotamia with leap days used to stay consistent in the long run. As for days of the week that article also says they were based on the 7 non-fixed heavenly bodies visible to the naked eye.

Time measurements like heat, mass, length etc are arbitrary units. It is just that they are the oldest.

The Sumerians gave us our time standards and they loved base 12. So twelve hours in the day and 60 (5x12) minutes in the hour. Also 12 months in a year and 360 degrees in a circle.

The French actually tried to implement decimal time after the revolution but reverted back after 6 years or so.

The only metric unit of time is the second. all the other ones are customary units that are geared towards living on Planet Earth. There was a movement for decimal time at one point, but it never really took off. Given that the length of a day changes, I don't see how it would remain stable either. Which is something that SI units try very hard to make sure doesn't happen.

12 hours in half a day is fine for me. 12 can be divided into halves, thirds, quarters and sixths. That's useful for planning out a day. Time is one of the applications where I don't have a complaint about using base 12.

Since we are on the topic of time measurements, take Caesar and Augustus's names off of my calendar please and thank you.

Also, if you can fill in February to be full 30 days, that'd be great as well. Take a day off from each of the emperors.

Americans use the imperial system, yet claim not to be imperialist. Curious 🤔

Writing this in 634.023.M3 Imperial Calendar i agree we should change it to juche

Because there's 365 days in a year (duh). I mean, if it were, like, 200, then a year would be 0.7 season cycles?

Same for a day. If we set it to, say, 10000 minutes or whatever, noon could very well end up as the middle of the night eventually.

As for the minute and hour, how else would you fit seconds into a day? 24*60 square rooted for equal units? So we have 120 new minutes each 120 seconds long? I mean, I could see that sort of working? But it's still pretty weird, and not a true decimal. So I guess you'd have to rework seconds also.

Edit: months are based off the moon, and there would be no way to somehow make units of 10 months fit into a year, which literally cannot be anything other than 365 days, unless you want your afternoon tea parties 0.12 daylengths past midnight.

Please don't touch it now

-- the entire software developer community around the world

Well, the time for eath rotation isnt a constant, it will slowly decelerate and days will be longer.

Using multiples of 10 for time was considered, but was a shitty option compared to the current deal. Months should all be 30 days and then have a free week at the end of the year tho, egyptian style.

Revolutionary France had decimal time for a while, but it was not popular. People liked 24 hour days and 3600 second hours

The days in a year are the actual time it takes to orbit the Sun, but that hasn't stopped people. For financial purposes there's the ISO 8601 calendar where years have 52 or 53 weeks. There are the symmetry calendars which have even quarter years and same size months (for example, each quarter is made of a 4 week month, a five week month, another four week month) with every 6 or 5 years having a leap week

But there are so many clocks that would be obsoleted by a change to time.

Well, first off, we'd need to come up with something better.

Just off the top of my head, let's say we use days as our main unit of time and then something like centi- and milli-days (and portions of milli-days) for shorter units. A centi-day is about 14 and a half minutes. A milli-day is 86.4 seconds.

But, then, so many of our other units are defined in terms of seconds. If we abandoned seconds, we'd have to come up with new units for energy, power, and any other units which are defined in terms of seconds.

So, in order to abandon seconds, we'd have to throw away the rest of the metric system and start over.

And, I suppose that's something we could do, but is it worth it?

And even if we did all that work, that wouldn't fix the fact that the time it takes to orbit the sun isn't a multiple of the amount of time a it takes the planet to revolve around its axis.

That said, there are definitely improvements we could make without wrecking the whole metric system. Daylight saving's time is ridiculously unpopular and you'd think we'd've gotten rid of it by now. I also think getting rid of time zones would be beneficial. Perhaps making all but one month the same length.

The main reason is because we use natural cycles that are important for civic and agricultural reasons as the basis of our measurements. And those cycles are unrelated phenomena that don't match with each other well.

Day and year are based (duh) on two solar cycles (Earth's rotation and translation), while the month and week are based on the lunar cycle of translation around the earth in roughly 28 days. When people tried to force lunar and solar calendars to fit, we ended up with the inconsistent months we have.

The 12/60 base divisions of the day were chosen before we had good calculators. Numbers with many divisors like 12 and 60 help a lot with mental math when you don't have calculators.

There have been proposals of better calendars. The French tried something during the revolution and other people as well. The French republican calendar was:

• 1 hour = 100 minutes
• 1 day = 10 hours
• 1 week = 10 days
• 1 month = 3 weeks
• 1 year = 12 months + 5 monthless holiday

Another idea is the Cotsworth Plan:

• 1 minute = 100 seconds
• 1 hour = 100 minutes
• 1 day = 10 hours
• 1 week = 7 days
• 1 month = 4 weeks
• 1 year = 13 months + 1 special monthless holiday

I like the French Republican Calendar, but I would change it to months with 6 weeks of 5 days instead. And divide the week into 3 work days, 2 weekends. But the Cotsworth Plan is a better compromise between lunar and solar cycles.

Neither are good decimal systems. But in the end, if we want to use both the year and the day we're fucked. There's no way of having a fully decimal system. The year is approximately 365.25 days, and 365 is an awkward number. It's only divisible by 5 and 73, so it's not possible to have good divisions of it that match adequately a 10 based grid. You could abolish months and just have 73 weeks of 5 days, but I see no advantage.

We could do away with the year and just keep the day. We could do something like

• 1 miliday= 1000 microdays (1 microday ≈ 0.086 seconds)
• 1 deciday = 100 milidays (1 miliday ≈ 1.4 minutes)
• 1 day = 10 decidays (1 deciday = 2.4 hours)
• 1 decaday = 10 days (1 decaday ≈ 1.4 weeks)
• 1 hectoday = 10 decadays (1 hectoday ≈ 3.3 months)
• 1 kiloday = 10 hectodays (1 kiloday ≈ 2.74 years)

But this system would be totally misaligned with seasons, moon phases, solar cycles, etc. One could argue that those things are not as important for everyday life as they used to be, and that's true. But they're still economically important and you'd have to implement special calendars to keep track of them. It seems something like the Cotsworth or French systems make more economic sense.

You guys aren't using Juche years?

I mean, days of the year is fine as is because that matches seasonal cycles which is important for agriculture and the like. Ofcourse along the equator lunar calenders were historically used because they don't have different seasons but a calender used by everyone keeps things consistent for trade and the agricultural trade is still one of the most important things for humanity so it best remains a solar calendar.

As for time, 60 and 24 and in general multiples of 12 are great units because they can be easily divisible in many ways. This is why they were established as such in the first place, because Babylon had a big thing for what is called "extremely composite numbers" which are basically just a number that has more factors than any previous and equal to all subsequent ones (until the next extremely composite number) and all multiples of 12 (as far as I know) fall into this category. This means that units that are multiples of 12 both easily divide into each other (making it useful for changing between units) and easily divide into many other numbers making it easier to schedule a day as you have nice clean boundaries.

Bc its 6k years old and used universally.

Here is my insane take:

We should use some large multiple of ten of plank units for distance measurements,

Then we can use a noticable on our scale time period in plank time units to measure time.

That way when we can set easier standards for when we meet our extra terrestrial comrades.

Republicans only want one thing and it's disgusting

And when you are studying financial mathematics, there 30 days months all around, or not actually each day is counted, or wait it's only work days. For the year you can have 360 days at year, or 365 or sometimes 366. And you need to remember all that shit for tbe exams and never use it again because is the problem for the programmers to solve.

You see how your fingers split into three bits? When you count them in your hand with your thumb there's 4 fingers remaining, 4*3=12.

Decimal time rule!

Funnily enough, Asimov novels sometimes feature decimal time clocks.

Revolutionary calendar in the early French revolution was decimal too : 12 months of 3 weeks of 10 days. 5 or 6 days at the end of the year for vacations. And they used decimal time too.

It was wildly unpopular. I think the decimal time was removed after a couple of years. Napoleon removed the decimal time.

I have both on a app on my phone, just for fun. You can easily find apps for that.

Hot take: imperial units are fine for normie stuff (as in, not engineering or math or whatever)

They come in useful sizes! Feet are handier than meters and gallons are better than liters. And unit conversion between feet and miles, pounds and tons, etc. isn't something that ever happens in day-to-day life. It sounds silly to say that a mile is 5280 feet but I'm pretty sure that ratio was decided retroactively for the sake of making the system consistent. As in, no one knows or cares about converting between the two because we already know how long a foot is and how long a mile is. Also no one uses the obscure units like gills and barleycorns.

Base ten is trash and a glorious socialist utopia wouldn't use ivory tower measurements that aren't actually useful for performing labor.

A base 12 or 60 system is much more flexible for "small" human scale measurements, with base 10 being a bit more useful for "far distances," for orders of magnitude estimation because of our base10 numbering system, but then going back to a large divisor system for galactic distances. For example a parsec is 648000/pi astronomical units, which isn't metric in anyway shape or form, but is extremely useful for astronomical calculations.

We have a similar system to that today in America. Skilled Tradesmen will use imperial/base 12 systems for manual work. i.e. Construction, carpentry, etc. as the ability to use thirds and quarters of a unit without relying on fractions and having clearly defined lines on a measuring stick that have those thirds/quarters, is more useful then an arbitrary base 10 measurement that only has 2 divisors. The reason america still uses the "standard" system is that it is useful, not because of "boomers" or whatever.