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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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,
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 joys of a base-60 number system
Man I just want everyone to use UTC
Time zones are kind of useful though.
"The day will start when the sun comes up?" No, when the sun is the furthest away it can be from us.
12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
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.
Wait until you find out that binary counting allows you to count to 31 with one hand.
Because base ten sucks for practical use and anything that needs division.
So hex time it is!
Some people briefly tried that during the French Revolution, but it never caught on.
Chad American broken clocks: right twice per day Virgin Bri‘ish broken clocks: only right once per day
pwnd
Oh and when the minute hand is 3/4s of the way to the 12 it's quarter too...5.
Tonne? You mean megagram?