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:
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.
Thank you :) I love how lemmy has all the smart people.
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 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?
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