Thought of this in the shower this morning, if anyone has an answer I’d be very interested!
IIRC, people have tried to create, and enforce, metric time in the past but it always fails. Basically it seems like that ever since the Mesopotamians invented base 60 mathematics for keeping track of time, some geometry, and related concepts it is stuck for that purpose because it really does seem to be the best number set for the job. It did not stick around for anything else though because it’s basically garbage for those tasks. Base 10 works pretty good; it’s easy to move around zeroes and decimal places, and since most people have 10 fingers it’s pretty intuitive.
Agreed, most people have ten fingers.
I’d like a second opinion on that.
You can blame the babalonians for that. They have a 60 base number system and was used for time and dates.
Ancient Greece also liked highly factorable numbers. Plato called out 5040 being a handy population size for having many factors.
12 and 60 divide nicely. A quarter of a 12-hour clock is 3 hours, but in decimal time it’d be 2.5 hours. A third is 4 hours in base 12, but some gross 3.33 repeating in decimal.
I just don’t like it.
That’s the same argument for (some) Imperial measurements, but people converted to metric anyways.
Metric isn’t better because it uses 10, it’s better because it uses the same base for everything. A measurement system (and number system) that uses 12 for everything would be better than both imperial and metric.
I think the benefit of having metric in base 10 rather than 12 is that it matches our numeric base system.
123mm is 12.3cm and 1.23dm and 0.123m.
Converting things in base 12 would be a bit more work, not sure it’d be worth it.
We’re not really going around converting time very often.
Yeah, but honestly i think both are kinda stupid. we should use something sensible like base 16(easy conversion to binary but better readability) or base 12(easily divisible by 2, 3 and 4).
Decimal time was introduced in Revolutionary France, just like the metric system and a decimal calendar. They made it non-mandatory after 17 months, partly because of the enormous costs to replace all clocks. The decimal calendar survived longer and was abolished by Napoleon as part of his reconciliation strategy with the Catholic church.
Decimal time is still used by the way. Astronomers use fractional days because it’s easier to do calculations with. And that very same ease of use is why Microsoft Excel uses fractional dates to calculate dates, as it requires less calculations.
Love the modified Julian date. You’ll also find some satellite-based astronomers measuring their observations in kiloseconds (I think Hubble does it in orbits but most of the X-ray satellites use kiloseconds).
Unix time is base 10 and I’d say it is pretty widely used. Not for wristwatches but by all kinds of software on the device you’re using to read this right now.
Unix time is just the number of seconds since January 1 1970, isn’t it? How is that base 10, or any other base? If anything, you might argue it’s base 2, since computers generally store integers in binary, but the definition is base-independent afaik.
