The french:
Goddamn metric time
Even the French figured out that decimalized time was stupid after a couple of years.
Which has added credence to the old saying that “The French follow no one. And no one follows the French.”
I kinda want to try it out lol
Why is it stupid beyond, “nobody else uses it”?
Well, beyond the sheer social resistance to the idea. Turns out everyone needs to agree it’s a great idea and almost no one did. Evidently humans are wired to the base12 time format far better.
The attempt at switching to base10 time quickly fell apart when people started notice that the the “time markers” were starting to drift. And at some point they finally figured out that what we call “noon” was going drift rather quickly to not happening until evening and therefore Monday was going to move to a different spot also. This is a very bad thing. Because any kind of calendaring system needs to be as consistent as possible. Noon must happen at the same point in the day every day or as close to it as it it can mathematically get. If it drifts to fast and far, then it’s a worthless marker for time. And decimal time has that problem in spades.
Now, no calendar system is perfect because the orbits of the planets in our solar system isn’t perfectly consistent. Sometimes the orbit of earth is a tiny bit faster or sometimes it’s a tiny bit slower. So we strive to get a close as we can but we still need to make adjustments. Turns out, all that math is really bloody hard.
??? That’s not how it worked at all.
They still had the same length of time per day; 24 hours was equal to 10 french hour, each french hour was 100 french minutes, and each french minute was 100 french seconds. So noon arrived at 5 every day.
Why the ‘IIII’ insted of ‘IV’?
Prevents confusion between the four and the six: III, IV, V, VI, when the watch is not held perfectly vertically for viewing.
Actually very common in watches with roman numbers iirc
i’m pretty sure that IV is a modern typographic thing
I’ve also heard that, because in Latin IV is the beginning of “IVPPITER” (Jupiter), there’s a theory that people avoided using “IV” as to not “disrespect” the god’s name. 🤷♀️
Also, on a 12 hour clock, 3 sets of four looks clean af I guess, e.g.:
- I, II, III, IIII
- V, VI, VII, VIII
- IX, X, XI, XII
May as well just go with VIIII then. Or maybe 9.
IIIIIIIII
Since the IIII usage is common in the Middle Ages and even into the Early Modern Period, when nobody believed in Jupiter, that is obviously just something somebody made up.
It could have also started from that and continued on despite people not knowing the reason, no? I do agree that it’s quite silly and unlikely, though.
Why does everything that comes from Switzerland always seem to be owned by Swatch? Do they not have any other brands there?
Swatch is the largest watch company in the world and you’ll be surprised which brands are owned by them. Omega for example
Now I really want a .beats watch. That’s so retro cool.
If you’re ok with a screwdriver, you can mod a Casio F91-W and add a .beat watchface https://www.sensorwatch.net/docs/watchfaces/clock/#beat-time
Gift from ancient Mesopotamia. Mesopotamians love 12 & base 60. They also liked 7. Those numbers recur in their mythology.
Americans have a weird fixation with 💯. Where Americans might use percentages, I’ve seen Japanese plot values in [0, 1] (ie, pure proportions).
It’s not about mythology or Mesopotamia. Those numbers are called highly composite numbers (HCN) and superior highly composite numbers (SHCN) and are great for doing calculations (especially divisions) in your head because they have a lot of factors. That’s why they were used everywhere before calculators were a thing.
That’s probably why Mesopotamians chose them: the convention traces back to them. Measuring angles in degrees also traces back to them.
Still, those numbers/units are quite arbitrary & introduce unnecessary conversions. Radians are dimensionless & require no conversion. Converting seconds to a more natural unit like days involves reintroducing those highly composite numbers that fit better in base-60 than the base-10 system we now use.
Sounds like a Michael McIntyre bit
At least our hours are the same length regardless of latitude now, so let’s be grateful for that.
oh god, thanks for making me imagine something terrible
If the day started at 1:00 then by the second hour you would be at 2:00, even though only 1 hour has passed. Effectively the day starts at 0. In fact in 24-hour time that is how it’s depicted, 00:00 with midday being depicted as 12:00, so it isn’t confusing
In the roman empire the day/night cycle was divided into 24 segments. 12 for the day and 12 for the night which also meant a day hour in summer was longer than the night hour.
If the day started at 1:00 then by the second hour you would be at 2:00, even though only 1 hour has passed.
When the second day of the month starts, the day of the month is 2, even though only 1 day has passed.
I mean, numerically it does make sense to start at zero but it doesn’t seem to correspond to the way people think and talk.
Feel free to take it up with the Romans. It’s their stupid calendar system.
I also take issue with there being 7 days in a week rather than 10, it’s just messy.
Which is also why I hate that our calendar starts at year 1.
As a programmer I’d rather it start at 0
Yeah but now you can’t enjoy the delights of python
Careful, there are Americans around
Americans love units based on 12
“At least we’re not mixing in letters”
I see
IIIIin there and I cry a little on the inside.
This has become a standard on analog clocks and watches (presumably to avoid confusion with VI), but for some reason IX and XI (for 9 and 11 respectively) is fine.
Personally I’d like to see IX and IIIIIIIIIII.
ETA: I guess IX and XI are ‘fine’ because they’re not upside down, but my point still stands.
Don’t listen to OP’s bullshit.
They work for big clock. They’re trying to convince you 12 hour clock is useless so they can sell you double the clock.
Wouldn’t you need half the clock if it had twice the numbers?
Look at this guy, only one clock. I keep two analog clocks in each room, the AM 12-11, and PM 12-11. The way it was meant to be.
Hour hand -> hour = n
Minute hand -> minute = n * 5
It makes sense, there’s just an algorithm attached to each pointer.Hour -> 3 = 3
Minute -> 3 = 3 * 5 = 15The first clocks didn’t have a minute hand though.
Sundials.
Now if you want to get really pissed, the magnetic North Pole is actually the South Pole of the Earth’s magnetic field. We call it the North Pole because the north side of a magnet points to it.
Don’t tell them about positive/negative electron movement.
Where am I?? 🫨🌀😵💫
Actually, we call it the North Pole because we already had a concept of North from the North Star. Then we invented magnets and decided that the part that points North is the North side of a magnet (despite North Pole being magnetic south).
Also see this: https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b923ca
It amazingly explains all the insanities for handling dates and times.
Don’t forget about π
τ > π
τ = 2π, but yeah that’s another letter that we can’t help but get involved
IIRC they counted the bones in their fingers using their thumb and that gives 12. The first sundial was around the equator and there is always light for half a day, so half a day becomes 12 hours.
To count large numbers often one hand was used to count using 5 fingers and the other to count the bones, so you get 5x12 for 60 minutes.
AIUI there was an aspect in the divisibility of the numbers being convenient.
12 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6. 60 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30.
10 is divisible by 2 and 5. 100 is divisible by 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, and 50.
If you want to minimize dealing with fractions, 12 and 60 are far more convenient than 10 and 100.
That’s an interesting thought, but I believe it to simply be a coincidence.
The base 12 counting being based on counting the division of your fingers is historically verified, but if the division aspect was so compelling to them you’d expect it to carry forward into their writing system.
By the time you get cuneiform math though, they actually go back to base 10.
https://images.app.goo.gl/9GR6VEiT7GHYF3KaA
As you can see base 12 is not in the written system, or for written mathematics. It just was convenient for counting on their hands.
They used mixes of base 10/base 12 and base 60.
Base 10 would be used go determine the symbols for a specific “digit” in base 60.
So similar to how our 13 is 1 ten and 3 ones, their 13 was the symbol for 10 then 3 symbols for 1. 13 = 𒌋𒁹𒁹𒁹 But 73 would be written 𒁹 𒌋𒁹𒁹𒁹
Which would be interpreted as 1 sixty and 13 ones, or 60 + 13
I’ma start a revolution where we use duodecimal metric for everything, including time.
That’s how we ended up with 12 months of varying length in a year and it’s a mess.
It’s a problem no matter how you divide the year
That’s why I propose changing the orbit of the earth, too
13 months of 4 weeks + new year’s day (+leap day) actually fits perfectly.
I wouldn’t call having an unassigned remainder “perfectly”. And always, leap day fucking shit up lol
Not if you divide by 5. It gets you 73 days each.
Ok, but now subdivide the 73 day month-analogs into week-analogs.
I can see calling the month analogs “seasons”, but 73 is a prime number so you’re boned. We need subdivisions smaller than that for practical purposes
German has a word for it: historisch gewachsen
In Ethiopia they still use the tradition time where the day starts at the 1:00 which is our 6am. Then 12:00 is our 6PM, and it starts over. So they have 2 cycles of 12 hours, one for daytime, and one for night time. And it felt somewhat more intuitively in conversation too.
I think I remember watching a YouTube video about different systems. There are more exotic ones beyond the 12h/24h binary
Sure, but I guess either only used in particular environments (e.g. religious settings) or in pretty disconnected places from the rest of the world.
