For example,

60 seconds = 1 minute

60 minutes = 1 hour

24 hours = 1 day

7 day = 1 week

29-31 days = Month (approx.)

365/366 days = year

It’s like for the imperial measurement of distance, where 1 mile = 5280 feet…

Edit: just to clarify, I’m more or less keen towards any consistent, decimal-based measurement systems like base-10 or base-12.

  • wrath-sedan
    link
    fedilink
    34
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]OP
      link
      fedilink
      0
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      Tl;dr: The Middle East made it.

      Edit: Oops, I jumped to conclusions a bit… but I wasn’t suggesting a political agenda towards it… just to clarify…

  • Pons_Aelius
    link
    fedilink
    18
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    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.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    1711 months ago

    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.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    1711 months ago

    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.

      • pewter
        link
        111 months ago

        I’ve heard of a suggestion of using 13 months of 4 weeks each.

        It adds up to 364 days.

        The remainder day is a new type of annual leap day and you get the additional normal one every 4 years.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      111 months ago

      One can reach twelve joints on a 4-fingered hand with the thumb. That’s the basis of the base-12 counting system.

  • Trudge [Comrade]
    link
    fedilink
    14
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]OP
      link
      fedilink
      7
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      Wait, where does Caesar fit into the naming of calendar months?

      Edit: I see, Julius Caesar for July. Now, I see fully your point

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          1011 months ago

          And beyond that September, October, November and December are just, essentially, Latin words for 7, 8, 9, 10. Which of course raises the obvious question/observation of “why the fuck are months 9-12 given names correlating to 7-10?” And the answer is… the above two months were shoved in. For reasons. Why not put them at the end? “Because fuck you, that’s why!” (There’s probably some reason and I don’t actually care. I’ve officially thought too much about Rome and Latin for the day)

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            411 months ago

            https://www.almanac.com/how-did-months-get-their-names

            March (Martius) was named for Mars, the god of war, because this was the month when active military campaigns resumed. May (Maius) and June (Junius) were also named for goddesses: Maia and Juno. April (Aprilis) is thought to stem from the Latin aperio, meaning “to open”—a reference to the opening buds of springtime. The rest of the months were numbered; their original names in Latin meant the fifth (Quintilis), sixth (Sextilis), seventh (September), eighth (October), ninth (November), and tenth (December) month.

            Eventually, January (Januarius) and February (Februarius) were added to the end of the year, giving all 12 months proper names. January was named after Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and transitions. February’s name is believed to stem from Februa, an ancient festival dedicated to ritual springtime cleaning and washing.

            Julian Calendar Updates When Julius Caesar became Pontifex Maximus, he reformed the Roman calendar so that the 12 months were based on Earth’s revolutions around the Sun. It was a solar calendar, as we have today. January and February were moved to the front of the year, and leap years were introduced to keep the calendar year lined up with the solar year.

            The winter months (January and February) remained a time of reflection, peace, new beginnings, and purification. After Caesar’s death, the month Quintilis was renamed July in honor of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, and later, Sextilis was renamed August in honor of Roman Emperor Augustus in 8 BC.

            Of course, all the renaming and reorganizing meant that some of the months’ names no longer agreed with their position in the calendar (September to December, for example). Later emperors tried to name various months after themselves, but those changes did not outlive them!

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            411 months ago

            It’s actually January and February that were added in. Before that, there was just this gap during the winter when they didn’t bother counting the passage of days until the start of spring was declared, in March. That’s also why February is the short month, as it was the last added and just used up the remaining days.

            • 新星 [he/him/CPC bot]
              link
              fedilink
              English
              411 months ago

              Worth emphasizing that the year began in March – December means the 10th month because it was the 10th month, even after January/February were added

            • @[email protected]
              link
              fedilink
              211 months ago

              There were also superstitions about February - due to its role as a time for ritual purification and cleansing, that made them reticent to add days to it, so it stayed at the bare 28

  • commiespammer
    link
    fedilink
    12
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    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.

    • @psud
      link
      111 months ago

      You could easily mess with the year, making a common year exactly 52 weeks (364 days) and using a leap week

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    1111 months ago

    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.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        110 months ago

        they were, in ancient egypt. They were supposed to be dangerous days, because religion wanted to keep control of the people on the days they werent tied to the regular schedule, by scaring them.

  • @psud
    link
    10
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    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.

      • @psud
        link
        2
        edit-2
        11 months ago

        The most convincing argument for imperial linear measure is the good size of the inch and foot, but millimetres are fine, so the loss of those friendly sizes doesn’t hurt

        The hour is a comfortable size, a metric day would have a ten or hundred hour day, hours wouldn’t be anything like the eight for work, eight for sleep, and eight for shitposting

        Working in seconds isn’t a good workaround

        We would definitely be fucked over in any recalculation of how many metric hours we should spend working

        The past changes to week lengths were particularly disliked by the religious people who believe the weeks have been running Monday to Sunday (or Sunday to Saturday) from the beginning of time

        And again we have a status quo of two sevenths of a week being for recreation, if we had a ten day week three day weekends would be longer than our current, but would have seven continuous work days

        Also you would need names for the additional days

        • @[email protected]OP
          link
          fedilink
          111 months ago

          I didn’t presuppose the notion of adding additional days to the week. I merely supposed that the leftover days, that do not make a standard 7-day week on their own, should be concentrated to either the beginning or end of the year…

          • @psud
            link
            211 months ago

            The symmetry calendars as well as the ISO week number calendar do 364 day (52 week) years with a leap week every 6 or 5 years

            That strikes me as the best way of making the year more even, at the cost of losing the easy leap year rule (which few people know anyway)

              • @psud
                link
                111 months ago

                371 days in leap years!

                Also January 1 is always Monday, and you could paint the calendar on your wall because every year would have the same dates on the same days, just with an extra week added to December every several years

                The biggest problem is that it doesn’t track the actual solar day, so farmers would need to use the current calendar to work out when to plant

  • @TootSweet
    link
    English
    811 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]OP
      link
      fedilink
      411 months ago

      I can see your point in preserving seconds.

      I was just wondering why the measurement here isn’t as decimal-based, compared to others…

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        511 months ago

        They are. The second is the only unit of time in the metric system. All of the regular SI prefixes apply. They just don’t fit the earth day perfectly, and nothing will, nor should they. Being earth centric is not good science.

      • @TootSweet
        link
        English
        211 months ago

        There are benefits to numbers other than powers of 10 that decimal doesn’t really give us.

        A lot of measurements we deal with are based on 12 (hours on a 12-hour clock, months in the year, inches in a foot), 24 (hours in a day), 60 (minutes in an hour, seconds in a minute), 360 (Degrees in a full circle, seconds in an hour, and at one point, the number of days in a year, before we started to realize that after enough years passed, the month you used to think of as winter started being warmer.)

        And one thing all of those have in common is divisibility by 3.

        1000 is divisible by 2 and by 5, but not by any other prime number.

        12 is divisible by 2 and 3, and all the other examples I gave above are multiples of 12, so they’re also divisible.

        Dealing with half of something is pretty straightforward. Dealing with a third of something, also not difficult to visualize. But a fifth of something requires a little more cognitive load. (Think about trying to evenly divide a pie in 3rds vs in 5ths.) Even a 6th is probably easier to deal with than a 5th, and that’s largely because it 6’s prime factors are smaller than 5.

        With the metric system, everything’s divisible by 2 and 5. 100’s prime factors are 2, 2, 5, and 5. 1000’s are 2, 2, 2, 5, 5, and 5. A third of a metre is approximately (but not exactly) 333.33 millimeters. A third of a foot is exactly 4 inches. The metric system also doesn’t make it easy to evenly divide by 6.

        We could make a whole system of measurements based on powers of 12, I suppose. But our dominant number system has been based on powers of 10 for a long time.

        Maybe even better would be to use powers of 30 because it’s divisible by 2, 3, and, 5 (and 6). But it’s not evenly divisible by 4! So maybe one based on 60 which is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

        Well, now we’ve ended up with a big part of the reason why there are 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour. In fact, historically, there were cultures which used base 60 as their number system. For instance Babylonian mathematics.

        Maybe the really best way to go about fixing our various ways of measuring things is to abandon base 10 in favor of base 60 and then invent a “sexagesimal metric” system.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    7
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]OP
      link
      fedilink
      311 months ago

      Aren’t Juche years basically the standard measurement of years in the Gregorian Calendar, except it is equal to current year - 1948 (Creation of DPRK)?

      • 新星 [he/him/CPC bot]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        2
        edit-2
        11 months ago

        Yeah but Juche years are better since you get to time travel to (Juche) 112 with all your fancy technology

        It’s actually Juche 1 = Gregorian 1912 (Kim Il Snug’s birth year) BTW

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    511 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]OP
      link
      fedilink
      211 months ago

      What about the 365 days/year, tho, or the 7 day/week unit translation? They don’t make much sense to me…

      • @bouh
        link
        311 months ago

        Basically it comes from the roman calendar. Which is based on the sun and the moon cycles.

        A year is a full turn around the sun. It takes 365,25 days. So 365 days, and 1 more once every four years.

        A month is based on the moon revolution around the earth, which is 29,5 days.

        But in the past they weren’t as good to measure these times, so they used more approximative calendars that they would fix by adding days to synchronise the calendar on the moon or year. Roman for example had the month always start on a full moon.

        For the months, you had then some emperors who wanted their month to get more days. I think the 7 days week comes from Christians, the bible talk about it. 7 days allows 4 weeks in one moon cycle. Roman used 10 days weeks, so 3 weeks in a moon cycle. Both are inaccurate, so there were days added or removed to synchronise regularly.

        Julius Caesar basically made the calendar we have now because the old one was a mess. Then, in the XVIth century we got the gregorian calendar, which is almost the same but fix some problem the old one had.