In a sane world, we’d be base 10. I don’t think it’ll happen.
Hey, what’s wrong with base RNG? Sure keeps things interesting.
Base 6 would be better and maybe even base 12 could be too. Luckily the United States customary units already use a lot of numbers with more useful prime factorization than 10 like 4 and 3 and even 120.
Babylonians were obsessed with divisibility, so they went with a base 60 system. That’s why we still have 60 minutes 60 and seconds. Also the 360 degrees of a circle fits that ideology, because 6*60=360.
Was it really base-60? Like “10” in Babylonian was 60 and they had 59 individual symbols for the digits lower than that? If so, that’s a lot of digits to learn.
To represent a number using Babylonian Cuneiform Numbers, you choose a symbol to represent 10 (
(2*2*2)+2) and a symbol to represent 1, and you create them combined in groups that are summed together to represent numbers up to 59 (10+10+10+10+10+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1). When one group is to the left of another, the group to the left represents a number that is 60 times greater than it would if the group to its right hadn’t been created. A symbol representing a group that sums to 0 was sometimes used.The Numberphile channel created videos on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RR3zzQP3bII https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9m2jck1f90
Interesting, thanks, I’ll watch the video.
It’s always funny to me how worked up people get about the topic. Then when you discuss changing how we measure time, people freak out even more.
Oh, time units are such a mess. Ask anyone who has to design a system with a specific pump in it. You’ve calculated that you need about 345 ml/s, but the pump manufacturer gives you different options l/min, l/h, m^3/h etc.
The French tried to fix the time units too, but apparently the time just wasn’t right for something that radical.
Decimal time was used for longer workweeks like 7/10, which is counter-productive both in the literal sense and popularity-wise. I wouldn’t adopt a time system that robs me of break days and for all I know 4-day workweek is actually more productive societally.
On top of that, the decimal time system didn’t even stick to a consistent multiplier of 1000. This means that it wasn’t neatly compatible with prefixes, but it was a nice try.
I think metric time isn’t really applicable above hours, since the moon, earth and sun are too important to leave out.
Yeah, there are lots of inconvenient things about time, earth, moon and the sun. If you pick a certain length of time, and use consistent multipliers, it’s not going to align with all of these things. Oh, and even if it somehow did, it wouldn’t work forever, because these things aren’t even constant. They drift over the centuries and millennia, so if you memorize that a day is exactly 86400 s, it’s not going to be like that forever.
Also, the Gregorian calendar is very broken, but at least it’s not as broken as the calendars that came before it. It tries to use mathematically pleasing even numbers as much as possible, but that’s just not compatible with reality. Just look up leap days and leap seconds to see what I mean.
The Islamic calendar is an interesting one, because it simply accepts the fact that the solar system is a bit random and wobbly, so the length of a month varies accordingly. It’s not super precise, which is a problem, but at least it’s easy to use even if you can’t do complicated calculations, models and predictions. It also places a lot of importance on the moon, which is nice and practical in many ways, but it doesn’t align with the seasons at all.
If I could make a new calendar, I would just forget about the concept of months, and count the days since the winter solstice. That way, day 123 would be the same every year, and the calendar would be good for tracking season. At the end of the year you may or may not have a leap day depending on random wobbles. If the moon is important to your activities, then you could use any of the many lunar calendars people have already invented.
I feel like the time thing is less an issue than other systems because it’s better adopted across the world. Part of where metrication came from is that each country would have their own standard for how long a foot or how big a gallon was, but the months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds are pretty well agreed these days. Most units can be selected arbitrarily without changing much about their usefulness, but with time you want to stick as close as possible to solar days, number of solar days per year, and maybe line up with some seasons/solstices/equinoxes. Changing the sub-divisions of the day also means we’d probably want to re-draw time zones, so we’d want a subdivision that can be reasonably easily divided by something close to 24. I guess you could have a 10 hour day and each hour be 100 minutes, or some such and move to 20 or 25 time zones to keep relatively consistent. A 10 day week doesn’t divide evenly into a year though. The divisors of 365 are 73 and 5, so I guess you could do 10 and have one of the weeks split somewhere, but then you still have to deal with the occasional leap year.
Then there’s the consistency issue, the length of a day varies over time, so regardless of the subdivisions we choose, high precision measurements are going to need to account for that to keep our time in line with the solar day.
You’re definitely right that people can agree on the length of day and year regardless of where they live. This way, there’s no urgent need to change that part of the system.
Since 365ish isn’t a number you can neatly divide with anything, I suggest we just pick some number you like, and then add a leap day when needed. So, let’s say you want to divide the year into 10 decimal months, so let’s call them “donths”. Each donth has exactly 36 days, which means that at the end of the year you still have 5ish days left. It’s not exactly 5, because astrnomy, but don’t worry about it. Then you’ll just lump all the remaining bonus days into an extra donth and you’re done. The length of the first 10 donths is always constant and the length of the leftover extra donth at the end of the year is whatever it happens to be. You could make those days a national holiday when people just wait for the new year to start or whatever.
Years and days are fundamental units that you’re kind of stuck with because they’re so fundamental to life on earth. But, even though seconds are SI units, there’s nothing about them that’s special. They’re just a holdover from dividing a day into 24 units, then those units further subdivided by 60 and then another 60.
What’s interesting is that the metric system was invented at a time when being able to convert between units in a way that’s easy for the human brain was important because technology was advanced enough that things could be measured precisely, but wasn’t advanced enough that computers could do the conversion for you.
What’s interesting is that now, before Metric has even caught on worldwide, we’re already past the point of needing easy conversions. The Metric System was important when it was invented because technology had advanced to a point where precision measurement was possible and important, but computers didn’t yet exist. So, converting between miles per hour and feed per second was a pain. But, these days everyone has a smart phone, smart watch, voice assistant, etc. nearby that can easily do the most gnarly conversions with ease.
I’d still like metric time units, but tradition might win over logic now that Apple Watches are so common.
Hi machinist here, metric is better metric conversions are a lot easier than imperial
The US switched to metric during the Carter administration
Are you referring to the Metric Conversion act of 1975? Carter became president in 1977.
