21–30 of 150 posts
Short version. They don't really know. "Although it is unknown why 60 was chosen, it is notably convenient for expressing fractions, since 60 is the smallest number divisible by the first six counting numbers as well as by 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30."
Short version. They don't really know. "Although it is unknown why 60 was chosen, it is notably convenient for expressing fractions, since 60 is the smallest number divisible by the first six counting numbers as well as by 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30."
Yet another headline phrased as a question without a clear answer in the article body...
You can also find the duodecimal system in languages like English and German: ten, eleven, twelve | thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen zehn, elf, zwölf | dreizehn, vierzehn, fünfzehn, sechzehn
dix, onze, douze, treize, quatorze, quinze, seize | dix-sept, dix-huit, dix-neufwhy is the sky blue, Daddy?
I bring that up here because I've never heard even the staunchest metric proponents use kiloseconds or megaseconds or hesitate to use hours, minutes, days, and so on. I know people experimented with decimal times, especially around the French Revolution, but it didn't stick. It's funny when someone talks about the value of using base ten and then switches to base 60, base 12, and base 24 in the next sentence.
I should say that in physics experiments people used seconds only (which is where I learned that to within about a percent a year is pi times ten to the seventh).
Interesting history lesson about the Egyptian's use of the duodecimal system. I believe the last argument is understated: one big advantage of base 12 over base 10 is division by 3. This offers many ways of dividing a time interval into several sub-intervals of identical duration. For base 60, this intensifies: as mentioned in the post, 60 is the smallest number divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. This gives tremendous f…
Duodecimal counting still persists in some places in inches-per-foot and in the UK until 1971 in the "pounds, shillings and pence" old-money system. (12 pence to a shilling and 20 shillings to a pound). It's interesting to me that both duodecimal and decimal counting are recommended as being easy to calculate with. The benefits of decimal come from our using base-10 for other purposes. I guess the best of all possibl…
As an aside, I wonder how technology affects the units or systems we use. They had to rely on decimal or duodecimal systems for their units because they were doing all of their calculations manually (so did we until about 20 or so years ago btw,) but now that everyone* carries a computer on his/her pocket, what better systems could we design?
I guess binary might be an example of that. 2 values is not something that applies to everything, at least not naturally in the way the human mind works, but it is much more efficient for machines to process information, that makes sense.
After the french revolution there was a short period (3 years) when the French had decimal time. It didn't catch on because that meant the workers had 10-day workweeks instead of 7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar As a result, decimal clocks from that era are very rare and highly sought after!
It has nothing to do with how one day is divided, it's the calendar.
And later, with the calendar came a simpler version with 100 minutes in an hour, 100 seconds in a minute, and so on (Article XI of the "Décret de la Convention Nationale concernant l'Ere des Français" [1]). It was only official (and mandatory) for a few months, however [2].
Edit: the one with 1M seconds a day was only an earlier draft version that never made it into law.
[1]: http://www.gefrance.com/calrep/decrets.htm (in french)