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Why is a minute divided into 60 seconds, an hour into 60 minutes?

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Why is a minute divided into 60 seconds, an hour into 60 minutes?

#121

Post by jhanschoo »

spodek wrote: post #26

As an American with a physics background, a while ago I casually reviewed how bad our non-metric system is -- http://joshuaspodek.com/metric-system-isnt -- and found it not nearly as bad as people treat it. Among other things, when I build things it's useful to divide in half a few times, which is easier with inches and feet. And I've found no benefit to Celsius's 0 and 100 coinciding with water's state changing. I b…

You seem to have missed the convenience of secondary definitions using SI.

Using SI, 1 J = 1 N * 1 m = 1 W * 1 s.

You can't do the same with calories, miles, horsepower, and other Imperial units.

Re: Why is a minute divided into 60 seconds, an hour into 60 minutes?

#122

Post by stephenhuey »

pyre wrote: post #119
dragontamer wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fahrenheit was supposed to be 0 degrees for freezing, and 100 for body temperature. It turns out that Fahrenheit's reference thermometer was a bit... off... however.

How did it manage to be off by 32 (!) for freezing, but fairly close for body temperature? I would expect a constant (or at least same ballpark) error. I imagine it had something to do with the medium used for the thermometer?

He was trying to find a salt mixture that went through a phase change at 0 degrees:

http://antoine.frostburg.edu/chem/senese/101/solutions/faq/z...

That wasn't so reliable, and neither was using 100 for human body temperature, so when he discovered that water boiled at 212 he began calibrating with that.

Re: Why is a minute divided into 60 seconds, an hour into 60 minutes?

#123

Post by wtbob »

redial wrote: post #27
jbert wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't see the point of a duodecimal system of units when a base 10 system is much more elegant. You would never end up with a 1/64th of something in the metric system. Fractions are a hack . 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…

> I don't see the point of a duodecimal system of units when a base 10 system is much more elegant. You would never end up with a 1/64th of something in the metric system. Fractions are a hack.

How is base 10 more elegant than base 12?

1/64th might result from a binary, octal or hexadecimal system; duodecimal tens to favour things like 1/3, 1/4, 1/6, 1/9, 1/12 and so on. The elegant thing is that in duodecimal all of those are non-repeating fractions: .4, .3, .2, .14, .01 respectively. Interestingly, in duodecimal 1/5 and 1/10 are non-repeating (this is also true in binary...).

Base 12 is far more elegant than base 10, but the conversions cost make the conversion to French units look cheap--and then we'd need to convert all our units to some sort of French units mark II.

Re: Why is a minute divided into 60 seconds, an hour into 60 minutes?

#124

Post by MarkPNeyer »

dragontamer wrote: post #97
ctdonath wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"we don't need more units!" Yes, some units are useful for particular interests. Create them as they're needed and useful. Base-10 time would make more sense. Celsius at least coordinates notable values with common materials. Some units are just stupid. The lead article gives an unsatisfactory explanation of base-12/60 time (admitting near the end the reason for base-60 is unknown); trying to explain clocks to toddle…

Fahrenheit was supposed to be 0 degrees for freezing, and 100 for body temperature. It turns out that Fahrenheit's reference thermometer was a bit... off... however.

0 was the coldest temperature he could reliably reproduce - which is salt water just above the freezing point.

Re: Why is a minute divided into 60 seconds, an hour into 60 minutes?

#125

Post by noselasd »

raldi wrote: post #66
drostie wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just glad that nobody in Europe seems to use YYYY/DD/MM. This means that the format "YYYY-MM-DD" is unambiguous and the lexical ordering of dates is the same as their natural ordering[1], which is useful for sorting files in folders. [1] Except for years BCE which the scheme doesn't treat.

Indeed. And even better, Y-M-D H:M:S is monotonically decreasing.

Except at DST switch.

Re: Why is a minute divided into 60 seconds, an hour into 60 minutes?

#126

Post by gumby »

dragontamer wrote: post #97
ctdonath wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"we don't need more units!" Yes, some units are useful for particular interests. Create them as they're needed and useful. Base-10 time would make more sense. Celsius at least coordinates notable values with common materials. Some units are just stupid. The lead article gives an unsatisfactory explanation of base-12/60 time (admitting near the end the reason for base-60 is unknown); trying to explain clocks to toddle…

Fahrenheit was supposed to be 0 degrees for freezing, and 100 for body temperature. It turns out that Fahrenheit's reference thermometer was a bit... off... however.

Interestingly, Fahrenheit has 180 (212-32) degrees between freezing and boiling. Zero is set to a brine solution -- a reproducible metric about as cold as you could make. So it's not an insane system.

Re: Why is a minute divided into 60 seconds, an hour into 60 minutes?

#127

Post by Mikeb85 »

gallerytungsten wrote: post #109
Mikeb85 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's much easier and quicker to simply weigh your ingredients on a digital scale. Step into a professional kitchen and you'll never see anyone using measuring spoons or cups... Not to mention, having everything in metric and by weight allows you to easily figure out ratios of ingredients, making scaling recipes much easier and quicker.

In a professional kitchen, scales are mainly used for baking. On "the line" where food is cooked, measurements are mainly by hand and by eye.

I know how it's done, I used to be a chef, at higher end restaurants than most people will ever eat at.

Yes, during service you're not busting out scales, and a lot of things aren't precisely measured. But anything where precision is necessary, you weigh it. Where it isn't, you don't.

Good luck ever finding a cup measure, or a measuring teaspoon in a professional kitchen though...

Re: Why is a minute divided into 60 seconds, an hour into 60 minutes?

#128

Post by claudius »

redial wrote: post #27
jbert wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't see the point of a duodecimal system of units when a base 10 system is much more elegant. You would never end up with a 1/64th of something in the metric system. Fractions are a hack . 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…

> 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.

For day-to-day use, it makes sense to use a system where you can express your age (in years) in one or two digits rather than five to seven. Hence, a hexadecimal system might be preferable as a representation.

Re: Why is a minute divided into 60 seconds, an hour into 60 minutes?

#129

Post by kzrdude »

drewblay wrote: post #53
spodek wrote: post #26

As an American with a physics background, a while ago I casually reviewed how bad our non-metric system is -- http://joshuaspodek.com/metric-system-isnt -- and found it not nearly as bad as people treat it. Among other things, when I build things it's useful to divide in half a few times, which is easier with inches and feet. And I've found no benefit to Celsius's 0 and 100 coinciding with water's state changing. I b…

>And I've found no benefit to Celsius's 0 and 100 coinciding with water's state changing. I agree, I like how Fahrenheit degrees are smaller and therefore degrees in Fahrenheit are more exact.

W.r.t the Celsius scale, a comment from Celsius' country of origin in response to:

> Nobody lives their life around freezing and boiling temperatures. I live my life around 50 to 90 degrees and if you live yours around 10 to 40, I don’t see the advantage.

The natural response is of course we live close to freezing! 0 °C is the temperature that differentiates frozen lakes from open lakes, snow from rain, slippery dangerous roads from regular.

Re: Why is a minute divided into 60 seconds, an hour into 60 minutes?

#130

Post by ward »

riffraff wrote: post #76
smnrchrds wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a country with metric system. We use different units of measurement interchangeably because it's easy to do so and we have gotten used to it. I am 1.74m or 174cm tall. The bus stop is 500m or half a kilometer away from my home, etc. While nobody converts 250km to meters, when the value is closer to one, both units of measurement are equally useful and equally used. Also all physics and engineering formula a…

Something I never thought about is that there are differences between metric countries too in usage. E.g. in italy you refer to a glass of 200ml, 100 grams of pasta and two hectograms of parmigiano, while in hungary they routinely use deciliters and decagrams, which I'd never seen outside of school.

And the beauty is that you are still able to easily convert it to the type you are used to. I, as a Belgian, might blink once when you use hectogram, but it is trivial to convert it to what I am more used to (say kg or g).
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