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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?

#101

Post by b0rsuk »

jakub_g wrote: post #14
yardie wrote: post #10

I read this book about the history of numbers. http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0747597162/ref=oh_details... The book author declares the Babylonians had a base 60 system. some native cultures have none at all. (well 1 and many)

Another interesting read I can recommend is this one: http://www.amazon.com/Universal-History-Numbers-Georges-Ifra...

I strongly recommend this book, it's a really fun read. It explores different ways of measuring time and items used over centuries in various cultures. It clarifies why the invention of zero was such a big deal, and why latin numerals looked like letters (same reasons as runes! They were trivial to carve on measuring sticks). Heaps of trivia! This should be a mandatory book at schools, it explains how development of mathematics affected our life, with numerous examples.

More on topic, the book makes a good point how base 60 came to be. It appeared when two natural bases merged: base 12 and base 10. Base 12 is natural, because you can conveniently count to 12 using fingers of one hand. To do that, you use the thumb. Notice that each of your remaining fingers consists of 3 segments. 4 fingers left * 3 segments = 12.

Base 60 allows cultures using bases 12 and 10 to coexist. It's the least common multiple. Naturally, it ALSO made it easier to avoid fractions.

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

#102

Post by Dylan16807 »

raldi wrote: post #90
vadman wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you are asked what date it is, do you think hardest about the month or the day? For most people it's the day, so it makes sense for it to come first.

When I ask what time it is, do you think harder about the minute or the hour?

...

The hour. Is this supposed to be a trick question? 90% of the time, if I give the hour to quarter-hour resolution then I've done a good enough job of saying what time it is. I don't even think about minutes.

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

#103

Post by digikata »

edvinbesic wrote: post #35
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…

As a European living in America I disagree. The one value of metric vs imperial is that you (for the most part) don't have to do any math when converting between units. If I have 1.73 miles, I have to do the math to figure out how many feet that is, 1.73*5280~=9134, which is not something that's easy for me to do in my head. However, 1.73 km is 1730 meters, which is way easier (at least for me, but that might be my b…

The worst aspect is the real cost of interacting with both metric and imperial systems in America. Those costs manifest themselves in things like the crash of the Mars Climate Orbiter, or closer to home, the fact that I have to have both metric and standard wrench sets at home sitting in my garage to work on a range of projects.

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

#104

Post by omegant »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #84
DanBC wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cups are nice because it promotes a "feel" for cooking rather than treating it as a science where the recipe must be followed exactly.

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.

The usefulness of cups comes from the fact that you create your own home unit depending what you need eith out needing to weight anything. It's just giving proportions, you can use a small cup for one portion size, or a big kettle for a battalion.

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

#105

Post by dragontamer »

jonesetc wrote: post #78
eric_the_read wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're absolutely right. Thing is, most of the time, when dealing with miles, I don't care how many feet it is. Any distance measured in miles is sufficiently large that its equivalent in feet is largely irrelevant. I suppose it's nice to know that 1.73 km is 1730 meters, but either way, it's a medium-long walk. If I needed to convert all the time ( I suspect this it's really only when using compound units like p…

It's really just the 3 teaspoons in a tablespoon that is annoying to remember. All of the others are just 2 or 4 of the one below it. A week and a restaurant and they start becoming quite natural.

Peter piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.

Thank goodness no one seems to use Pecks / Bushels / Dry Gallons (the dry volume versions of Pints / Quarts / Wet Gallons). The only time I ever hear of "Pecks" is in the Tongue Twister.

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

#107

Post by mxfh »

eric_the_read wrote: post #44
edvinbesic wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a European living in America I disagree. The one value of metric vs imperial is that you (for the most part) don't have to do any math when converting between units. If I have 1.73 miles, I have to do the math to figure out how many feet that is, 1.73*5280~=9134, which is not something that's easy for me to do in my head. However, 1.73 km is 1730 meters, which is way easier (at least for me, but that might be my b…

No, you're absolutely right. Thing is, most of the time, when dealing with miles, I don't care how many feet it is. Any distance measured in miles is sufficiently large that its equivalent in feet is largely irrelevant. I suppose it's nice to know that 1.73 km is 1730 meters, but either way, it's a medium-long walk. If I needed to convert all the time ( I suspect this it's really only when using compound units like p…

Even more crazy when dealing with it as an angular unit as Minute of Arc.

Historically: 1 Minute of Great Arc = 1 Nautical Mile

Great Arc = Earth circumference

1 Minute of Great Arc = Great Arc / (360 * 60)

Fun Fact:

Earth Circumference = 4 times great circle distance Pole to Equator historically defined as 10000km or 10 Million Meters (They were that serious about being decimal)

That also explains why the earth radius can still approximately be expressed as 10000km/(π/2) = 6366.2km (just 4.8km off the current mean radius defintion of 6371 km)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautical_mile#History

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

#108

Post by eric_the_read »

jonesetc wrote: post #78
eric_the_read wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're absolutely right. Thing is, most of the time, when dealing with miles, I don't care how many feet it is. Any distance measured in miles is sufficiently large that its equivalent in feet is largely irrelevant. I suppose it's nice to know that 1.73 km is 1730 meters, but either way, it's a medium-long walk. If I needed to convert all the time ( I suspect this it's really only when using compound units like p…

It's really just the 3 teaspoons in a tablespoon that is annoying to remember. All of the others are just 2 or 4 of the one below it. A week and a restaurant and they start becoming quite natural.

For some reason, I get confused between 8 ounces in a cup and 16 in a pound. But a scale will measure in grams just fine, do I tend to prefer that.

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

#109

Post by gallerytungsten »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #84
DanBC wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cups are nice because it promotes a "feel" for cooking rather than treating it as a science where the recipe must be followed exactly.

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.

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

#110

Post by dragontamer »

qbrass wrote: post #94
drostie wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is extremely inconvenient that time is base-24 and base-60 while everything else in the metric system is base-10; it leads, for example, to a difficult conversion between the "meters per second" of the physics class and the "km/hr" of the highway. One surprisingly frustrating thing is that if you view a day as a million "instants" then an instant is actually a very human number, about the human reaction time or so…

What about scaling instants up to a year? A kiloday would be 2.74 years. Which doesn't seem to mean anything in human terms.

All of the english system measurements were built on "human" terms.

A furlong is the distance a horse can plow in one day. This also gives a relationship between horsepower and furlongs. A chain is the distance you keep crops apart, and one chain by one furlong is an acre.

If you had 20 acres of land, you knew a horse could plow the land in 20 days.

The aging English system of Feet, Yards, Furlongs, Miles, Rods, Chains, Acres, Horsepower... they don't mean anything to non-farmers. So, we can replace these with a different system: the Metric system.

However, everyone uses the Point / Pica (1/72th an inch, and 1/6th an inch respectively) system for font measurement. As we are computer literate people today, font-size measured in "points" is quite important.

12-Point font (aka, font one pica in size) is a standard font size. No one cares that 12-points is really 4.233 mm. Hell, saying 4.233mm font means nothing to me.

But the day, night, moon, and sun cycles (approximated by day, month and year) is obvious to everyone. As such, an arbitrary 10-base system like Metric Time ignores the "reality" for most people... that the day, moon, and sun are related.

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