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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?

#141

Post by Crito »

drostie wrote: post #57
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…

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…

> We already know that when someone says "be there in five minutes" they mean 7-8; if they said "be there in five ki" they would be more accurate.

But then they would actually show up in 7-8 ki, meaning 10-12 minutes!

On the other hand, maybe this is just the cure for high-intensity fast-paced society that we need. ;)

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

#142

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.

And now that I think of it, Aussie tablespoons are 4 teaspoons (20ml), where US tablespoons are 3 (15ml)

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

#143

Post by Vecrios »

svantana wrote: post #21
treenyc wrote: post #18

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...

There is so much interesting information in the article that people really forget what they came for, the answer to the proposed title question.

Personally, I wasn't upset at all. I really liked the article although it had a deceiving title.

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

#144

Post by clarky07 »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #127
gallerytungsten wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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

In which case, it matters little if you use metric or not...

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

#145

Post by drostie »

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.

The basic answer is that (1 year) / (1 day) = 365.242199... is a pure number with no units associated to it, so there exists no set of units which can eliminate it.

The question then is, should we synchronize on the year, or on the day? The advantage of using the year is that it's a more stable unit of time; the length of a day is actually incredibly noisy and days are slowly getting longer every century as the Sun's and Moon's tidal forces deform the Earth, turning rotational energy into heat.

Unfortunately, there are a bunch of disadvantages. There are a lot of calendars in effect today, and they don't always settle on the same definition of "year" -- for that matter, there are a lot of astronomical definitions of "year" -- since the Earth's axis doesn't point at the same stars eternally, do you mean orbiting the Sun once relative to the distant stars (ignoring the axis) or do you mean coming back to the same tilt relative to the Sun so we can start the seasons over again (including the axis)? Or do you just mean a full cycle of phases of the moon, as lunar calendars do it?

The best way that I can see is to settle approximately on a day with an atomic clock; and push the question of actually trying to keep dawn at the same time each day (correcting for the slowdown of the Earth) to the time zones, which already sometimes try that in the sense of Daylight Saving Time.

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

#146

Post by Ecio78 »

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 as ward has pointed out, it is so easy to convert between them.

On the other hand I don't understand for examples why in the US they still use measures like "cup", "oz" "pint" in cooking. Should I buy a specifically sized "cup" to cook a us recipe? :)

By watching UK television it seems that even they are using kilograms, liters and also Celsius for oven temperature, and some weeks ago there was a UK famous baker talking with some US guest and saying almost the same thing.

disclaimer: I'm Italian

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

#147

Post by nmc »

jhanschoo wrote: post #117
nmc wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly enough, in French you find the hexadecimal system: dix, onze, douze, treize, quatorze, quinze, seize | dix-sept, dix-huit, dix-neuf

In Latin seventeen is septendecim, and sixteen is sedecim (fifteen is quindecim). Language drift has shortened most French words from their Latin ancestors, and the same goes for the numbers for 10-20. I presume that the early French chose to use dix-sept when their words for septendecim and sedecim started to sound the same. As for dix-huit and dix-neuf, the Romans counted down from twenty; duodeviginti (two-down-fr…

This actually goes for beyond that!

70 is sixty-ten (soixante-dix), then 71 is sixty-eleven... and so on, up to 99: four-twenty-nineteen. Indeed, 80 is 4 times 20, hence "four-twenty" (quatre-vingt, without the "s" at the end).

Interestingly enough, French-speaking Belgians use the regular forms: 70 is "septante", 80 is "octante", and 90 is "nonante".

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

#148

Post by lotsofcows »

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…

Fractions are a hack? 'Cos decimal is so intuitive!

1/3 vs 0.3' ? Much elegance!

1/3+1/3+1/3==1 vs 0.3'+0.3'+0.3'==0.9'==1 or something.

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

#149

Post by Mikeb85 »

clarky07 wrote: post #144
Mikeb85 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

>Good luck ever finding a cup measure, or a measuring teaspoon in a professional kitchen though... In which case, it matters little if you use metric or not...

> In which case, it matters little if you use metric or not...

Well, you still will measure things, most cooks will do a stint in the pastry kitchen, plus in the higher end restaurants a lot of pastry techniques transfer over to the savoury side (ie. a lot of what we think of as "molecular gastronomy").

While metric vs imperial doesn't matter for accuracy (whereas weight is more accurate than volume if you're measuring anything that's not liquid, and even with liquids it's easier to measure volume incorrectly), metric is just easier.

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

#150

Post by elspecial »

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…

"Among other things, when I build things it's useful to divide in half a few times, which is easier with inches and feet."...

If you find it easier to work with base 12 than base 10, you are not like most of the people.

"And I've found no benefit to Celsius's 0 and 100 coinciding with water's state changing."

So the fact that pure water freezes at 0 and boils at 100 is of no benefit to you?

I don't buy it.

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