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OTHER COMMS IN THE HISTORYVERSE:
Honestly the current system of time is pretty decent. Base 10 isn't inherently superior for everything.
However.
The calendar... Awful. Messy. Arbitrary. I feel like we missed the boat when the world didn't immediately adopt the International Fixed Calendar.
That (13x28+1) would be so much nicer. I'm also a fan of 12x30+5, which keeps the year divisible into quarters and gives an even better 5 day new year's bonus. It also loses the exactly 4 week months, but eh.. Keeps things interesting. Also avoids every month having a Friday the 13th.
Also solstices and equinoxes should be on the 1st of months
My gut says that would introduce a whole lot of inconsistency? It's to do with the tilt of the axis, not the daily rotation. I don't think those line up neatly enough.
Apparently they used this inside Kodak until like 1983. I have to imagine some lone hold-out at the end, everyone waiting on them to retire or die so they can all finally do things worse and all I can think is: that'll be be me someday.
Each month begins on a Sunday, and ends on a Saturday; consequently, every year begins on Sunday. Neither Year Day nor leap day are considered to be part of any week; they are preceded by a Saturday and are followed by a Sunday, making a long weekend.
That sounds both nice and an absolute hassle to try and retrofit all our timekeeping stuff to deal with.
Explanation: Celsius is preferred over Fahrenheit as a unit of measurement for temperature because it adheres to a more 'rational' and organized system, the same appeal as with the metric system. During the French Revolution, France implemented both of those things as standard... and also attempted to implement a new calendar, a new division of time, and a new epoch marker. Happy 234th YEAR OF THE REPUBLIC everyone!
Metric doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the base. Imperial units are mostly base 10 as well. It's about having a consistent scale. You can do base 60 metric if you want to, but there's not really a good reason for it when everyone's already on base 10.
So does Fahrenheit have an inconsistent scale?
No, F is just badly designed with no sensible reference points that tie into the greater system... It's like having 10k seconds in a minute, the day starts at 2:31, noon is at 8:29, and midnight at 18:52.
Which number base is more convenient depends on how you do arithmetic. In ancient times people thought mostly in integers and rational fractions, and highly composite numbers with lots of factors were convenient, as you could divide a number like, say, 60 a number of ways, getting integer results or simple fractions. Later, decimal approximations came into fashion, and factors of 10 as in the metric system became more fashionable. In the days when computers were small and slow and code needed to be hand-optimised, base-2-based representations were used (for example, graphics systems that represent angles with a full circle having 256 degrees rather than 360), though now everybody just uses double-precision floats and hopes that the accumulated error never gets big enough to affect results.
At least I don’t use AM/PM anymore.
Swatch Time was kind of neat, I wish it had taken off.
Except that they called it “Internet Time” without so much as submitting a RFC to IETF.
I thought this was about the energy drink for a second.
Because they use internet time which is 1000 beats a day.
