1y ago

People like to shit on the imperial measurements for its inconsistensies, but why is it we have a similarly dogshit one for measuring time?

For example,

60 seconds = 1 minute

60 minutes = 1 hour

24 hours = 1 day

7 day = 1 week

29-31 days = Month (approx.)

365/366 days = year

It's like for the imperial measurement of distance, where 1 mile = 5280 feet...

Edit: just to clarify, I'm more or less keen towards any consistent, decimal-based measurement systems like base-10 or base-12.

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96 comments

Revolutionary France had decimal time for a while, but it was not popular. People liked 24 hour days and 3600 second hours
The days in a year are the actual time it takes to orbit the Sun, but that hasn't stopped people. For financial purposes there's the ISO 8601 calendar where years have 52 or 53 weeks. There are the symmetry calendars which have even quarter years and same size months (for example, each quarter is made of a 4 week month, a five week month, another four week month) with every 7 or 6 years having a leap week
But there are so many clocks that would be obsoleted by a change to time.
- Aye, I see... another case to keeping the status quo measurements...
  
  The most convincing argument for imperial linear measure is the good size of the inch and foot, but millimetres are fine, so the loss of those friendly sizes doesn't hurt
  The hour is a comfortable size, a metric day would have a ten or hundred hour day, hours wouldn't be anything like the eight for work, eight for sleep, and eight for shitposting
  Working in seconds isn't a good workaround
  We would definitely be fucked over in any recalculation of how many metric hours we should spend working
  The past changes to week lengths were particularly disliked by the religious people who believe the weeks have been running Monday to Sunday (or Sunday to Saturday) from the beginning of time
  And again we have a status quo of two sevenths of a week being for recreation, if we had a ten day week three day weekends would be longer than our current, but would have seven continuous work days
  Also you would need names for the additional days
  
  I didn't presuppose the notion of adding additional days to the week. I merely supposed that the leftover days, that do not make a standard 7-day week on their own, should be concentrated to either the beginning or end of the year...
  
  The symmetry calendars as well as the ISO week number calendar do 364 day (52 week) years with a leap week every 6 or 5 years
  That strikes me as the best way of making the year more even, at the cost of losing the easy leap year rule (which few people know anyway)
  
  364 day /years, that's progress here...
  
  371 days in leap years!
  Also January 1 is always Monday, and you could paint the calendar on your wall because every year would have the same dates on the same days, just with an extra week added to December every several years
  The biggest problem is that it doesn't track the actual solar day, so farmers would need to use the current calendar to work out when to plant

96 comments