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.
TL;DR: mostly ancient math and moon stuff.
This article suggests 60/60 came from the Sumerians who used a base-12 counting system. This and other articles note that 60 is more flexible than 100 in many ways as it’s divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.
The Babylonians invented the 360 degree circle, and so understood the sun to move about 1 degree per day.
The number of days in a week and weeks in a month is based on lunar phases (month=moon, and in Chinese the word for month is the same as moon, 月). This article says the approximately 28 day month is traced to ancient Mesopotamia with leap days used to stay consistent in the long run. As for days of the week that article also says they were based on the 7 non-fixed heavenly bodies visible to the naked eye.
Time measurements like heat, mass, length etc are arbitrary units. It is just that they are the oldest.
The Sumerians gave us our time standards and they loved base 12. So twelve hours in the day and 60 (5x12) minutes in the hour. Also 12 months in a year and 360 degrees in a circle.
The French actually tried to implement decimal time after the revolution but reverted back after 6 years or so.
Hot take: imperial units are fine for normie stuff (as in, not engineering or math or whatever)
They come in useful sizes! Feet are handier than meters and gallons are better than liters. And unit conversion between feet and miles, pounds and tons, etc. isn’t something that ever happens in day-to-day life. It sounds silly to say that a mile is 5280 feet but I’m pretty sure that ratio was decided retroactively for the sake of making the system consistent. As in, no one knows or cares about converting between the two because we already know how long a foot is and how long a mile is. Also no one uses the obscure units like gills and barleycorns.
Feet are handier than meters and gallons are better than liters.
Wrong, youre just used to them. I roughly know what a liter of something weights, usually around a kg. A gallon tho? wtf i would know? I can easily compare meters of length to my arms or height, but i need more complex divisions for feet
A foot is as long as my forearm and a little longer than a literal foot, unless you’ve got big feet. An inch is as wide as my thumb which I have used to measure things cuz it’s pretty exact. You’re right that I don’t know how much a gallon is in pounds though. It’s like… more than a bag of apples but less than a box of soda
Brazilian here. You’re just used to it because objects around you are imperial sizes. I live in a metric country so objects around me are metric sized. So I can easily eyeball metric units.
- 0.5 cm is the width of a pencil
- 2 cm is the size of a small coin (the American penny is roughly 2cm wide, BTW)
- 1 meter is roughly a long step
- 1 km is the distance you walk in roughly 20 minutes
- 1 liter is easy because in any metric country it’s the volume of a standard soda bottle
- 1 kg is the weight of a small bean, rice or sugar bag, or the weight of a soda bottle, or the weight of a good sized cabbage.
Haha yeah in case it wasn’t clear from my other comments, I don’t actually think imperial is a better system. I just don’t think it’s as bad as everyone says it is. Like you said, you understand the size of these units relative to things irl and can just intuit them.
Converting between units doesn’t come up often because like, when are you gonna need to know distances in coins? I mean it’s cool that you can easily do that in metric but I couldn’t care less that I can’t switch between feet and miles.
P.S. do beans weigh as much as cabbages in Brazil? :0
Hahahhahaj, you were victim of my bad English. I meant a bag of beans! Hahahaha.
I was just giving an example of how you could have an intuitive idea of metric units by the using objects around you if you eventually need it.
Haha no problem, your English is waaay better than my Portuguese! I understood what you meant and that’s the point I was trying to make too. I don’t need to do any conversions to figure out what a mile, gallon, etc. is because I already know, just like you already know what a kilometer and liter are.
And when you are studying financial mathematics, there 30 days months all around, or not actually each day is counted, or wait it’s only work days. For the year you can have 360 days at year, or 365 or sometimes 366. And you need to remember all that shit for tbe exams and never use it again because is the problem for the programmers to solve.
And there are some calendars (the old UK electricity EFA calendar for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_Forward_Agreement) that have months which are 4, 5 and sometimes 6 weeks (445445445445/6). An absolute nightmare.
12 hours in half a day is fine for me. 12 can be divided into halves, thirds, quarters and sixths. That’s useful for planning out a day. Time is one of the applications where I don’t have a complaint about using base 12.
Exactly why there are 12 months and 24h a day, for easy divisions.
I think the 12 months thing is more due to the cycle of the moon being about 12 per year right?
Yeah, 12.4 moon cycles a year.
The real confusion is when you count the days in a month, or year…
I’ve heard of a suggestion of using 13 months of 4 weeks each.
It adds up to 364 days.
The remainder day is a new type of annual leap day and you get the additional normal one every 4 years.
One can reach twelve joints on a 4-fingered hand with the thumb. That’s the basis of the base-12 counting system.
Americans use the imperial system, yet claim not to be imperialist. Curious 🤔
Well, the time for eath rotation isnt a constant, it will slowly decelerate and days will be longer.
Using multiples of 10 for time was considered, but was a shitty option compared to the current deal. Months should all be 30 days and then have a free week at the end of the year tho, egyptian style.
Parties during that week would be unreal
they were, in ancient egypt. They were supposed to be dangerous days, because religion wanted to keep control of the people on the days they werent tied to the regular schedule, by scaring them.
Writing this in 634.023.M3 Imperial Calendar i agree we should change it to juche
What is juche time though?
Calendar used in DPRK, basically normal gregorian but the dates are counted from 1912 as Juche era, in a combination of european system and partially Korean system.
Today date is: 19.08 Juche 112
