this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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[–] cynar 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to decimalise time for human use. If you make it useful for humans, it doesn't sync well to a day. If you make it sync to a day, the resulting units are awkward for the human mind.

Amusingly, for computers, time is decimalised! UTC is a fully metric time. It's just simpler to constantly remap to and from UTC to a user's time, than to train the user to use UTC.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

For computers, Unix time is in binary. But yes.

However, humans can get used to longer/shorter seconds, minutes and hours. Arguing the opposite is like saying the meter would never work because it doesn't have a human body relation like feet. The problem is the sheer amount of documents, equipment and SI using the 24/60/60 system, and the indivisibility of 365.24.

[–] elscallr 1 points 1 year ago

The divisibility of 60 is useful, too. It has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 (plus any combination of the above) as factors making dividing time a relatively simple operation.