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Why do we use base 60 for time and base 10 for everything else. Why has no one decided to integrate it.
(self.showerthoughts)
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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Unix time is base 10 and I’d say it is pretty widely used. Not for wristwatches but by all kinds of software on the device you’re using to read this right now.
Unix time is just the number of seconds since January 1 1970, isn't it? How is that base 10, or any other base? If anything, you might argue it's base 2, since computers generally store integers in binary, but the definition is base-independent afaik.
Yeah, it's definitely base independent. It's just that representations of it are typically in base 10 because we as humans typically use base 10, so we show it as such to read it.
Base 10 is not how it is "widely used" though. It is widely used in encoded form. It's not typically shown as a number when displayed for humans.