this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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Comradeship // Freechat

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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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[–] bouh 1 points 1 year ago

Decimal time rule!

Funnily enough, Asimov novels sometimes feature decimal time clocks.

Revolutionary calendar in the early French revolution was decimal too : 12 months of 3 weeks of 10 days. 5 or 6 days at the end of the year for vacations. And they used decimal time too.

It was wildly unpopular. I think the decimal time was removed after a couple of years. Napoleon removed the decimal time.

I have both on a app on my phone, just for fun. You can easily find apps for that.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Base ten is trash and a glorious socialist utopia wouldn't use ivory tower measurements that aren't actually useful for performing labor.

A base 12 or 60 system is much more flexible for "small" human scale measurements, with base 10 being a bit more useful for "far distances," for orders of magnitude estimation because of our base10 numbering system, but then going back to a large divisor system for galactic distances. For example a parsec is 648000/pi astronomical units, which isn't metric in anyway shape or form, but is extremely useful for astronomical calculations.

We have a similar system to that today in America. Skilled Tradesmen will use imperial/base 12 systems for manual work. i.e. Construction, carpentry, etc. as the ability to use thirds and quarters of a unit without relying on fractions and having clearly defined lines on a measuring stick that have those thirds/quarters, is more useful then an arbitrary base 10 measurement that only has 2 divisors. The reason america still uses the "standard" system is that it is useful, not because of "boomers" or whatever.

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