this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
12 points (83.3% liked)

Comradeship // Freechat

2115 readers
1 users here now

Talk about whatever, respecting the rules established by Lemmygrad. Failing to comply with the rules will grant you a few warnings, insisting on breaking them will grant you a beautiful shiny banwall.

A community for comrades to chat and talk about whatever doesn't fit other communities

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] SomeGuy@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean, days of the year is fine as is because that matches seasonal cycles which is important for agriculture and the like. Ofcourse along the equator lunar calenders were historically used because they don't have different seasons but a calender used by everyone keeps things consistent for trade and the agricultural trade is still one of the most important things for humanity so it best remains a solar calendar.

As for time, 60 and 24 and in general multiples of 12 are great units because they can be easily divisible in many ways. This is why they were established as such in the first place, because Babylon had a big thing for what is called "extremely composite numbers" which are basically just a number that has more factors than any previous and equal to all subsequent ones (until the next extremely composite number) and all multiples of 12 (as far as I know) fall into this category. This means that units that are multiples of 12 both easily divide into each other (making it useful for changing between units) and easily divide into many other numbers making it easier to schedule a day as you have nice clean boundaries.

What about the 365 days/year, tho, or the 7 day/week unit translation? They don't make much sense to me...