Adding time is fun
 

Uh, just wanted to say this publicly, I guess. There's really no point to the post, but thought I'd put it out there.

Adding Days/Hrs/Minutes together is fun, because you're working with different bases in the same problem.

Anyways, I keep track of my hours manually and this is a secret enjoyment of mine.

Take care,
Dave.

Re: Adding time is fun
 

The next time some canadian (or whatever other country) starts giving you attitude about the US refusing the metric system, tell them to change their time to a base 10 system and get back to you.

All of a sudden they understand why it seems like more hassle than it's worth.

Re: Adding time is fun
 

[ QUOTE ]
The next time some canadian (or whatever other country) starts giving you attitude about the US refusing the metric system, tell them to change their time to a base 10 system and get back to you.

All of a sudden they understand why it seems like more hassle than it's worth.

[/ QUOTE ]

It's pretty geeky, but I'll admit I'd thought about this once. The time divisions that have a physical significance are year, month, and day, and these can't be changed (you can't create a unit to make the # of days in a year a power of 10). The division of a day into hours, minutes, and seconds, however, is quite arbitrary. For the remainder of this post, read "non-metric second" as today's "second", and "metric second" as a future, base-10 "second", and realize bpm is beats per (current, non-metric) minute.

Presumably the non-metric second was based upon the heart rate of an average adult at the time (60 bpm). 60*60*24 = 86,400 non-metric seconds per day. We could instead define 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hours, and 100 seconds per minute, making the metric second = 86.4% of the non-metric second.

Incidentally, this corresponds to a heartrate of 69.444 bpm. If you look at today's less healthy adults, this is much closer to the average heart rate than 60 bpm anyway, so perhaps it's a better system of dividing time. But other than making time-based calculations a little easier, changing time units would be a huge effort with little reward.

Re: Adding time is fun
 

Wikipedia is awesome. The reason we call it a "second" is that it's short for "second minute". (The "first minute" is our 1/60th of an hour.) Turns out it's the Babylonian's fault we use 60 all the friggin time. Damn you Babylonians!

I don't know why we need to keep months like they are. It's sorta barely like the moon, I guess. Butthe fact that they change so much is totally out of line. (If some were 30 and some 31, that'd be ok. But 29? Somebody needs to be fired for that one.) I say we have 10 months, alternating 36 and 37 days.
-Sam

Re: Adding time is fun
 

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I don't know why we need to keep months like they are.

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I agree with you there, that the current months are rather silly. I just meant that the period of the moon's revolution is a fixed number of days that we can't change. You're right, it's probably simplest to divide the year into ten months and leave the lunar cycle out of the calendar.

Re: Adding time is fun
 

I think originally, the months were lunar. Up until about 1,800 years or so ago, the calendar year started in March, which makes the months SEPTember, OCTober, NOVEMber, and DECEMber sensically named. I forget what July and August were originally, but either way those months were renamed for Julius first, then Augustus later. To properly honor the leaders, whoever made the change added one extra day to each of those months. Thus, the end of the year, February, came 2 days earlier. This still does not explain other months with 31 days in them, but offers some sort of insight.

Of course, this is just an explanation, not a justification

Re: Adding time is fun
 

[ QUOTE ]
To properly honor the leaders, whoever made the change added one extra day to each of those months.

[/ QUOTE ]That's so cool! Do you have a reference for that? It might be the best example of red-tape interfering with scientific measurement I've ever heard. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]
-Sam

P.S. I'm psyched you got a 2+2 account just to teach me about months. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] Welcome to the forum.

Re: Adding time is fun
 

The chance that the second or minute were defined based on the human heartrate seems slim to me.

A much more likely reason to choose sixty for the number of seconds in a minute and minutes in an hour is that it is easily divisible into a lot of whole numbers: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30. The same goes for 24: 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12.

A 50 minute hour, for example, is only divisible by 2, 5, 10, and 25. 100 minutes would be only divisible by 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, and 50.

Re: Adding time is fun
 

[ QUOTE ]
It might be the best example of red-tape interfering with scientific measurement I've ever heard.

[/ QUOTE ]

No, it doesn't hold a candle to whatever state legislature it was that tried to set pi equal to 3.

Re: Adding time is fun
 

Your idea that 24 and 60 were chosen because of divisibility has merit. But my counterargument would be, why not divide the day into 60 hours? Why choose two different bases?

Presumably dividing the day into 216,000 units produced a unit that seemed "too small", so they chose a different divisor to make the unit seem "right." What would they be aligning with if not the human heartbeat?

Re: Adding time is fun
 

[ QUOTE ]
It might be the best example of red-tape interfering with scientific measurement I've ever heard. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]


[/ QUOTE ]

Not that it's exactly a scientific measurement - but my favourite example of that kind of interference is the official marathon distance. Changed from 26 miles to 26 miles, 385 yards for the 1908 Olympics in London so that it finished in front of the royal box, and never changed back.

Re: Adding time is fun
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
It might be the best example of red-tape interfering with scientific measurement I've ever heard. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]


[/ QUOTE ]

Not that it's exactly a scientific measurement - but my favourite example of that kind of interference is the official marathon distance. Changed from 26 miles to 26 miles, 385 yards for the 1908 Olympics in London so that it finished in front of the royal box, and never changed back.

[/ QUOTE ]

O RLY?

The choice of distance was somewhat arbitrary. The first modern Olympics in 1896 had a marathon distance of 40 km. The starting point for the 1908 Olympic marathon in London was modified so that the Royal Family could have a good view and the length happened to be 42.195 km (26 miles 385 yards). For the next Olympics in 1912, the length was changed to 40.2 km and changed again to 42.75 km for the 1920 Olympics. Of the first 7 Olympic games, there were 6 different marathon distances between 40 and 42.75 km (40 km being used twice).

A fixed distance of 42.195 km was adopted in 1921 by the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) as the official marathon distance.

Re: Adding time is fun
 

Right, it's totally arbitrary, but it's still amusing to me that the extra 385 yards/195 metres atheletes are running, to this day and age, are a result of a handful of rich people wanting the race to finish where they were sitting 100 years ago.

Re: Adding time is fun
 

It's arbitrary that it is 26 miles anyway [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]