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Old 06-21-2006, 03:13 PM
Borodog Borodog is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2004
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Default 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.
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