On 04/06/2011 03:19 PM, Jim Lux wrote:
On 4/5/11 7:38 PM, Greg Broburg wrote:
The number 6 and derivations thereof were presented
to the world of science from the numerologists. Time
was arranged as parts of a day, 24 hours 60 minutes
per hour 60 seconds per minute. Very tenuous at best.
I propose that we consider 100 seconds in a minute,
100 minutes in an hour, and 10 hours in a day. People
could handle that with an IPhone ap, right?
Then there's the Babylonians, who used a number system where 60 was
important. 60 has lots of factors, which makes dividing things up into
equal sized chunks easy. (as my daughter said when much younger, and
doing fractions in math, "curse those Babylonians").
The fact that a year is about 360 days long (6*60) also feeds into it.
You really needed the invention and adoption of place value for a
decimalized system to work well, and that didn't come along til around
700-800 C.E., I think. By then, the fractional measurement approach and
customary units were well entrenched. Sure, although King John
standardized the yard and inch and pound and such in the 1200s, I'm sure
that the units themselves were already in use for a long time. Currency
is also done in a fractional system (pieces o'eight, 12pence/shilling
with ha'pennies to boot)
The French *did* have a decimalized calendar (and time, too, I think).
You can't do much about the the number of days per year, and a 400 day
calender would be useless since it would be hard to pin things which
depends on seasons to a fixed date, month or so...
Another annoying detail is that the SI second takes about 86400 seconds
for a twist around the axis such that the closest star is at the same
place in the sky again. If you want to get the closes decimal number it
would be 100000 new seconds and such a second would require
86400 * 9192631770 / 100000 = 864 * 919263177 / 100 = 7942433849.28
cycles per new second of a caesium reference. Not a particular "neat"
number, but in reality it would not be too strange when considering how
a caesium clock actually works.
Going full decimal is not practical. I does not support it.
Cheers,
Magnus
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