No. Base 12 and base 60 are significantly better for things that are commonly divided into halves, thirds, fourths and so on.
A “day” is 86400 seconds. Changing the length of a second is a non starter, so you’d end up saying a day doesn’t line up with a day night cycle, or something weird like “a day is 8.64 hours long”, which doesn’t feel better than 24.
We could change the definition of a second, but we’d be changing the si unit of time to mesh up with things that don’t currently have si equivalents. We’d have to redo a significant number of units.
The meter is defined in terms of the second, which is then used to define the kilogram.
It’s a base unit that all the others are built on. This wouldn’t be a tweak, it would be rebuilding the metric system. So that there would be ten hours in a day, which we would keep having to tweak because the earths rotation isn’t constant, which is why “day” isn’t an si unit in the first place.
Yeah, the civilization that decided they like base 60 is long gone, but the reason they liked it is still relevant, which is why we keep using it. Highly composite numbers are really convenient, and ten is a pretty shitty number beyond being the base we often count in.
Chad ancestors splited 1 year of 10 months of 3 décades of 10 days of 10 hours of 100 minutes of 100 seconds and so on. With 5 or 6 “sans-culotides” to handle leap years.
Also each unit of a decade is related to a fixed name: for example, “primedi” (first day of decade) is the 1st, 11th and 21th days of any month, “duodi” 2nd, 12th and 22th, “tridi” 3rd, 13th, 23th and so on until décadi fot 10th,20th and 30th and last day of the décade.
But what if we decimalised time?
No. Base 12 and base 60 are significantly better for things that are commonly divided into halves, thirds, fourths and so on.
A “day” is 86400 seconds. Changing the length of a second is a non starter, so you’d end up saying a day doesn’t line up with a day night cycle, or something weird like “a day is 8.64 hours long”, which doesn’t feel better than 24.
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We could change the definition of a second, but we’d be changing the si unit of time to mesh up with things that don’t currently have si equivalents. We’d have to redo a significant number of units.
The meter is defined in terms of the second, which is then used to define the kilogram.
It’s a base unit that all the others are built on. This wouldn’t be a tweak, it would be rebuilding the metric system. So that there would be ten hours in a day, which we would keep having to tweak because the earths rotation isn’t constant, which is why “day” isn’t an si unit in the first place.
Yeah, the civilization that decided they like base 60 is long gone, but the reason they liked it is still relevant, which is why we keep using it. Highly composite numbers are really convenient, and ten is a pretty shitty number beyond being the base we often count in.
Didn’t the French try that after the revolution?
Yep, base 10, base 10 everywhere.
Chad ancestors splited 1 year of 10 months of 3 décades of 10 days of 10 hours of 100 minutes of 100 seconds and so on. With 5 or 6 “sans-culotides” to handle leap years.
Also each unit of a decade is related to a fixed name: for example, “primedi” (first day of decade) is the 1st, 11th and 21th days of any month, “duodi” 2nd, 12th and 22th, “tridi” 3rd, 13th, 23th and so on until décadi fot 10th,20th and 30th and last day of the décade.
Jesse would approve that