People like to shit on the imperial measurements for its inconsistensies, but why is it we have a similarly dogshit one for measuring time? - eviltoast

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.

    • psud@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The most convincing argument for imperial linear measure is the good size of the inch and foot, but millimetres are fine, so the loss of those friendly sizes doesn’t hurt

      The hour is a comfortable size, a metric day would have a ten or hundred hour day, hours wouldn’t be anything like the eight for work, eight for sleep, and eight for shitposting

      Working in seconds isn’t a good workaround

      We would definitely be fucked over in any recalculation of how many metric hours we should spend working

      The past changes to week lengths were particularly disliked by the religious people who believe the weeks have been running Monday to Sunday (or Sunday to Saturday) from the beginning of time

      And again we have a status quo of two sevenths of a week being for recreation, if we had a ten day week three day weekends would be longer than our current, but would have seven continuous work days

      Also you would need names for the additional days

      • Lemmywontallowme@lemmygrad.mlOP
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        1 year ago

        I didn’t presuppose the notion of adding additional days to the week. I merely supposed that the leftover days, that do not make a standard 7-day week on their own, should be concentrated to either the beginning or end of the year…

        • psud@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          The symmetry calendars as well as the ISO week number calendar do 364 day (52 week) years with a leap week every 6 or 5 years

          That strikes me as the best way of making the year more even, at the cost of losing the easy leap year rule (which few people know anyway)

            • psud@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              371 days in leap years!

              Also January 1 is always Monday, and you could paint the calendar on your wall because every year would have the same dates on the same days, just with an extra week added to December every several years

              The biggest problem is that it doesn’t track the actual solar day, so farmers would need to use the current calendar to work out when to plant