[martin-adams]

Well, it's hard to change the number of solar days it takes to go around the sun one full revolution. Anything different and we'd see the seasons shift.

As for number of hours in a day. 24 is very divisible which is better than say 10. You can divide it into 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 24 without fractions.

As for 60 minutes and 60 seconds, these again are very divisible: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, and 60.

The more interesting question, should we have chosen base 12 instead of base 10. It would of course be harder to count using your fingers.

[JFFalcon]

> It would of course be harder to count using your fingers.

No necessarily. 4 fingers * 3 knuckles per finger make 12, so you can count in base-12 using only 1 hand. I think the Sumerians (?) used that * 5 fingers on the other hand to count in base-60, resulting in our base-60 time system.

[kybernetikos]

I read a good argument in favour of senary on the basis of divisibility. It has nicer properties than base 12 for that. Personally for time I don't find the convenience of its divisibility to remotely outweigh the inconvenience for addition and subtraction of using a base different to the way we count.

Whatever base we use for counting, and I can imagine arguments for senary decimal duodecimal binary or trinary, we should use the same base for counting time.