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by JAlexoid 1106 days ago
To this day, living in US for 8 years, I have to stop and think if I need to translate minutes and seconds to American.
1 comments

There's a handy rule of thumb for this: is the number of seconds per minute (60 aka 2*2*3*5) a weird, random-sounding number that's way too easy to make clean subdivisions out of[0], rather than a nice, math-hostile power of ten? Then it's probably already in American units, unless it's British.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_composite_number

Robespierre wanted to saddle us with metric time too, you know.
The 60 is from Sumer.
It's in the context of:

> I have to stop and think if I need to translate [] to American.

and I assume (reasonably though not certainly) that the commentor is not Sumerian.