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by johnnyanmac 145 days ago
>That would have no impact on decimalizing sub-day units:

part of it is natural. We roughly divide day and night into 2 parts, so we already need to have considerations for halves.

It seems like base 12 was chosen simply due to religion. the zodiac defined the hours at night for ancient egypt, and the Goddesses of Seasons for Greece later on.

Minutes and seconds came because we let astronomers define them based on hours and movements of the sun along a dial. The time it'd take for a dial to traverse a literal arcminute and arcsecond (which is still a thing today). Though these times are very different from today's minutes and seconds. So we have math to thank for the base 60 measurements.

1 comments

> part of it is natural. We roughly divide day and night into 2 parts, so we already need to have considerations for halves.

I forget which country did it but their historical time system counts hours as two halves from sunrise and then from sunset... That sounds a lot better than noon and midnight, to me. We could totally do

  sunrise = 0.00
  sunset = 9.99 -> 10.00
  sunrise = 19.99 -> 0.00
(For some standardized values of "sunrise" and "sunset" that don't slide around over the span of a year.)