|
|
|
|
|
|
by jwecker
4330 days ago
|
|
|
You mean similar to how stock prices used to be demarcated or how foreign exchanges use 'pip' values? ;-) (http://www.cringely.com/2012/09/05/ticked-off-how-stock-mark...) Seriously though good question. First though it made me realize that you never see prices in thirds of a dollar- as if everyone avoids it and have simply gotten used to avoiding it. I can't imagine a situation where ease of dividing by three for money actually adds any efficiency. Similarly, while I do see the value in dividing the day into 24 hours, I certainly wouldn't advocate a unit that's defined as one 60th of a second (even though it has even more prime factors than 12 ;) I concede that the use-cases where having more prime factors and therefore easy non-decimal division are few and far between. I guess what surprised me when doing construction was that there was a very rational reason for a foot being 12 inches rather than 10- that it's not simply a relic of the fact that a human foot seems to be about 12 thumbs long- some arbitrary number accidentally ingrained in some cultures. And as illustrated by the fact that stocks were eventually decimalized and then made to trade at penny-granularity, computers and the fact that we don't do a lot of division in our heads or on paper anymore will probably eventually erase most remaining efficiencies. |
|
|
Veering sharply offtopic, seconds are actually called seconds because they're "second order minutes". So, just as a minute is 1/60 of an hour, a second-order minute is 1/60 of 1/60 of an hour.
In the past, people have indeed used "thirds" (1/60 of a second) and in the 13th century, Roger Bacon went as far as using "fourths" (1/3600 of a second)!