Posted on 01/19/2018 10:32:02 AM PST by MtnClimber
Just what is a second, exactly? The question has been open to interpretation ever since the first long-case grandfather clocks began marking off seconds in the mid-17th century and introduced the concept to the world at large.
The answer, simply, is that a second is 1/60th of a minute, or 1/3600th of an hour. But that’s just pushing the question down the road a bit. After all, what’s an hour? That answer is related to the best means of time-keeping ancient civilizations had — the movement of the Earth through the heavens. The amount of time it takes for the Earth to turn once about its axis, or for it to rotate once about the sun, is fairly stable, and for much of human history, it sufficed as a way of marking the passage of time. Days, hours, minutes — they’re all just derivatives of planetary motion.
Today, however, when computers perform operations at the rate of 4 billion cycles per second, we need a better measure. The rotation of Earth, and its orbit, change slightly over time. Earth’s rotation, for example, is slowing slightly. So measuring a second based on rotation would mean that a second would get slowly longer over time. Ultimately, we couldn’t compare the second of today to the second of yesterday.
So, to pin down a truly timeless measure of a second, scientists in the 1950s devised a better clock, one based not on astronomical processes but on the movement of fundamental bits of matter — atoms — whose subtle vibrations are, for all intents and purposes, locked in for eternity. Today, one second is defined as “9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom”.
That’s a mouthful.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.discovermagazine.com ...
Easy.
The new hour would be worth 2.4 of the current hours. So you would need about 3.3 new hours worth of sleep a night. Clocks would just have the numbers 1-10 on them; no need for a.m. or p.m. anymore.
That’s not saying much. A broke clock is correct twice a day.
Don’t trust anyone that can’t count without base 100/10.
Nice builders of streets, horrible calendar makers.
So when you are measuring something and need to divide it by three, you would rather divide 73-15/64 inches by 3 instead of something like 186 cm divided by three? If so, that is very inefficient and prone to error. Do you also disagree with the way we count money?
...and I also speak binary, octal, and hex...so decimal is a piece of cake.
The use of 60 is Babylonian. It has many convenient fractions for dividing the hour: 1/2 (30 min), 1/3 (20 min), 1/4 (15 min), 1/5 (12 min), 1/6 (10 min), 1/10 (6 min), 1/12 (5 min), and 1/15 (4 min).
Yes, to both. I’m not interested in making life convenient. Cutting that board in to three pieces is organic or exact, it’s not both. 24 3/8” strong is close enough to build rocket ship and reactors, if you need more accurate than that then you have hired a machinist or hopefully a millwright. If your looking for easy, well in my world that just means lazy. Real measurements are based on organic units. The world wasn’t built by a guy who thought in units of 10. What is when worse is temps. Are people so messed up that they have to have only 100 divisions between freezing and boiling instead of the more accurate 180? Are people really wanting to be that lazy?
“Easy”
Doing the math is not the issue.
What is the actual benefit of having an new hour that is 2.4 times the old hour? IMO - it’s no better than measuring weight in terms of “stones”.
Yep we should do away with Fahrenheit and Kelvin also. Use Celsius. 180 is not that much accurate. If you want accuracy, use tenths of a Celsius degree. Unless you are doing some type of scientific experiment, do you really need to know whether it is 75 or 77 degrees? Not really. And it’s not a matter of being lazy - it is a matter of being efficient and avoiding errors. Who would not want to do that?
The benefit is that you have ten hours in a day. We use the decimal system to count - much better than base 2, base 4, base 24, base whatever. So let’s apply it to everything else.
Ok - how are you going to sell it to the average Joe?
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