this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
788 points (97.5% liked)
Memes
45544 readers
1752 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What about time? That's base-60, and one of the most useful measurements we have.
The base 60 part of time is the least-used part of it. Very few people care enough about exactly what minute or second it is and end up rounding it to the nearest 5 or 15 anyway.
The people who do care about having precision in seconds usually aren't converting it to minutes or hours.
The nearest 5 minutes is a 12th of an hour, the nearest 15minutes is a quarter of an hour. No one ever cares about a 10th of an hour (6minutes) i.e. the nearest minute or second so you inadvertently demonstrated my point. Also the "high precision in seconds" is also conveniently a base 60 system which also goes evenly into a full day, or week, or year despite none of those measurements being metric either.