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What is the smallest hill you would die on?
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this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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Time units are just as cursed as American units.
Conversion between days, hours, minutes and seconds is a total mess. If you never have to do anything with those numbers, you don’t need to worry about it. The moment you need to do calculations or compare devices you run into completely unnecessary problems that would have been easy to avoid. Just think of pumps and fans with units given in l/min or m^3/h.
Just pick the standard time unit and stick with it. Use prefixes to deal with big or small numbers.
This is why I kinda wish we had metric time as standard, but absolutely nobody would adopt it now unless they actually find t useful
Using seconds as the base unit of time would work in various situations, but not all. For example, kiloseconds (ks) would be handy for measuring the runtime of a movie or the length of a workday. In that regard, it’s just a matter of getting used to it. However the length of a solar day is about 86.4 ks and a year is about 31.54 Ms, which would be annoying numbers to memorize. Then again, remembering numbers like 60, 24, 52, 365 is about as annoying too, so that’s a problem for another day.
This also reminds me of something I realized recently: 24 hours is NOT the amount of time it takes for the Earth to rotate 360°. Because the Earth (assuming North is "up") rotates counterclockwise and orbits counterclockwise, each day is slightly more than 360°, probably close to 361°.
So if we assume a year is about 365.25 days, Earth actually spins 366.25 times. One rotation is just kinda "eaten" by orbiting counterclockwise.
Also known as a sidereal day. Check the animation. It’s pretty cool.
This topic also touches upon the concept of reference frames. When people say that the earth takes 24 h to make a full revolution, it’s in relation to the sun. From a universal perspective, the heliocentric reference frame moves and rotates. From the heliocentric perspective, the usual earth based reference frame also moves and rotates. Nothing is truly stationary, and measuring revolutions is impossible unless you define your frame of reference.
If you say a full revolution takes 24 h, it’s not wrong, but it’s only true in one reference frame.
And the icing on the cake? If we had 13 months, essentially every month could have the same number of days, 28.
That's not true.
The moon cycle and the sun cycle aren't in an integer ratio.
That only gives you 364 daya per year and we need just fractionally less than 365.25. You end up needing an extra day every year, and if we want to keep midnight in the middle of the night, and extra full day every four years (except when we don't). Adding those sorts of bodges onto an otherwise elegant system would be awful to work with.
Instead, I propose we build giant rocket engines pointing straight up on the equator, and adjust the Earth's orbit until one orbit around the sun takes exactly 364 days.
There is a solution
There's an easier solution. Just make New Year's Day it's own thing, not attached to any month. Then every 4 years, you'd have 2 New Year's Days. Or something.
Downside with this system is if your birthday was o. a tuesday, it'll always be a Tuesday. Having the occasional Saturday birthday is a good thing imo
I have been extolling the virtues of this for years.
A global day off on NYD and every four years two days off. Really nice!
23:59 28/13/xxxx -> 00:00 NYD -> 23:59 NYD -> 00:00 01/01/xxx(x+1)
or 23:59 28/13/xxxx -> 00:00 NYD -> 23:59 NYD -> 00:00 ENYD -> 23:59 ENYD -> 00:00 01/01/xxx(x+1)
I approve of this system. It should make calendars nice and simple for the most part. For example, salaries would be pretty simple since the period wouldn’t fluctuate wildly.
It’s just that not all things respect global holidays, so calculating energy production, water consumption and other things like that would still have to deal with weird inconsistencies. Regardless, this would still be far superior to our current train wreck of a calendar.
Best of all, that funny fraction isn’t even constant. The earth is a bit wonky.
We fix it with rockets. Circularize the orbit and set it to an integer number of days that's divisible by 28.
Now that’s the kind of thinking we need more of! Mathematical precision is the way we run things around here. Screw whatever nature had intended for orbits and such. It’s our planet.
Why not just pick a starting time, then count the seconds that have passed since then?
That addresses the calendar problem, which is another pet peeve of mine. Oh, where do I even begin. The calendar system is just the next level of curses and barrels of rotting worms.
At least time units have fixed, but inconvenient conversion multipliers. Months and years involve numbers that aren’t even constants!
Just when you thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse, someone reminds you about time zones. That’s just pure cosmic horror.
It’s a miracle we don’t trigger a nuclear meltdown every week while using a system like this.
This will either sooth you because it's so nice comparatively, or enrage you that it's not the standard everywhere already but
Ethiopians are clearly very smart people. Take that white supremacists!
Ancient Romans just loved convoluted systems, which were later inherited by the rest of Europe. The French revolution fixed most of that mess by simplifying it and getting rid of the quirky designs. They also tried to fix time units and the calendar, but that just didn’t stick for some reason. Meanwhile, Ethiopians were already using a sensible calendar that has a good way to mitigate the messy properties of Earth.