Imperial units people, Do you sometimes get confused about time units as well? (lemmy.world)

submitted 8 months ago by MTK@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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Hi, I think in metric units, so almost everything is some form of a power of 10, like a kilogram is a 1000 grams, etc.

Sometimes I will think of an hour and half as 150 minutes before remembering that it is 90 minutes.

Does something similar happen to imperial units users? Because as far as I understand you don't have obvious patterns that would cause you to make these mistakes, right?

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[-] PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 23 points 8 months ago

I am of the opinion that time should be expressed in base 36, much more subdivideable and allows you to express a given time as a two decimal point number between 0.00 and Z.ZZ

Also as you might have noticed, the latest time in the day is literally the Zs, the clock would be telling you to go the fuck to sleep already.

[-] sanguinepar@lemmy.world 13 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Much as I think this would be pretty confusing, I love that Z.ZZ thing :-)

I'm trying to work this out though - so what we call 24 hours would now be 36 different blocks of time, 1-12 and A to Z, right? (EDIT - wrong! 0-9, not 1-12, duh...)

So a '36th' of a day (or, actually, let's give it a name... A "Frin"? That'll do) would be equivalent to 24/36 of an hour = 2/3 of an hour = 40 minutes.

However would subdivisions of a Frin also be in base 36? If so, then the 36... Terps, let's say... in a Frin, would each last slightly longer than a minute... 40/36 = 10/9 of a minute = 600/9 = 66.666666... of what we call seconds.

But of course the next subdivision would also be in base 36. So each Terp would have 36... Bops... So a Bop would last as long as a 36th of 66.666666... seconds= 66.66666/36 = 1.85185185... seconds per Bop.

36 Bops make a Terp, 36 Terps make a Frin, 36 Frins make a Day.

What a strange world that'd be!

[-] Turun@feddit.de 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Thanks for doing the math.

36 different blocks of time, 1-12 and A to Z, right?

Not 1-12, but 0-9.

Edit: now that I've spelled it out, O/0 and 1/I/L (for uppercase/lowercase letters) may be problematic.

[-] sanguinepar@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago

Not 1-12, but 0-9.

Duh, yeah of course, oops! :-)

[-] PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 3 points 8 months ago

I'd still call it hours minutes and seconds since it's the same level subdivision,

It'd follow this progression, 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z, part of the reason I like base 36 counting is because of just how many cool things just happen to come together with it, and the fact that the Alphanumeric set perfectly fits into it is one, another one I like is that "10" is a square that is also the product of two other squares.

But back to specifics, an "hour" is 40 present minutes, a "minute" is 66 and 2/3rds of a second, and a "second" is 1.85185... seconds, or 1 and 23/27ths of a second.

If I had it my way this would be paired with the Sym454 calendar to ultra-regularize everything

[-] sanguinepar@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago

Yeah, I screwed up saying 1-12, I meant 0-9 but got mixed up while thinking about the next bit!

this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024

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