Decimal Time: How the French Made a 10-Hour Day (2013)

Re:Decimal Time: How the French Made a 10-Hour Day (2013) by dirktheman on Tuesday June 11, 2019 @09:57AM (#20155411)

Do we really divide units of time that often, though? Only 'half an hour' and the quarters (in French at least) are used frequently. And with the decimal time system, 'quarter of an hour' would be just as meaningful as the Gregorian system, it would just signify 75 minutes instead of 45.

Keep in mind they introduced the entire metric system: distance, volume, weight, currency, etcetera, making this just one of many changes... Either way, apparently people weren't too stoked about having one day off every 10 days instead of one day off every 7 days.

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Re:Decimal Time: How the French Made a 10-Hour Day (2013) by jlarsen on Tuesday June 11, 2019 @11:41AM (#20156415)

I do. I sleep 8 hours, wake up 2 hours before work, work 8 hours, and spend 6 hours in the evening afterwards. That's 1/3, 1/12, 1/3, and 1/4 of the day, or 3.33, 0.83, 3.33, 2.5 decimal hours.

You have a good point about taking it in context with the 'decimalization' of other units of measure, but my point is really just that the article is overly generous towards decimal time, and ignores solid mathematical reasons for using 12/24/60 for time-keeping. I've never in my life needed to know when a day is "70% over", but I constantly need to subdivide my time into halves, thirds, or quarters.

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Re:Decimal Time: How the French Made a 10-Hour Day (2013) by masklinn on Wednesday June 12, 2019 @03:58AM (#20162610)

> I do. I sleep 8 hours, wake up 2 hours before work, work 8 hours, and spend 6 hours in the evening afterwards. That's 1/3, 1/12, 1/3, and 1/4 of the day

You do realise that you use these approximations because they're the integral results of easy calculations, and you'd just use slightly different durations in a decimal time framework, right?

As in, metric countries don't use a 12.7mm wrench because that's what 1/2" is. They use a 13mm wrench (and the corresponding metric nuts). And their speed limits are 110/120/130, not 112.6/120.7/128.7.

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Re:Decimal Time: How the French Made a 10-Hour Day (2013) by lifthrasiir on Wednesday June 12, 2019 @06:56AM (#20163333)

But we still have preferred numbers [1] which never map neatly to the decimal or any other radixes due to their logarithmic nature. The ratios, sharing the same logarithmic nature, ARE one of the good reasons to select radixes if the decimal were not as pervasive as now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferred_number

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Re:Decimal Time: How the French Made a 10-Hour Day (2013) by jacobolus on Wednesday June 12, 2019 @06:57PM (#20170206)

The whole point of preferred numbers is fitting a rough logarithmic scale to a positional (e.g. decimal) number system.

For an alternative let me recommend just using binary logarithms written in base 12. (So that 1 corresponds to doubling, 1.7 corresponds pretty closely to tripling, and 2.4 corresponds roughly to quintupling. i.e. 0.1 (base 12) is an equal-tempered semitone.

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