The Earth spins around the Sun every 365 days to give us the year while the Earth rotates around itself every 24 hours to give us the days and 7 days mark a week and 24 hours make a day and 60 minutes make an hour and 60 seconds make a minute.
At some point between us humans climbing down from the tree's and today, some bright spark decided on the measurement that we have for time and we have just carried on using the clunky system that we have to add days to every time the date is divisible by 4 so that it doesn't all go horribly wrong.
We realised at some point in the 70s that the system we were using for measurement was unnecessarily complicated and introduced the metric system so why have we not done the same with time and decimalised it?
Using the system already used by computers, a decimal day would be divided into 10 equal parts and a decimal year would split the year into 10 equal parts which is much simpler to understand than all this imperial nonsense although it would mean losing two months. I opt for July and August, too damned warm for my fair skin.
The Romans used a 10 month calendar, the Ancient Egyptian calendar had a week as 10 days and the French used the same system right up until Napoleon stuck his big nose into things and abolished it.
This is the digital age and everything from your alarm clock to your computer is using decimal time so why are we persisting with such outdated methods when it comes to marking how long it takes for the Earth to go around?
Of course it would mean losing songs such as 1.0 hours to Tulsa, .03 Minutes to Midnight and Working 9.0 to 17.0 but i think it's worth it.
4 comments:
Lucy,
computers use binary (base 2), octal (base 8), and hexadecimal (base 16)...
a byte is 8 bits, a word is 4 bytes, a full word is 8 bytes, a double word is 16 bytes...
q
This could be one of those times when i have not understood what i heard but what i thought i heard was that computers use decimal when measuring time.
To be fair i only hooked onto it because i thought it would be clever to change the names of songs with times in their titles to decimal but turned out i could only think of 3.
When we use a number we generally assume base 10 (digits are 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9). The increments are ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, ten thousands, etc. (multiply by 10 each order of magnitude)
Example: 7 means 7 ones
Example: 32 means 3 tens and 2 ones
Example: 129 means 1 hundred, 2 tens, and 9 ones
Hexadecimal changes things a bit (digits are 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D,E,F). The increments are ones, sixteens, two-hundred-fifty-six, four-thousand-ninety-six, etc. (multiply by 16 each order of magnitude)
Example: 7x means 7 ones (same as base 10)
Example: Bx means 11 ones
Example: 11x means 1 sixteen, and 1 one (17 in base 10)
Example: 1Bx means 1 sixteen and 11 ones (27 in base 10)
Example: 101x means 1 two-hundred-fifty-six, no sixteens and 1 one (257 in base 10)
Thus
“99 red balloons” becomes “63x red balloons”, or assuming base 16 it becomes “69 red balloons”
“96 tears” becomes “60 tears”
“Party like it is 1999” becomes “Party like it is 7CF”
“I can’t drive 55” becomes “I can’t drive 37”
“Working 9 to 5” becomes “Working 9 to 5”
Yeah, it doesn’t work…
q
Thank you for explaining it all q. Your clever songs titles were much better than mine which of course means they will 'accidentally' be deleted and mysteriously reappear in the original post with the explanation that they were there all along but you must have missed them.
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