The minute ("small part") and second ("even smaller part") come from the era of clockmaking as they were pointless when your timekeeping resolution was crude.* We are quite lucky that hours and then minutes were divided into 60 sections rather than 10, 12, or 100. This may have come from the system you describe (arc minutes, seconds, thirds, etc) which is much older.
* or not just crude but completely different; e.g. Babylonian and Roman hours varied in length each day as the time from sunrise to sunset was divided into twelve equal sections and sunset to sunrise implicitly the same. IIRC the constant-duration hour goes back only to marine navigation a few hundred years ago
> We are quite lucky that hours and then minutes were divided into 60 sections rather than 10, 12, or 100.
So let's say there's 20 hours a day, since presumably we'd still want to have two daily clock rotations. Those hours could then be divided into 100 "minutes" with 100 "seconds" each.
• 1 alternate-universe second = 0.432 current-universe seconds
I could very much deal with this. Current-universe seconds are a bit too long for the level of precision I want with that unit, and I don't think the < 30% change in the length of a minute or hour would matter much once I adapted. And, as a consequence, unit conversions would become so much easier!
Going to base 10 is a step backwards because 10 has so few factors. The meter would have been massively easier to use had it been base 12 or 60.
Perhaps you can get the Mars colonists to adopt a different system. The martian day is just close enough to the terrestrial day to make adapting the terrestrial system for it quite annoying.
> Going to base 10 is a step backwards because 10 has so few factors. The meter would have been massively easier to use had it been base 12 or 60.
Only when you also use that same base for everything else too. The decimal system works so well because it uses the same base as the number system we use (almost) everywhere.
And actually I don't really think the lack of divisors is really a problem in base 10. It may be different if you're used to imperial units, but when using the decimal system you don't think in fractions all that much. You either use more places after the decimal point, or move to a smaller unit.
Well at the time the meter was designed, base 12 was quite common for money and measurement.
I have lived in an Imperial system country, the modified version used in the USA, and multiple metric countries as well as using a mixture of cgs (SI) and mks depending on what work or study I was doing and still, for customary activity, find a dozen the most convenient. When doing science it doesn’t matter.
I feel like 2.4 hours is too long to be a useful measurement though.
Consider: You're asleep for ~ 1/3 of the day (hopefully), so you'd only have 7 units of time for everything you do while awake. This means many more events would have end up with weird start times, (e.g. 9:68 rather than 9:00 am). Just about every movie would be less than a single hour long.
Quibi is a video service launching soon that thinks that movies should be less than 10 minutes. And wasn’t vine’s limit about 4?
The most expensive-per-minute cost/minute videos on TV are ads and nowadays the are all a minute long Or less. And most manage to fit in a problem, a little character development, a happy resolution & climax, and then even a little denouement!
