Decimated: What if Napoleon hadn’t abolished decimal time?

economist.com

11 points·unignorant··7 comments

The very end of the article mentioned hexadecimal time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexadecimal_time

I like the idea of the 16-hour day, the 256-minute hour, and the 16-second minute. It makes at least as much sense as the divisions we have now; more in certain circumstances.

Just about any scheme would make more sense than the completely random nonsense that we have now.

It's sad to see the gregorian calendar madness from over 400 years ago will probably even be carried into the space-age.

For example, an intercalation scheme that intercalates single days and is based on the mean Martian tropical year of 668.5921 days can be approximated closely with a cycle of 45 leap years in 76 years because 66845⁄76 ≈ 668.592105 and 0.5921 × 76 = 44.9996.

Easy, huh?

Well, here's more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timekeeping_on_Mars

The current system is actually quite convenient. You can divide hours and minutes by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, and 12.

And the main reason why we want to divide hours, is that we want to make beautiful clock faces.

The software I use for logging hours uses decimal fractions for minutes. Also, neither bc nor python has a reasonable syntax for summing 0:23 + 1:50.

There's no timespan class?

That's not syntax.

Misleading title - doesn't answer the question.

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