I guess the idea is to make the duration of "second" - of the order of blink, snapping fingers, ... basically to provide a granularity which is neither too fast nor painfully slow compared to what we are used to.

This makes me wonder if instead of splitting in 3 (10:100:100), if it were split equally but in 5 parts (10:10:10:10:10) would it make tracking 5 needles tough.