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Comment by 32bitkid | Hacker News Reader

One has to admit that it complicates even trivial communications about days and times. Even questions like "What's the date of friday next week?" can't be quickly answered. Or "Is Nov 12th on the weekend?" I feel these are practical things that _most_ people would _like_ to easily reason about, but can't.

It imperial units for days; or like trying to do math in a numerical system where each significant digit has a different random radix. Does it have variety? Yes... Is even remotely fun to do anything practical with? No.

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Well, we already do math in a crazy-radix system for time, and the not-easily-divisible unitless variable of (1 year / 1 day) means that we can't do too much better -- we can reduce the problem to about one crazy radix, but no smaller; that radix will probably always depend on the value of the more-significant number in the date (the year).

But yes, we probably should quash the "variety is fun" argument early in the discussion. The problem is that it's a persistent low cost in the back of everyone's heads. Sure, when you think about it you might like it a lot, but it will then stress you out in hard-to-perceive ways during the rest of the year, with no real benefit to show for it.

The huge error that Eastman made was to keep the same month-names for the other months. This is a bad idea; if two systems are going to exist in parallel they need to be disambiguated in practice.

>The huge error that Eastman made was to keep the same month-names for the other months.

The problem is, you'll find, that naming things is an incredibly political act. Agreeing on a new name for anything is a terribly complicated process, and when you're talking about something every single person has a stake in... well, it would have never happened. He tried very skillfully to bypass all that, and basically succeeded.

No, his mistake was to underestimate the clout that religious tradition still had on large sectors of the ruling elites. Even now, when we pride ourself in the "scientificness" and rationality of our societies, we're still enslaved by stories written by agrarian priests at the dawn of civilization -- in many ways, it's worse now because nobody would even entertain proposals as bold as modernizing a system we've been using, almost unchanged, for two millennia, no matter how broken it might be.

Even questions like "What's the date of friday next week?" can't be quickly answered.

Fortunately we don't have a very pressing need to answer these sorts of questions; we have tools galore to handle them for us: smartphones, calendars, messaging apps, meetup etc. Topics like these often remind me of one of Einstein's more famous quotes:

[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. ...The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.

We used to spend an enormous amount of time teaching our children mathematical tricks which have now all been made completely obsolete by the scientific calculator. Only the most rudimentary of arithmetical strategies have survived, if only for the fact that it's still a little inconvenient to reach into your pocket when scanning and counting objects with your eyes.

I disagree, many times people are trying to coordinate and one person says the 8th thinking it's a friday, but it's actually thursday. So some people think they were talking about the 8th, others talk about it like it were the 9th, and there's confusion all about.

Casual calendar coordination is really easy to mess up in the current state.

That quote is about memorizing a relatively arbitrary number (5,280 feet to a mile) which is only relevant when you have systems that can't be easily reasoned about.

This is precisely why the metric system, or uniform length of months, are useful.

> It imperial units for days

Imperial made quite a lot of sense when numbers were small and calculations done without the aid of instruments: Using bases divisible by both 3 and 4 makes mental calculation quite quick.

> Using bases divisible by both 3 and 4 makes mental calculation quite quick.

Easier than base 10?

Half a foot, six inches. Third of a foot, four inches. Quarter of a foot, three inches. Sixth, eighth, and twelfth also go into whole inches.

For bigger projects, yards are fairly easy to decompose too, into whole feet and inches.

It's a good system for projects of human or slightly super-human scale using low resolution instruments and mental math. It's rotten for high precision computerized tasks of widely varying scales.

I can't recall the last time I needed a third. Halves, quarters, tenths, hundredths...

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