What percentage of US adults understand leap day?

[Pheran]

In other news, Microsoft doesn't understand leap day either, because their whole cloud service crashed due to a leap year bug.

 

[Jeff7]

In other news, Microsoft doesn't understand leap day either, because their whole cloud service crashed due to a leap year bug.

I had to program something once to act as a clock, including automatic calculations for the month, start/end of daylight savings time, and leap years - all that stuff.
It made me fully appreciate just how horrendously bizarre our measurement of time is. 60 seconds -> 60 minutes -> 24 hours -> 7 days -> 12 months. Bleh.
We need a metric time scale.

100 seconds in a minute. 10 minutes in an hour. 10 hours in a day. 10 months in a year. Or some such thing. The definition we assign to the duration of 1 second is quite arbitrary and flexible, were it not for its use in everything.

Or just make it all base 2 or base 16. :awe:

 

[Ichinisan]

I had to program something once to act as a clock, including automatic calculations for the month, start/end of daylight savings time, and leap years - all that stuff.
It made me fully appreciate just how horrendously bizarre our measurement of time is. 60 seconds -> 60 minutes -> 24 hours -> 7 days -> 12 months. Bleh.
We need a metric time scale.

100 seconds in a minute. 10 minutes in an hour. 10 hours in a day. 10 months in a year. Or some such thing. The definition we assign to the duration of 1 second is quite arbitrary and flexible, were it not for its use in everything.

Or just make it all base 2 or base 16. :awe:

It wouldn't change the fact that the number of days is based on Earth's rotation on its own axis. If you base everything on that, then a "year" still doesn't equate to a single orbit around the Sun...because the trip around the Sun is not precisely 365.00 days.

 

[acheron]

I had to program something once to act as a clock, including automatic calculations for the month, start/end of daylight savings time, and leap years - all that stuff.
It made me fully appreciate just how horrendously bizarre our measurement of time is. 60 seconds -> 60 minutes -> 24 hours -> 7 days -> 12 months. Bleh.
We need a metric time scale.

100 seconds in a minute. 10 minutes in an hour. 10 hours in a day. 10 months in a year. Or some such thing. The definition we assign to the duration of 1 second is quite arbitrary and flexible, were it not for its use in everything.

Or just make it all base 2 or base 16. :awe:

60 is better than 100 since it can be divided evenly into 3 and 6 in addition to 2, 4, and 5. How often do people use "20 minutes" as an arbitrary guess when something is going to take 1/3 of an hour? If hours are 100 minutes long, a third is 33.3 minutes, which is much less convenient.

24 is kind of the same way -- easy to say 8 hours as a third of the day.

Months are kind of based on the moon, though since we use a solar calendar now it's mostly just out of tradition.

7 days a week is entirely arbitrary though.

 

[lxskllr]

60 is better than 100 since it can be divided evenly into 3 and 6 in addition to 2, 4, and 5. How often do people use "20 minutes" as an arbitrary guess when something is going to take 1/3 of an hour? If hours are 100 minutes long, a third is 33.3 minutes, which is much less convenient.

24 is kind of the same way -- easy to say 8 hours as a third of the day.

Months are kind of based on the moon, though since we use a solar calendar now it's mostly just out of tradition.

7 days a week is entirely arbitrary though.

1/3 of an hour is equally arbitrary. For just talking purposes, exactness doesn't matter. 30 minutes is close enough to 1/3 of an hour in the above example. "I'll be at your house in 30 minutes, but it may take 70 minutes depending on traffic".

 

[CZroe]

1/3 of an hour is equally arbitrary. For just talking purposes, exactness doesn't matter. 30 minutes is close enough to 1/3 of an hour in the above example. "I'll be at your house in 30 minutes, but it may take 70 minutes depending on traffic".

But it isn't just for talking purposes. It comes in very handy when splitting duties and scheduling/payroll.

 

[lxskllr]

But it isn't just for talking purposes. It comes in very handy when splitting duties and scheduling/payroll.

There's nothing magic about 1/3. Use a different increment. It's the same reason you don't use 1/7, 1/13, 1/47, or any other ridiculous division you could possibly use.

 

[CZroe]

There's nothing magic about 1/3. Use a different increment. It's the same reason you don't use 1/7, 1/13, 1/47, or any other ridiculous division you could possibly use.

Because you are ignoring what I said, I guess you need an example. Three people need to share a duty over the course of an hour every hour. One person does theirs at the top of the hour, one at 20 minutes past the hour, and the other at 40 minutes past the hour. It has nothing to do with 3.333..., 6.666..., or anything. It has to do with one hour being easily divisible by 3. We don't have 3.333... persons to easily divide into 10.

Similarly, you might have indivisible units of manpower or other resources in counts of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, etc which makes base 60 or 24 come in more useful than base 10. When it comes to indivisible persons, duties, etc with no concern about vagueness or who did more seconds/minutes of a random remainder, it's easy to see the benefit.

 

[lxskllr]

Because you are ignoring what I said, I guess you need an example. Three people need to share a duty over the course of an hour every hour. One person does theirs at the top of the hour, one at 20 minutes past the hour, and the other at 40 minutes past the hour. It has nothing to do with 3.333..., 6.666..., or anything. It has to do with one hour being easily divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, etc which comes in useful when it comes to indivisible persons, duties, etc with no concern about vagueness or who did more seconds/minutes of a random remainder.

I'm not ignoring anything. You're use of 3 people is arbitrary, and has little use in the real world. I could contrive a situation that makes anything work well. That doesn't mean it's the best way to do something.

 

[CZroe]

I'm not ignoring anything. You're use of 3 people is arbitrary, and has little use in the real world. I could contrive a situation that makes anything work well. That doesn't mean it's the best way to do something.

No it isn't. The point is that any number of people is more likely to be divisible into base 60 or 24 than base 10. If I only have 3 people, I only have three. I can divvy up an hour equally between 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30 or 60 people. I didn't arbitrarily assign 3 people, I *had* three people and I'd easily handle the same thing if one person were out sick or if I had extra coverage for a day. You can't say the same for base 10. Got it?

 

[lxskllr]

No it isn't. The point is that any number of people is more likely to be divisible into base 60 or 24 than base 10. If I only have 3 people, I only have three. I can divvy up an hour equally between 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30 or 60 people. I didn't arbitrarily assign 3 people, I *had* three people and I'd easily handle the same thing if one person were out sick or if I had extra coverage for a day. You can't say the same for base 10. Got it?

I'd probably get people that could do simple math, and keep the easier decimal hour.

 

[CZroe]

I'd probably get people that could do simple math, and keep the easier decimal hour.

When it comes to pay, lawsuits are made due to rounded minutes. When it comes to familial duties, you get fights. When it comes to random strangers, you get aversion. No one wants to deal with it. If I want 1 round from each officer an hour evenly spaced through the hour, there can be no dispute about when each round needs to be done whether I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc officers on duty. When I need to split a shift between two officers, it doesn't matter if it was a 12, 8, or 6 hour shift: Even hours that neatly fit into 24.

 

[3chordcharlie]

a cheaper route would be to give up proper day/night cycles and extend the time per day. that or keep 24 hours, throw away leap day, and let the seasons slip.

Awesome!

I could understand the frustration, if we were talking about leap-Monday or something... Leap years make no difference at all to your life.

 

[Aikouka]

There's going to be a leap second in June. If only 10% can explain leap days, I think we're looking at 0.1% for leap seconds.

Ugh... leap seconds are one of my banes when working with software that uses UTC. If you want to convert to TAI or GPS, you need to factor in the number of leap seconds, which makes up for the earth's rotation speed not being constant. Unfortunately, since they add a second fairly randomly, there isn't an easy way to do it other than hard coding the value. :|

I'm glad you mentioned this though, because I had no idea that they were adding another one in June.

 

[Dr. Zaus]