Swatch tried to make a simple, decimal-based unit of time called the "beat" in 1998. It was a failure. I started with the question "Why isn't time metric," but soon the question became "why are there sixty seconds in a minute?"
I followed the thread all the way down the rabbit hole, and it turns out that right around the time humans started divvying up time, we really liked base 12 counting.
This video happens to be 60 seconds long, and a lot of people think this explanation is simply too quaint to be true, so I've done a lot of double checking, and found the following references. Hope you enjoy this intellectual bon mot! -Brian
References, as assembled by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, for the radio program "Earthdate" available here: [ Ссылка ]
Keeping Time: Why 60 Minutes? | LiveScience - [ Ссылка ]
Why is a Minute Divided into 60 Seconds? | Scientific American - [ Ссылка ]
Why Are There 24 Hours In A Day And 60 Minutes In An Hour? | ScienceABC - [ Ссылка ]
History of Timekeeping Devices | Wikipedia - [ Ссылка ]
Second | Wikipedia - [ Ссылка ]
Pedantic notes: I mushmouthed the word "interphalangeal," so there's a version out there with it misspelled. Whoops. Also, yes: if you're not paying attention, it sounds like I'm confusing duodecimal with sexagesimal. Hang in there, it should be clear by the end, and yes I should have said "twelves" digit instead of "tens." Some of you noticed that I'm not counting the thumbs. That's because the thumbs are the pointers and can't point to themselves.
I think that's it. Hope you enjoyed this. -Brian
