Ask Lemmy

Your last sentence is correct. We don't have obvious patterns that would cause us any confusion (beyond the confusion we already have with this measurement system that makes no sense), so we simply memorize it.

I can't believe after all these decades, the USA still sticks with the imperial system. It's nonsense. But I grew up with the imperial system so that's what feels natural to me and I can "feel" what a mile feels like, I can "feel" what an inch feels like, but if you speak to me in metric, since we in the USA are not as exposed to it over here, I need to pull out my calculator to make the conversions to understand how a meter relates to a foot and a yard, yes I hate it, I would rather be able to think and feel in metric because it's more logical.

My favorite thing about my microwave is that if I punch “180” into the 4 character display, it will count down 80 seconds, then switch to 59, meaning it took 180 as 1 minute, 80 seconds, not 3 minutes

I am of the opinion that time should be expressed in base 36, much more subdivideable and allows you to express a given time as a two decimal point number between 0.00 and Z.ZZ

Also as you might have noticed, the latest time in the day is literally the Zs, the clock would be telling you to go the fuck to sleep already.

Similar to your example, I do sometimes have a "brain fart", thinking that X:50 means half. So, like if the microwave says 1:50, I might think that means 1.5 minutes left, but I generally catch myself pretty quickly, and it's never caused any real problems.

I did my undergrad in a science that lends itself to lots of metric measurements, so even though I'm born and raised in the US, I'm pretty comfortable with metric and tend to set my defaults to metric.

I think in both imperial and metric, imperial forces more fractions into my thought, which may be useful for time divisions. Fractions can definitely be quicker for centering things along a length. But when I’m designing for 3d printing (a fertile that has always been metric based) I prefer mm/cm.

Time units being base 12, 24, 60 are fairly convenient in that you can divide them evenly in many ways. I find this highly advantageous, turns out lots of folks did too and that's why we use it today.

I used to get confused doing arithmetic between AM/PM until I switched my life over to a 24 hour clock. Also why folks who do time math often like in hospitals or military use that system. It's comes down to convenience.

It can be kind of confusing since seconds are part of SI, but hours and minutes are not. So you are kind of mixing frogs with oranges here. Even with metric units it's not always linear and intuitive. Take for example decibel scale which is logarithmic, which is something that throws people off. Same with Richter scale. Having earthquake at scale of 3 is not half the strength of 6. It's thousand times weaker than 6.

So in short, time keeping is done for convenience sake because 60 is divisible by a lot of numbers many times over. It can throw you off a bit if you are converting from metric to time format but there's a simple formula for that and with some training you can do the calculation in your head. It's a matter of practice.

I'm in the USA, and I certainly don't use the imperial system exclusively

my (domestic) education was in metric (undergrad and grad school), and now I work at an American company and use metric exclusively.

And yes, I get confused sometimes. Often I get time and currency confused, so if something is $1.59 I think it's a penny shy of $2, for instance.

Living in the US, I know what mph, inches, feet, yards and pounds all mean. Anything else I'll end up looking up, and yes, I've lived here my whole life. I don't make any mistakes because I always end up checking how my cups are in a quart or whatever.

Sometimes I will think of an hour and half as 150 minutes

You're still thinking of a pattern -- but there is a conflation between cardinal numbers and proportion/percentage. An hour and a half is 150% of one hour.

But no, that doesn't happen with imperial systems, because there just aren't really patterns to that level.

I tend to lean into fractions naturally, so time fits into that well. But like, I design quite a bit in FreeCAD for 3d printing and only work with metric for stuff like that. I hate that we have not switched to metric in the USA.

Time sucks ass. How many seconds in a day? 86400 or something. The whole thing feels like imperial units. I'd prefer if we'd just have percentages instead and work on fractions with special names for them.

Full disclosure, I'm a programmer.