Current Events > People who say "not reading that" or "too long to read that"

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxIkqbRR59s

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/3/4/AACE4xAAEaIy.jpg

tldr

@tldrreturns

Shut da fuck up

u

tldr

But wait, thats not all even if they reconciled time it wouldnt explain that if cared enough to comment, if you get out of your way to tell you don't give a f***, that's actually giving a f***... at least in my books.

Me? I got into here thinking it would be at least interesting. Got intrigued by title, saying our time perception is weird and was waiting something else other than simply telling a specific event was "only" several million seconds or several hundred days ago.

As Einstein would say, time is relative. So it's not really measurable. I was expecting some kind of discussion pointing to that, but maybe my expectations were too high.

Now, reading topic title and reading what TC actually wrote, he seems a little bit confused. His topic title should be "Our method to measure our time perception is weird". It actually is based on a system developed by Sumerians over four thousand years ago.

This system would use a sexagesimal (base 60) system. No one is sure why to this day, but it's believed it's because 60 is convenient for expressing fractions. Sixty is the smallest number divisible by first six counting numbers and by 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30 as well. Sumerians used this system to base their calculations on astronomy (among other things). Said system was passed on from Sumerians to Babylonians, who then passed this system to Greeks later on. Keep that in mind.

First civilization to come up with the hour concept were Egyptians. They had a system based on a sundial for counting hours during the day and observing stars for counting hours during the night.

Day time was split into 12 parts because they used finger joints to count. For nights, they used a system based on observing stars and their positions. First they used 18 stars as reference (12 for total darkness and 3 for each twilight period). That means days would have 12 hours and nights 18. Later on, Egyptians updated this system to use only 12 stars as reference at nights, so both days and nights would have same amount of hours. This system was somewhat flawed though. Hours would be much shorter / longer during days or nights based on what season they were in.

But now, about a thousand years later, comes the Greek.

An astronomer named Eratosthenes used that sexagesimal system to divide a circle into 60 parts, as early geographic system of latitude consisting in horizontal lines through known places on Earth at the time. About a hundred years later, another astronomer named Hipparchus standardized latitude lines by making them parallel and proportional to Earth's geometry, also coming up with longitude lines encompassing 360 degrees. Based on that, Hipparchus also suggested splitting days into 24 equinoctial hours, based on those latitude / longitude coordinates he had just came up with, so hours would no longer vary in duration based on season, as Egyptians had.

A few decades after Hipparchus work, Claudius Ptolemy (an Egyptian astronomer, mathematician, and geographer of Greek descent) expanded on Hipparcus work. He subdivided each of the 360 degrees of latitude and longitude into smaller segments (60 parts each), then subdivided each of those smaller segments into 60 parts each. First division was named partes minutae primae (first minute), known simply as the "minute", while second segmentation, partes minutae secundae, (second minute), became known as the "second". However, hours were still not divided into minutes and minutes into seconds initially for time keeping purposes.

This would become standard time measurement only by the end of 16th century (almost 1600 years later) with the invention of the mechanical clock, in order to keep all clocks adjusted, minutes (1/60 hours) and seconds (1/60 minutes) were used as reference, thus standardizing time measurements as we know them today.

This leads us to modern days, where scientific advancements made us change how seconds are defined. Instead of using the definition of 1/60 minutes to tell what a second is, International System of Units (SI) had other definitions which were than changed in 1967. That was when a second was redefined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 energy transitions of the cesium atom.
Said definition still persists and governs how we measure time today. Atomic timekeeping allowed Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). But then there's one interesting fact about atomic time and UTC...in order to keep atomic time in agreement with astronomical time, leap seconds need to be added to UTC occasionally. Even though our time measurement has never been so precise and standardized, even so not all minutes contain 60 seconds. About eight minutes per decade actually contain 61 seconds instead.

Why did I take the time to search and share all this? Working. Hardware upgrades on some servers. Waiting folks to reboot the servers after hardware upgrades just so I can do my thing on software side. Adding some information to this topic, so now whoever comes here do know how our time is defined and measured.

But why is a year 365 days? Why 12 months in a year? Why some have 30 days, others 31 and February has only 28? Why leap years exist? I'll leave those questions unanswered for now, as first server is coming back up and I need to start working.

Cool. How many times have you posted this on CE?

I'm not reading all that.