- its not the best option for an internet standard time
- it's not a good option for a replacement for hours and minutes
- it is however, a good dumb feature for cohost plus to have
WAS SOMEBODY TALKING ABOUT A MORE OPTIMAL TIME SYSTEM
https://www.xanthir.com/b54c0 AND https://www.xanthir.com/hex/clock/
So base 10 is fine but if you really want to optimize your society's sense of arithmetic, base 6 is the way to go. 6 accords well with your native sense of "how many things can you count by sight", 36 is a reasonable approximation of "a largish group of whatever". 6 is highly composite, it's divided by 2 and 3, and 5 and 7 are one less and one more than it (which make them friendlier for arithmetic purposes). The times table is ridiculously simpler while numbers in the range you care about are only a digit longer at most.
Anyway, about time. Base 10 doesn't have a convenient way to divide the day up into hour-like, minute-like, and second-like divisions that are all the same and convenient to base 10. That's why our current system is 60/60/24, which is just nonsense (also it agreed with Babylonian numerology). The closest round base 10 number for seconds/day is 100k, which can't divide into three equal steps - you have to do something like 100/100/10, which gives inconveniently large hours. Going up to 1M (100/100/100) is just terrible - too many hours, minutes are small, and seconds are way too small. Going down to 1000 (10/10/10) is obviously unusable as well. Plus all of these work badly for dividing into thirds.
BUT IN BASE 6, whaddya know, a 36/36/36 division (aka 100₆/100₆/100₆) is about perfect. More hours than you're used to, but not ridiculously so, and they're 40 old minutes long, which is close enough to still serve the same purpose. Minutes are almost identical - approx 1m4s in the old system. And need second are about two old seconds, again close enough to serve the same purpose. (Bonus: 1 beat per second is now roughly the slowest rhythm perceivable by humans.)
Now that the three divisions are ah the same quantity, no more having to teach children the terrible "3 means 3am or 3pm, or 15 minutes or seconds, depending". 3 is 3 or 30₆, much simpler. And while 36 hours on one face is too many (just like 24 is too many), two hours hands works, so no more need for am/pm.
And now converting between time units is nothing at all. 3h22m is 322m (or 32200s) - you literally just move the heximal point.
Extra bonus: then we can reform the calendar too (https://www.xanthir.com/hex/calendar/), so months are also 36 days, so the perfect 100₆:1 ratio continues all the way from seconds to months. A year is then 10 months, of 6 6-week days each, with December (now back to being correctly named for it's month number) having a 7th week of 5 or 6 days.
ok this is neat, i may have to steal some of these ideas for meme solar time. i hadn't thought through enough to pick up on the fact that 1 pernif of a day or night on an equinox would be roughly 20DEC minutes, i may have to split my days 10SEX/100SEX/100SEX to get units that are nice and intuitive. which solves the same problem as two hour hands by just demoting the second one into the minutes range and rippling from there. and that problem is also mitigated somewhat by the day/night split.
one of the things i haven't written down about meme solar time is it's deliberately anthropocentric. there are contexts where it's useful for an hour to be 9,192,631,770DEC hyperfine transitions of cæsium-133 or whatever, but if I ask what time it is, I don't care how many cæsium-133 radiations it's been since mean solar midnight at the center of my time zone, I care how far through the day it is.
honestly the only reason to start the day at mean solar midnight is so that mid-day can be mean solar noon, but that's silly, start the day at the start of the day, i.e. sunrise. and in that context, the day ends at sunset, now it's night. if i'm sleeping from uhhhh (notation pending) 4🌔43 to 2☀️30 then... fuck i forgot what my point was while i was trying to do some mental math. also they added fucking Tenor GIF search to the Windows emoji picker in Windows 15SEX and i am going to parody bill gates for this one
oh i hadn't thought of this until just now but a thing i am absolutely doing in meme solar time is starting hours at 1 instead of 0. hours are counted, not measured, therefore the first hour should be hour 1. (counting from 0 isn't cute, programmers only do this when they're very distressed.)
