On Nov 6, 2014, at 11:24 AM, Dennis Ferguson <[email protected]> wrote:
>> >> On Nov 6, 2014, at 11:19, Clive D.W. Feather <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Tony Finch said: >>>> "minutes" and "seconds" are fractions of 60 and have been so since >>>> babylonian times for minutes and since 13-mumble for seconds. >>> >>> The etymology is actually helpful in this case rather than misleading as >>> etymologies so often are. >>> >>> "minute" is short for "pars minuta prima", the first small part >>> "second" is short for "pars minuta secunda", the second small part >> >> And I've seen "third" and "fourth", with the obvious meaning, used in old >> documents. >> >> But etymology doesn't override present meanings. > > It isn't really a question of what present meanings are, but of whether they > are > a good idea or not. If the hectosecond were redefined to sometimes be 99 or > 101 > seconds, with a table lookup required to find out which kind you were in, I > wouldn't > think that was a good idea even if it did fix a problem someone was having. > > In some ways the UTC minute redefinition is even worse than that. A 6 year > old > might not know how many seconds are in a hectosecond but would often be > expected to know there are 60 seconds in a minute. Redefining this to be > otherwise > seems bound to cause cognitive dissonance in many grown up former 6 year olds. As smart as computers are, they are less smart and less flexible than 6 year olds. Warner
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