One of my favourite facts. Well done Ruth Belleville, I absolutely love those old jobs like selling time. Also, definitely need to get Mr Baker and his brilliant trivial mind back on QI.
@@Janx101 Well excellent. You start your end, I’ll start here, and soon enough we’ll have gone viral and it’ll be a thing people complain about at parties, like daylight saving time.
In dutch we do use "kwartier" regularly, which is a quarter of an hour or 15 minutes. We also have "kwartaal" - a quarter of a year - and "kwartje" - 25 cents of the old guilder.
@@TheTuttle99 yes, used like that it's very common, but i have never heard it used on its own. To simply say "a quarter", just like one says "a day" or "an hour", as in a period of time. I don't think it's used like that in the English language, please correct me if i'm wrong.
Swatch tried the metric time in around 1998. You can tell how well that did by the fact you've probably never heard of it. They divided the day into 1000 pieces, and they did away with time zones so it was the same time worldwide. You'd just say "it's at 332" and it would be 332 the same time everywhere.
Doing away with time zones might sound like a reasonable idea, but it doesn't really make much difference. With a single global time in which we in Britain worked from 09:00 to 17:00, you'd have to know that a remote office worked from, say, 14:00 to 22:00, which is exactly equivalent to knowing they are 5 hours behind us in the current system.
There's Unix time, which is the standard most computing systems used. It's essentially a counter for the number of seconds passed since Jan 1st, 1970. The messaging app Discord also uses it to great effect, where you can enter a timestamp like and everyone would see a different time based on their own timezone. Very handy if you're running virtual/online events on the Internet.
Considering how connected the world is now, I think getting rid of time zones sounds reasonable. Nowadays people are always interacting with people in different time zones so it would make things easier to just get rid of time zones. You’re watching a youtuber and they say they have a live stream at this time so you gotta go Google where they live and then convert the time for your time zone. Much easier if everyone is just on the same time zone. I’m not sitting here remembering what time zone every country is in. And it’s gets even more confusing when you introduce daylight savings because the time difference changes.
@@Michael75579 Yeah but then you have to remember which time zone everyone is in. We've got to deal with that now at my job, with PST and EST and GMT folks and god forbid we expand to China or India because that's even more time zones to deal with
I thought it was going to be about the Knocker-uppers; the people who got folk out of their beds on a morning, before alarm clocks. I think they used long thin hammers to tap on their bedroom windows. One woman used a pea shooter, I think.
That was in another QI episode. Wasn't really hammers they used, as they could accidentally shatter the windows. It was just some very long sticks so they could reach to the top floor windows. But you are correct that there was a woman who used a pea shooter.
12 is a unique number in that, counting up from zero, it's the first number that's evenly divisible by 1, 2, 3, and 4 -- all the smallest whole numbers. You don't get that much even divisibility with 8, 9, 10, or 14. 60 is also unique among the tens (i.e., 10, 20, 30, 40, etc.), as it's the only tens =
Saw,a scientist on the *the science* channel explain how as one grows older you do experience TIME as passing quicker..🥴💫 that's all I remember,woke up this morning AND I was old.
@@Maya_Pinion one explanation I've heard is that each successive year is a smaller fraction of your life so it feels like it moves a little faster. Like one year for a 10 year old is 10% of their life so far and for an 80 year old it is 1.25%
@@mastod0n1 Yeah, I'm also just thinking that it's to do with familiarity. Because when I break the routine and go somewhere new, do something different and learn new things, then the passage of time does feel like it temporarily slows down a bit. But when I'm just doing the same old same old routine, day in and day out, time speeds along. I think it's because, when something's new, your mind is doing a lot - taking it all in, learning, etc. - but, once something's familiar and routine, it becomes subconscious and automatic... and, oh, look, time flies. It's over already. And, on that observation, for young folks, everything's new and unfamiliar and their mind is racing to take it all in and learn how the world works. But the older you get, the more you've just seen it all before, and it just flies by subconsciously. That is, my hypothesis here is that your time perception is related to how quickly and intensely you're thinking. If you're thinking at 100 mph - 20 thoughts a second - then a second feels like a longer time, as you've just packed a whole load of thinking into that second. But, as you grow older, it's more subconscious and less conscious - because, like, I've seen all this a hundred times before, so none of it is really surprising me or demanding much mental attention. Objectively, a second itself doesn't change. It's more about how much your brain is doing - or not doing - relative to that fixed metric. If you could pack a lifetime of thought into a single second, then seconds would seem like lifetimes. But if you're only having one thought a second, then the seconds just flow by far too quickly. On days where I try to squeeze in a morning walk somewhere new, then do a bunch of DIY jobs and then - I'm a coder - have an intense bit of thinking coding up something complicated... basically, just fully pack out my day with new and interesting things... then time feels like it slows down again. But, yeah, the gist of my point, I guess, is that time never objectively changes - it's always one second every second - so it's all to do with how much mental activity happens in those seconds. Think faster. Think at the immense speed that 5 year olds run their imaginations. And then you'll feel time slowing down again. But that's harder and harder to do with age, as thinking slows down because, as I say, the more familiar you are with something, the more it's subconscious and automatic. When you're five, then pretty much everything you encounter is a brand new experience. And your mind is racing, trying to take it all in. But when you're 75, then there's a lying politician on TV. Yeah, that always happens. They're always like that. Not interesting. Oh, look, there's a new technology. But, yeah, there's always a new technology every other week. This is normal. Not interesting. On your millionth conversation with family, there's really not that much new to be said and you all know each other so well, that there's probably not much point saying it - they already know what you think on this subject and that subject and the other thing. You get my point? With age, you stop thinking at 100 million miles an hour, as young kids do, and so your "thoughts per second" drops... and with that, I believe that's why time feels like it's going faster and faster. If you want to test this theory for yourself, then just go do something mad, new, interesting and pack your day with activities and thoughts. That day will feel longer than the one where you just sat where you always sat and did the same old things you always do.
I'm just imagining a company having an subscription with this woman to come around wednesdays at 5 pm before closing time.. and when she arrives there right on time, the company was closed because their clock was still incorrect and they thought she didn't make it during work hours
Presumably she could be relied upon to be punctual enough that they'd have chosen to stay open until after she'd come around… but now I'm wondering, that one week she'd have inevitably been sick, just how long they'd have stuck around waiting for her before giving up!
@timparenti but she was the timekeeper, so without her there was no time. So, she couldn't have been later for anything, even she didn't tell the right time
when I was in high school, I had a chance to go on a few trips to Europe through and educational tour program. One time our group was paired with a group from Canada that was always late for the bus in the morning. We started joking that they were on metric time.
Tom Scott also has a whole rant about time zones, Daylight Savings Time, and the difficulty of handling all the weird cases in computer code that handles dates/times.
This just in: Eventhough 10 has fewer differen prime factors, segmentation is still very easy to use. We're happy to see stuff 25% off, or 30, 50, 60. It's actually easier to comprehend than doing pure fractions - and I know, becaues I teach maths and fractions are the thing most students inexplicably hate.
I had an epiphany with fractions about halfway through 3rd grade when I realized that a fraction is a physical representation of the old-arithmetic "divided by" symbol (÷), where the numerator and the denominator are the dots. What's 7 ÷ 18? 7/18! It was 1970-- I was easily entertained.
@@ghijkmnop Decimal numbers are still much more intuitive to understand, because they follow the same logic as natural numbers. Comparing 1/3 to 1/4 is already counterintuitive, comparing 3/7 to 2/5 will require some quick maths. Comparing .33 (repeating, obv) to .25 is trivial, comparing .43 to .40 is just as trivial. Fractions are useful before you get to a result, because you can more easily and more precisely continue your calculation. Decimals are the best way to present a result to make it quickly understood (with an exception being when you hit a fraction straight on - which doesn't really happen in real life).
@@DrZaius3141 I find that's very much a generational thing though. People who grew up before computers, digital clocks etc. were commonplace generally agree that fractions are more intuitive than decimals, while those who did grow up with it (which would include myself) find decimals far more intuitive than fractions.
@@rjfaber1991 I'm old and I am okay with either decimals or fractions. What frustrates me is when (other) old people say "A quarter of" when you ask them what time it is. Because half of them think "A quarter of eight" means 7:45, and the other half think it means 8:15. And it literally doesn't matter what it *actually* means, because half of people use it wrong anyway so when anybody says "a quarter of" it could be anywhere in that 30 minute window.
Interestingly, Swatch invented a new time system called the Swatch Internet Time. A day consists of 1000 .beats and there are no time zones or summer and winter time, so time is the same all around the globe. This was back in 1998, so as you might have guessed, it never really caught on.
She could have been superseded by a Wauchope time ball. A British naval officer wanted to help mariners synchronize their watches for navigation. In Portsmouth he constructed a device with a large ball on a pole on the roof of a building. Every day at 1PM it dropped. Ships captains could watch from the harbor and set their chronometers. There were time balls set up on prominent buildings in a number of cities, including New York. It was the inspiration for the New Years Eve ball drop in Times Square.
Yes, good point, you're probably right! In fact, another time ball was installed at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich (London) in 1833 and it's still in operation to this day: Each day, at 12.55, the bright red time ball rises half way up its mast. At 12.58 it rises all the way to the top. At 13.00 exactly, the ball falls, and so provides a signal to anyone who happens to be looking. Since the observatory is on a hill, the ball can be seen from the river, but of course if you are looking the wrong way, you have to wait until the next day before it happens again, or buy your time from someone like Ruth Belleville. Btw, these time balls is where the expression 'on the ball' comes from.
In The Hiding Place, an au ttobiography by Corrie Ten Boom, she tells the story of going to the big city in Holland, to get the correct time every week. He was a watchmaker, from memory.
You can count to 12 on one hand by using your thumb to point at the creases in your fingers. Not including the thumb (because the thumb can't point at it yourself), each of the four fingers has three points it bends (3 * 4 = 12). You can extend that to 60 by keeping track of how many 12s you've counted using the fingers (and thumb) on your other hand (12 * 5 = 60), usually by using that finger to point at the creases. Look up "babylonian hand counting" for better explanations than mine.
I mean... Assuming you're not missing any digits you could count all the way to 1023 on two hands. Just use binary. Made it very easy to keep track of high numbers of sit-ups back in college. Just make sure your hands aren't pointing at anyone when you count 4.
@@greenredblue Or 132. 😁 Thanks! Now i know of 3 people who know how to count binary with their fingers! A fellow conscript during my service showed me 22 years ago, and whenever i show it to someone i am met with the same bewildered look he was (among our platoon apart from my interest). And that, even though i work in engineering where everybody actualy knows how binary numbers work! (4 actually, i once commented somewhere about "being able to count ones "bodycount" on one hand" that that could potentially mean count to 31 not just five as everybody assumed. So i had to explain how it works and one person understood my explanation.)
you and i might be able to have conversations at parties that would drive everyone else away... how are you on the bronze age collapse and numerology in the roman legion? say... Hadrian to Kaiser.
It's easier for me to count the finger segments instead (as my brain doesn't see the crease between the finger and the palm as part of the finger). But the rest of it is exactly the same.
When I was a work study analyst (time & motion) we recorded activities on a watch that was divided into centiminutes (100 cm per minute) rather than seconds because when it came to applying our percentage rating for the operators performance it saved a lot of messing about
I am kind of facinated by the idea that converting fractions to percentage might be considered a wastefully time consuming activity by the very people that perform time use analysis.
Ancient peoples used their body parts to create many different base systems: base-10 is _not_ the only natural or valid way to count with your hands. Speaking directly to the naturalness of base-12, which Bill rejects, many peoples enumerated the first five objects with five fingers on one hand then enumerated the sixth object by closing their hand. (Remember that zero hadn't been invented yet, so no one had a hand signal to for zero.) Most ancient cultures, but not all, extended the base-6 system to base-12 by enumerating the seventh object with a finger on their other hand. This system enumerates 12 objects, not 10, with two hands. Keep in mind that a hand is a hand is a hand. If I am trying to express a quantity to you and I show you my _left_ hand with three extended fingers, you would likely interpret that as 3 items. If I show you my _right_ hand with three extended fingers, you would still likely interpret that as 3 items. If I show you both of my hands at the same time, each with three extended fingers, what is the "correct" interpretation? We contemporary humans tend to sum the extended fingers and interpret it as 6 items. But, we contemporary humans might interpret the hands to represent positional notation: 33. In the contemporary world, you cannot convincingly argue that 6 is correct and 33 is incorrect-or vice versa. Ancient peoples didn't have positional notation because that technology hadn't been invented yet, so they never would have interpreted it to mean 33. Similarly, enumerating (counting) was invented long before addition was invented. So, for many peoples, interpreting two hands each with three extended fingers to mean 6 items would have been impossible. Even after addition was invented, summing the extended fingers is not obviously the "correct" interpretation. If showing the left hand with three extended fingers means 3 and showing the right hand with three extended fingers means 3, then showing both hands with three extended fingers means 3! It's an emphatic 3. In the contemporary world, if someone shows you their right hand with only their middle finger extended, what meaning do you assign to that one finger? But if the same person shows you both of their hands at the same time, each with only their middle finger extended, do you say to yourself, "Oh! They are telling me there are 2 items," or do you interpret two hands to be more emphatic than one hand? Base 10 is not inherently superior or more intuitive than base 12. I'm not aware of any research that proves that contemporary technology requires humans to use base 10, and base 12 would be advantageous in many ways (especially when converting to binary). It's probably just an accident that we use base 10 instead of base 12.
9 year old me 12 hours before Christmas: "UGH, Christmas is ages away, HURRY UP!" 29 year old me 12 months before turning 30: "Oh god, I'm going to be 30 soon, SLOW DOWN!"
Yes, having my birthday at the end of the year, I've been 'turning 50 next year' since January (for future people reading this, it's December now). It's still a year off but it seems very near.
Consider 30 as your new 20 but with 10 extras years of experience to hopefully better deal with certain situations... ^^ ("Yeah? How would you know?" / "Well, I'm in my early 40s.")
I knew this from Citation Needed (panel show) and from Futility Closet (podcast about history). Futility Closet go into it in detail, explaining the business process and the background.
One reason why post-revolutionary French decimal time didn't work was because workers still only got one day off each week. So instead of working six days in a row, they had to work nine.
A 10 day week should be 7 days on 3 days off. Mathematically that works out as more days off. 2 days off out of 7 a year works out as 104. Where as 3 out of 10 works out at 108.
That's one I didn't know. Makes sense. When I was in highschool in the 70s, people would argue about whose watch was the most accurate. The only way to settle the dispute was to tune the shortwave radio to WWV. Smartphones have made such arguments a relic of the past
Metric time would have 10 hours in a day. 100 minutes in an hour. 100 seconds in a minute. There is not enough room on the watch for the last two. 10 days in a week (there is not enough room on the calendar). 10 months in a year consisting of 36½ days (not enough room on the calendar). The ½ day would alternate between the end and the start of the month. Leap years have an intercalculary date at the end of the year.
Part of a Clockmakers trade was to visit homes on a regular basis to set the clock's time and some were even contracted to regularly wind the clock up because the Owner did not trust the servants to do it.
Isn't it weird how time is the only thing that's globally standardized? It shows how crucial it is for international interactions and why it's such a sticky system that we can't really change it - even if it would be smarter if it worked in a decimal system. It wouldn't even require big changes to turn those 86,400 seconds into 100,000. It would make counting time easier - a new second would be shorter, so no real pause between the numbers as you say them out loud. We wouldn't have to wait as long if someone where to say "just a second". Obviously, the speed of light would be adjusted to around 258,000km/s. A meter would need to be redefined, as it is currently tied to the second and light speed. It is however problematic that 100,000 is a bit weird to segment. A newminute would be 100 newseconds (which is about 50% longer than an old second). With a newhour being 100 newminutes, it would equal 2.4 old hours (2 hours, 24 min) - which would mean we'd finally get new movies that only last an hour. On the flipside, companies would lobby heavily to keep a working day at 8 newhours, leaving less than 5 old hours for the unnecessary stuff in life, like sleep or free time.
Time has been standardised for an eternity. We are in the year 2024 of the standardisation. The French and English didn’t agree on lengths till the 20th century.
Ever since I've heard of them, I've wanted a metric clock. I've done attempts to jerry rig something myself, but my non-skills in mechanics and coding has left me stumped. The closest thing I've gotten to is to buy an analog 24 hr clock (that goes through hour revolutions once every day. With 12 o clock noon at the nottom and 24 at the top), I've considered just snipping off the minute and second hand off it and just leave the Hour and make a new 10 hr backing. But I'd loose so much precision. Now, honestly, if anyone out there can point me towards a full 10 hour metric clock for sale for reasonable prices... I'd be very much interested!
too bad they didnt have the bit that came later in the episode, where they talk about time again, and then one of them goes : By whos time System are we using ?? :
So if I want to meet the time selling lady, I need to make an appointment with her. But I don't know the time! The ones who need her the most would always miss her! What a tragedy!
Babylonian numerals, not Mayan. The Maya used a base-20 system, though of course Europeans did not know that in ancient times. The Babylonian base 60 system is still used for measuring time and angles, but afaik nothing else.
Just do time as a percentage of a day. That is how computers do it. Then you have a very clear idea of what proportion of the day you are spending on any one task. If you need smaller then 1% you could have persec's or percentage seconds.
That is a fair point and there would definitely need to be some intermediate units to make it a smoother transition. Ironically 1% of a day is around is 15 minutes so depending how ridiculously hardboiled you like your eggs it could be a perfect amount of cooking time. Nothing of significance about just an intresting coincidence.
@@martinmills135 Thanks for pointing that out. Just a typo I am afraid. I fixed it and changed my wording to make the joke more apparent. In deference to the maths geeks and precision time keepers out there let me apologise in advance for the cardinal sin of rounding UP from 14.36. And any chiefs for advocating 15 minutes as a sane amount of time to boil an egg.
That the thumb isnt a finger is a really rare (british?) idea and barely is a thing in the english speaking world. In pretty much all other languages/dictionaries the thumb is a finger and normal people therefor have 10 fingers. Think of finger being the parent definition, like tooth being the parent definition for molars, incisors, etc. ... thats how pretty much everyone in the world handles this, and yes that includes the fields of medicine and science. Just like the imperial system not every definition thought up is useful or rational, best to let go especially when there is no trouble with the alternative, more popular definition.
This is what I tell people whenever they jeer at Americans for the Fahrenheit thermometer or whatever non-metric-system measurement. You're still using the Babylonian clock, and the Babylonian circle with 360 degrees. Why not 100 degrees equal to 100 percent of the circle? 100 seconds in a minute, 100 minutes in an hour, and 100 hours in a day, or 10 hours in a day, or whatever? 10 months in a year, 100 weeks. Why not? Adherence to tradition, something metric system lovers are supposed to turn their noses up at. Obviously, you can't do it with the number of days it takes for the Earth to go around the Sun. That's still 365-and-a-bit.
Americans get jeered because they've adhered to an archaic measurement system while the rest of the world has moved on. This was despite saying they'd change back in the late 60s but then backing out because it was all too hard, leaving other countries who committed to the change having to still deal with both systems due to Americas intransigence. Time, as was mentioned in this video, is universally accepted, something of a rarity, and that alone means it doesn't need to be changed, but if it was, I'm sure America would refuse to accept a new system anyway.
There is an angular measurement system which uses the gradian as the basic unit, with 100 gradians in a right angle. While it has a few useful features, it's very rarely used as it has neither the familiarity of degrees nor the unitless nature of radians.
It's not about traditions or their rejection. It's about standardisation, so that different groups can communicate effectively. It was easier to invent a rational metric system than to attempt to impose one set of standards for inches, miles, tons, ounces, etc. when different systems use the same word for different measurements. There are 20 fluid ounces in a pint. There are 16 fluid ounces in a pint. There are 32 roquilles in a pinte. One pinte is just over 2 pints, but less than 2 pints. Calendars and clocks don't have that problem since the same words aren't being used to mean different things. So an ancient system works for standardisation because everyone agrees on what the words mean.
So tell me where Bill erased time exactly? All he did was propose a metric system, that's not erasing time. Very click bait and false advertising title! I'd expect better from a production that values factual correctness.
The French were FAR too late ............. By the time (no pun intended) they got around to the French revolution (so named to differentiate it from the several earlier revolutions (in France)) the 12/24 was too interwoven with navigation which also used degrees, minutes & seconds as measures of distance ............ Which overlaid with duration makes it far easier to calculate where you are 🙄
So basically, "I'll make my own system of time! With blackjack and strumpets!"
Forget about the blackjack
@@Tapecutter59 Well, you've got to have some method of deciding what position you and the strumpet assume
The latter used to say "Wind your watch for you, sir?" to potential clients.
One of my favourite facts. Well done Ruth Belleville, I absolutely love those old jobs like selling time. Also, definitely need to get Mr Baker and his brilliant trivial mind back on QI.
Anniversary of her death yesterday. Interesting lady
My favourite job is knocker-up
I‘ve always been slightly disappointed that we never say “a third of an hour” for anything. Seems a waste of a perfectly good fraction.
Challenge Accepted!! 😁👍
@@Janx101 Well excellent. You start your end, I’ll start here, and soon enough we’ll have gone viral and it’ll be a thing people complain about at parties, like daylight saving time.
In dutch we do use "kwartier" regularly, which is a quarter of an hour or 15 minutes.
We also have "kwartaal" - a quarter of a year - and "kwartje" - 25 cents of the old guilder.
@@ymac7245 yes quarter hour as in "quarter to 6" or "quarter after 7" is quite common in most places I know of
@@TheTuttle99 yes, used like that it's very common, but i have never heard it used on its own.
To simply say "a quarter", just like one says "a day" or "an hour", as in a period of time. I don't think it's used like that in the English language, please correct me if i'm wrong.
Bill Bailey understands how King Crimson works
Swatch tried the metric time in around 1998. You can tell how well that did by the fact you've probably never heard of it. They divided the day into 1000 pieces, and they did away with time zones so it was the same time worldwide. You'd just say "it's at 332" and it would be 332 the same time everywhere.
Doing away with time zones might sound like a reasonable idea, but it doesn't really make much difference. With a single global time in which we in Britain worked from 09:00 to 17:00, you'd have to know that a remote office worked from, say, 14:00 to 22:00, which is exactly equivalent to knowing they are 5 hours behind us in the current system.
There's Unix time, which is the standard most computing systems used. It's essentially a counter for the number of seconds passed since Jan 1st, 1970. The messaging app Discord also uses it to great effect, where you can enter a timestamp like and everyone would see a different time based on their own timezone. Very handy if you're running virtual/online events on the Internet.
Considering how connected the world is now, I think getting rid of time zones sounds reasonable. Nowadays people are always interacting with people in different time zones so it would make things easier to just get rid of time zones. You’re watching a youtuber and they say they have a live stream at this time so you gotta go Google where they live and then convert the time for your time zone. Much easier if everyone is just on the same time zone. I’m not sitting here remembering what time zone every country is in. And it’s gets even more confusing when you introduce daylight savings because the time difference changes.
@@Michael75579 Yeah but then you have to remember which time zone everyone is in. We've got to deal with that now at my job, with PST and EST and GMT folks and god forbid we expand to China or India because that's even more time zones to deal with
@@thsscapi Doesn't quite map well to days though does it
Bill Bailey has the power of KING CRIMSON
I thought it was going to be about the Knocker-uppers; the people who got folk out of their beds on a morning, before alarm clocks. I think they used long thin hammers to tap on their bedroom windows. One woman used a pea shooter, I think.
That was in another QI episode. Wasn't really hammers they used, as they could accidentally shatter the windows. It was just some very long sticks so they could reach to the top floor windows. But you are correct that there was a woman who used a pea shooter.
Oh man,they should bring that back.
the knockeruppers probably got the annual subscriptions, like cars and tyres
From the name alone I thought they did something very different
12 is a unique number in that, counting up from zero, it's the first number that's evenly divisible by 1, 2, 3, and 4 -- all the smallest whole numbers. You don't get that much even divisibility with 8, 9, 10, or 14.
60 is also unique among the tens (i.e., 10, 20, 30, 40, etc.), as it's the only tens =
And it passes faster and faster each year. It feels like just yesterday I was planting my tomatoes. Now it's only a couple more weeks until Christmas.
Saw,a scientist on the *the science* channel explain how as one grows older you do experience TIME as passing quicker..🥴💫 that's all I remember,woke up this morning AND I was old.
@@Maya_Pinion one explanation I've heard is that each successive year is a smaller fraction of your life so it feels like it moves a little faster. Like one year for a 10 year old is 10% of their life so far and for an 80 year old it is 1.25%
@@mastod0n1 Yeah, I'm also just thinking that it's to do with familiarity.
Because when I break the routine and go somewhere new, do something different and learn new things, then the passage of time does feel like it temporarily slows down a bit. But when I'm just doing the same old same old routine, day in and day out, time speeds along.
I think it's because, when something's new, your mind is doing a lot - taking it all in, learning, etc. - but, once something's familiar and routine, it becomes subconscious and automatic... and, oh, look, time flies. It's over already.
And, on that observation, for young folks, everything's new and unfamiliar and their mind is racing to take it all in and learn how the world works. But the older you get, the more you've just seen it all before, and it just flies by subconsciously.
That is, my hypothesis here is that your time perception is related to how quickly and intensely you're thinking. If you're thinking at 100 mph - 20 thoughts a second - then a second feels like a longer time, as you've just packed a whole load of thinking into that second. But, as you grow older, it's more subconscious and less conscious - because, like, I've seen all this a hundred times before, so none of it is really surprising me or demanding much mental attention.
Objectively, a second itself doesn't change. It's more about how much your brain is doing - or not doing - relative to that fixed metric.
If you could pack a lifetime of thought into a single second, then seconds would seem like lifetimes. But if you're only having one thought a second, then the seconds just flow by far too quickly.
On days where I try to squeeze in a morning walk somewhere new, then do a bunch of DIY jobs and then - I'm a coder - have an intense bit of thinking coding up something complicated... basically, just fully pack out my day with new and interesting things... then time feels like it slows down again.
But, yeah, the gist of my point, I guess, is that time never objectively changes - it's always one second every second - so it's all to do with how much mental activity happens in those seconds.
Think faster. Think at the immense speed that 5 year olds run their imaginations. And then you'll feel time slowing down again.
But that's harder and harder to do with age, as thinking slows down because, as I say, the more familiar you are with something, the more it's subconscious and automatic.
When you're five, then pretty much everything you encounter is a brand new experience. And your mind is racing, trying to take it all in.
But when you're 75, then there's a lying politician on TV. Yeah, that always happens. They're always like that. Not interesting. Oh, look, there's a new technology. But, yeah, there's always a new technology every other week. This is normal. Not interesting. On your millionth conversation with family, there's really not that much new to be said and you all know each other so well, that there's probably not much point saying it - they already know what you think on this subject and that subject and the other thing.
You get my point? With age, you stop thinking at 100 million miles an hour, as young kids do, and so your "thoughts per second" drops... and with that, I believe that's why time feels like it's going faster and faster.
If you want to test this theory for yourself, then just go do something mad, new, interesting and pack your day with activities and thoughts. That day will feel longer than the one where you just sat where you always sat and did the same old things you always do.
@@josephheiskell3493 Nope
I swear to fucking god it was October last fucking week, why is it December now
I'm just imagining a company having an subscription with this woman to come around wednesdays at 5 pm before closing time.. and when she arrives there right on time, the company was closed because their clock was still incorrect and they thought she didn't make it during work hours
Presumably she could be relied upon to be punctual enough that they'd have chosen to stay open until after she'd come around… but now I'm wondering, that one week she'd have inevitably been sick, just how long they'd have stuck around waiting for her before giving up!
@timparenti but she was the timekeeper, so without her there was no time. So, she couldn't have been later for anything, even she didn't tell the right time
Little did Bill know that at 3:14 he inspired the name to Paganis successor to the Zonda...
when I was in high school, I had a chance to go on a few trips to Europe through and educational tour program. One time our group was paired with a group from Canada that was always late for the bus in the morning. We started joking that they were on metric time.
So good to see the Technical difficulties topic covered years ago being on the QI - Anyone else seen this episode of Citation Needed?
Sheep are like clocks, aren't they?
Tom Scott also has a whole rant about time zones, Daylight Savings Time, and the difficulty of handling all the weird cases in computer code that handles dates/times.
12 can be divided into more whole numbers than 10. The same applies with 60 vs 100. In a world before calculators, these things stuck.
This just in: Eventhough 10 has fewer differen prime factors, segmentation is still very easy to use. We're happy to see stuff 25% off, or 30, 50, 60. It's actually easier to comprehend than doing pure fractions - and I know, becaues I teach maths and fractions are the thing most students inexplicably hate.
I had an epiphany with fractions about halfway through 3rd grade when I realized that a fraction is a physical representation of the old-arithmetic "divided by" symbol (÷), where the numerator and the denominator are the dots. What's 7 ÷ 18? 7/18! It was 1970-- I was easily entertained.
@@ghijkmnop Decimal numbers are still much more intuitive to understand, because they follow the same logic as natural numbers. Comparing 1/3 to 1/4 is already counterintuitive, comparing 3/7 to 2/5 will require some quick maths. Comparing .33 (repeating, obv) to .25 is trivial, comparing .43 to .40 is just as trivial.
Fractions are useful before you get to a result, because you can more easily and more precisely continue your calculation. Decimals are the best way to present a result to make it quickly understood (with an exception being when you hit a fraction straight on - which doesn't really happen in real life).
@@DrZaius3141 I find that's very much a generational thing though. People who grew up before computers, digital clocks etc. were commonplace generally agree that fractions are more intuitive than decimals, while those who did grow up with it (which would include myself) find decimals far more intuitive than fractions.
@@rjfaber1991 I'm old and I am okay with either decimals or fractions. What frustrates me is when (other) old people say "A quarter of" when you ask them what time it is. Because half of them think "A quarter of eight" means 7:45, and the other half think it means 8:15. And it literally doesn't matter what it *actually* means, because half of people use it wrong anyway so when anybody says "a quarter of" it could be anywhere in that 30 minute window.
One of those topics that I learned of on Tech Diff's Citation Needed before I saw it here on QI.
Interestingly, Swatch invented a new time system called the Swatch Internet Time. A day consists of 1000 .beats and there are no time zones or summer and winter time, so time is the same all around the globe. This was back in 1998, so as you might have guessed, it never really caught on.
She could have been superseded by a Wauchope time ball. A British naval officer wanted to help mariners synchronize their watches for navigation. In Portsmouth he constructed a device with a large ball on a pole on the roof of a building. Every day at 1PM it dropped. Ships captains could watch from the harbor and set their chronometers.
There were time balls set up on prominent buildings in a number of cities, including New York.
It was the inspiration for the New Years Eve ball drop in Times Square.
I think you get a point for being quite interesting!
Also the electronic time company, which used telegraph cables.
Seems like lots of ppl would miss the drop and all they'd know is that it's sometime after 1pm
Yes, good point, you're probably right! In fact, another time ball was installed at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich (London) in 1833 and it's still in operation to this day: Each day, at 12.55, the bright red time ball rises half way up its mast. At 12.58 it rises all the way to the top. At 13.00 exactly, the ball falls, and so provides a signal to anyone who happens to be looking. Since the observatory is on a hill, the ball can be seen from the river, but of course if you are looking the wrong way, you have to wait until the next day before it happens again, or buy your time from someone like Ruth Belleville.
Btw, these time balls is where the expression 'on the ball' comes from.
Danny Baker, what a mind of trivia that guy has.
A shame that he's one of the least funny people to grace QI
Still funnier than Jo Brand, who's joke repertoire consists of fat jokes, 'my husband...' jokes and an infatuation with the late Michael winner
In The Hiding Place, an au ttobiography by Corrie Ten Boom, she tells the story of going to the big city in Holland, to get the correct time every week. He was a watchmaker, from memory.
From the perspective of a Dutch person, Bill picks a very dubious name for his hours
What does it mean?
@@rachelcookie321 sounds like hoer which is dutch for pr*stitute
Bill's been to the Edinburgh festival enough times to know better!
Tom Scott had Ruth Bellville on Citation Needed as well. Quite interesting!
To be fair there is quite a bit of crossover between QI and CN
You can count to 12 on one hand by using your thumb to point at the creases in your fingers. Not including the thumb (because the thumb can't point at it yourself), each of the four fingers has three points it bends (3 * 4 = 12). You can extend that to 60 by keeping track of how many 12s you've counted using the fingers (and thumb) on your other hand (12 * 5 = 60), usually by using that finger to point at the creases. Look up "babylonian hand counting" for better explanations than mine.
I mean... Assuming you're not missing any digits you could count all the way to 1023 on two hands. Just use binary.
Made it very easy to keep track of high numbers of sit-ups back in college. Just make sure your hands aren't pointing at anyone when you count 4.
@@greenredblue Or 132. 😁
Thanks! Now i know of 3 people who know how to count binary with their fingers! A fellow conscript during my service showed me 22 years ago, and whenever i show it to someone i am met with the same bewildered look he was (among our platoon apart from my interest). And that, even though i work in engineering where everybody actualy knows how binary numbers work!
(4 actually, i once commented somewhere about "being able to count ones "bodycount" on one hand" that that could potentially mean count to 31 not just five as everybody assumed. So i had to explain how it works and one person understood my explanation.)
you and i might be able to have conversations at parties that would drive everyone else away... how are you on the bronze age collapse and numerology in the roman legion? say... Hadrian to Kaiser.
It's easier for me to count the finger segments instead (as my brain doesn't see the crease between the finger and the palm as part of the finger). But the rest of it is exactly the same.
@@thsscapi That's valid, might be easier for most people to do it that way.
When I was a work study analyst (time & motion) we recorded activities on a watch that was divided into centiminutes (100 cm per minute) rather than seconds because when it came to applying our percentage rating for the operators performance it saved a lot of messing about
I am kind of facinated by the idea that converting fractions to percentage might be considered a wastefully time consuming activity by the very people that perform time use analysis.
@@jmackmcneill You can't expect others to accept more efficient ways of working if you are inefficient yourself 🙂
Ancient peoples used their body parts to create many different base systems: base-10 is _not_ the only natural or valid way to count with your hands. Speaking directly to the naturalness of base-12, which Bill rejects, many peoples enumerated the first five objects with five fingers on one hand then enumerated the sixth object by closing their hand. (Remember that zero hadn't been invented yet, so no one had a hand signal to for zero.) Most ancient cultures, but not all, extended the base-6 system to base-12 by enumerating the seventh object with a finger on their other hand. This system enumerates 12 objects, not 10, with two hands.
Keep in mind that a hand is a hand is a hand. If I am trying to express a quantity to you and I show you my _left_ hand with three extended fingers, you would likely interpret that as 3 items. If I show you my _right_ hand with three extended fingers, you would still likely interpret that as 3 items. If I show you both of my hands at the same time, each with three extended fingers, what is the "correct" interpretation? We contemporary humans tend to sum the extended fingers and interpret it as 6 items. But, we contemporary humans might interpret the hands to represent positional notation: 33. In the contemporary world, you cannot convincingly argue that 6 is correct and 33 is incorrect-or vice versa.
Ancient peoples didn't have positional notation because that technology hadn't been invented yet, so they never would have interpreted it to mean 33. Similarly, enumerating (counting) was invented long before addition was invented. So, for many peoples, interpreting two hands each with three extended fingers to mean 6 items would have been impossible.
Even after addition was invented, summing the extended fingers is not obviously the "correct" interpretation. If showing the left hand with three extended fingers means 3 and showing the right hand with three extended fingers means 3, then showing both hands with three extended fingers means 3! It's an emphatic 3. In the contemporary world, if someone shows you their right hand with only their middle finger extended, what meaning do you assign to that one finger? But if the same person shows you both of their hands at the same time, each with only their middle finger extended, do you say to yourself, "Oh! They are telling me there are 2 items," or do you interpret two hands to be more emphatic than one hand?
Base 10 is not inherently superior or more intuitive than base 12. I'm not aware of any research that proves that contemporary technology requires humans to use base 10, and base 12 would be advantageous in many ways (especially when converting to binary). It's probably just an accident that we use base 10 instead of base 12.
The Goon Show sketch What Time Is It Eccles had Eccles showing the time on a bit of paper.
9 year old me 12 hours before Christmas: "UGH, Christmas is ages away, HURRY UP!"
29 year old me 12 months before turning 30: "Oh god, I'm going to be 30 soon, SLOW DOWN!"
Yes, having my birthday at the end of the year, I've been 'turning 50 next year' since January (for future people reading this, it's December now). It's still a year off but it seems very near.
Consider 30 as your new 20 but with 10 extras years of experience to hopefully better deal with certain situations... ^^ ("Yeah? How would you know?" / "Well, I'm in my early 40s.")
I love crotchety old Bill. 🙂
I can remember yrs ago the media announcing that the government was going to decimalise clocks, but many weren't too worried as it was April 1st!
I knew this from Citation Needed (panel show) and from Futility Closet (podcast about history). Futility Closet go into it in detail, explaining the business process and the background.
I vaguely recall when there was a push in America to go metric in the 70s, there was talk of a 10 hour metric day.
ah, i learned of this one from Citation Needed
Good group of guests on that one
"We'll never have elevenses again!" bwahahaaaha
Pippin in shambles right now
One reason why post-revolutionary French decimal time didn't work was because workers still only got one day off each week. So instead of working six days in a row, they had to work nine.
A 10 day week should be 7 days on 3 days off.
Mathematically that works out as more days off.
2 days off out of 7 a year works out as 104.
Where as 3 out of 10 works out at 108.
@@Lord_Skeptic "Should be"? I'll pass on your suggestion to the Committee of Public Safety, but I doubt anything will come of it.
That's one I didn't know. Makes sense. When I was in highschool in the 70s, people would argue about whose watch was the most accurate. The only way to settle the dispute was to tune the shortwave radio to WWV. Smartphones have made such arguments a relic of the past
You had to work a lot harder to come up with a fun argument back then, now the internet doles them out by the fistful
How did Bill Bailey's system spell? It sounds like the supercar ... Huayra, so maybe it's where the car's name got the idea from 😄
Amazingly, it felt like it took an hour to watch this short video. But not a Bill Bailey hour!
Metric time would have 10 hours in a day.
100 minutes in an hour.
100 seconds in a minute.
There is not enough room on the watch for the last two.
10 days in a week (there is not enough room on the calendar).
10 months in a year consisting of 36½ days (not enough room on the calendar).
The ½ day would alternate between the end and the start of the month.
Leap years have an intercalculary date at the end of the year.
What a brilliant marketing scheme. Selling time. The Bill Bailey QI Metric Clock.
Since Sean Locke had the power of [The World]. It makes sense that Bill Bailey would have [King Crimson]
Anyone else know this from citation needed?
Yep I was thinking it was probably the same story
Ah yes, it's Corgi Shitting Time!
Babylon had base 60 with a sub-base of 10 not 12. They gave us the first minute portion and the second minute portion which are still in use today.
Part of a Clockmakers trade was to visit homes on a regular basis to set the clock's time and some were even contracted to regularly wind the clock up because the Owner did not trust the servants to do it.
So many quick witted comediennes available - and there sits Jeremy Clarkson.
* does anyone really know what time it is?* 🎶
Isn't it weird how time is the only thing that's globally standardized? It shows how crucial it is for international interactions and why it's such a sticky system that we can't really change it - even if it would be smarter if it worked in a decimal system. It wouldn't even require big changes to turn those 86,400 seconds into 100,000. It would make counting time easier - a new second would be shorter, so no real pause between the numbers as you say them out loud. We wouldn't have to wait as long if someone where to say "just a second". Obviously, the speed of light would be adjusted to around 258,000km/s. A meter would need to be redefined, as it is currently tied to the second and light speed.
It is however problematic that 100,000 is a bit weird to segment. A newminute would be 100 newseconds (which is about 50% longer than an old second). With a newhour being 100 newminutes, it would equal 2.4 old hours (2 hours, 24 min) - which would mean we'd finally get new movies that only last an hour. On the flipside, companies would lobby heavily to keep a working day at 8 newhours, leaving less than 5 old hours for the unnecessary stuff in life, like sleep or free time.
It would really screw up that song from Rent, too!
Time has been standardised for an eternity. We are in the year 2024 of the standardisation. The French and English didn’t agree on lengths till the 20th century.
Ever since I've heard of them, I've wanted a metric clock. I've done attempts to jerry rig something myself, but my non-skills in mechanics and coding has left me stumped.
The closest thing I've gotten to is to buy an analog 24 hr clock (that goes through hour revolutions once every day. With 12 o clock noon at the nottom and 24 at the top), I've considered just snipping off the minute and second hand off it and just leave the Hour and make a new 10 hr backing. But I'd loose so much precision.
Now, honestly, if anyone out there can point me towards a full 10 hour metric clock for sale for reasonable prices... I'd be very much interested!
Invite Hank Green onto the panel!
Thank you.
Ya gotta love Manny
The reason decimal time fails is that there aren't 100 days in a year. Turns out the universe doesn't care how many fingers we have on our hands.
Fun fact. U S submarines on patrol adopt a thirty hour day when submerged.. Everyone works a ten hour shift.
The Rural Buddha has passed judgment. Approach the zone of accountability with trepidation and a sense of foreboding!
I wish I owned a pipe just so I can pretend to act sophisticated like Bill Bailey 😂
03:38 We should have adopted base 12. Now it'd be virtually impossible to do it.
It seems like you could buy the time and immediately undercut them.
I don't think so. Who would buy it from you? I think it worked for them because they had a reputation for being reliable and trustworthy.
Come on, captions PLEASEE!!
5 boys, building each other up, will come up with the weirdest stuff, usually trouble
BBC did an amazing April Fools on the new decimal day 50 ish years ago
too bad they didnt have the bit that came later in the episode, where they talk about time again, and then one of them goes :
By whos time System are we using ?? :
Aw. I was hoping to see the part where Bill goes mad with power.
I've got the time written down on a piece of paper.
Nineses?
So if I want to meet the time selling lady, I need to make an appointment with her. But I don't know the time! The ones who need her the most would always miss her! What a tragedy!
Don't you know you can sell time in a bottle?
I thought terry stole time*...
*the leg of
I admit it, I don’t know how king crimson works. Like, he erases time, but, what does that mean?
Hunh, this was really just oploaded
It's about time!
It's the easiest buisness model ever
Why not 48 because that’s twice as divisible as 24
Talking about factors of 24. What about 60? Which is after all also used in time. And was the base of the Mayan number system.
Huh?
@@Maya_Pinion 60 has way more factors than 24, which is almost certainly why we have 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute.
Babylonian numerals, not Mayan. The Maya used a base-20 system, though of course Europeans did not know that in ancient times. The Babylonian base 60 system is still used for measuring time and angles, but afaik nothing else.
Well I won't get it back either way.
"Anyway. We've just spent an hour on that topic".
And now YEARS will be wasted commenting about it.
Metric and its decimal system will always be best in my heart, but it is to Metric's eternal disgrace that you can't easily divide a metre into thirds
Base 10 time would be terrible. There is a reason it never works.
Yes, Allen, the rent economy is a scam
Until 1940 um… why???
Because Ruth Belville became too old to continue the business. She died in 1943 aged 89.
Actually, the Babylonians did not use a base 12 system. Rather they used base 60, which they inherited from the Sumerians.
Or the trolls under the bridge...
Just do time as a percentage of a day. That is how computers do it. Then you have a very clear idea of what proportion of the day you are spending on any one task. If you need smaller then 1% you could have persec's or percentage seconds.
Well, you’re certainly going to need smaller units than 1% if you’re hoping to boil an egg or catch a bus.
That is a fair point and there would definitely need to be some intermediate units to make it a smoother transition. Ironically 1% of a day is around is 15 minutes so depending how ridiculously hardboiled you like your eggs it could be a perfect amount of cooking time. Nothing of significance about just an intresting coincidence.
@@insertnameheregk There must be some confusion. Are you thinking of 1% of your work shift or something? Because 1% of 24 hours is 14.4 minutes.
@@martinmills135 Thanks for pointing that out. Just a typo I am afraid. I fixed it and changed my wording to make the joke more apparent.
In deference to the maths geeks and precision time keepers out there let me apologise in advance for the cardinal sin of rounding UP from 14.36. And any chiefs for advocating 15 minutes as a sane amount of time to boil an egg.
Babalonians had a base 60 counting system, not base 12.
Instead of trying to make decimal time they should have made the rest of the metric system base-12. That would have made a lot of things easier.
Maybe bring in a base 12 number writing system too. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,10 . Probably would want some better symbols than A and B for 10 and 11.
You don't have 10 fingers, you have 8 fingers and 2 thumbs.
That the thumb isnt a finger is a really rare (british?) idea and barely is a thing in the english speaking world. In pretty much all other languages/dictionaries the thumb is a finger and normal people therefor have 10 fingers. Think of finger being the parent definition, like tooth being the parent definition for molars, incisors, etc. ... thats how pretty much everyone in the world handles this, and yes that includes the fields of medicine and science.
Just like the imperial system not every definition thought up is useful or rational, best to let go especially when there is no trouble with the alternative, more popular definition.
The words 'finger' and 'five' have the same origin.
All thumbs are fingers....
But not all fingers are thumbs.
All thumbs are fingers....
But not all fingers are thumbs.
This is what I tell people whenever they jeer at Americans for the Fahrenheit thermometer or whatever non-metric-system measurement. You're still using the Babylonian clock, and the Babylonian circle with 360 degrees. Why not 100 degrees equal to 100 percent of the circle? 100 seconds in a minute, 100 minutes in an hour, and 100 hours in a day, or 10 hours in a day, or whatever? 10 months in a year, 100 weeks. Why not? Adherence to tradition, something metric system lovers are supposed to turn their noses up at.
Obviously, you can't do it with the number of days it takes for the Earth to go around the Sun. That's still 365-and-a-bit.
Americans get jeered because they've adhered to an archaic measurement system while the rest of the world has moved on. This was despite saying they'd change back in the late 60s but then backing out because it was all too hard, leaving other countries who committed to the change having to still deal with both systems due to Americas intransigence. Time, as was mentioned in this video, is universally accepted, something of a rarity, and that alone means it doesn't need to be changed, but if it was, I'm sure America would refuse to accept a new system anyway.
There is an angular measurement system which uses the gradian as the basic unit, with 100 gradians in a right angle. While it has a few useful features, it's very rarely used as it has neither the familiarity of degrees nor the unitless nature of radians.
It's not about traditions or their rejection. It's about standardisation, so that different groups can communicate effectively. It was easier to invent a rational metric system than to attempt to impose one set of standards for inches, miles, tons, ounces, etc. when different systems use the same word for different measurements.
There are 20 fluid ounces in a pint. There are 16 fluid ounces in a pint. There are 32 roquilles in a pinte. One pinte is just over 2 pints, but less than 2 pints.
Calendars and clocks don't have that problem since the same words aren't being used to mean different things. So an ancient system works for standardisation because everyone agrees on what the words mean.
So tell me where Bill erased time exactly? All he did was propose a metric system, that's not erasing time. Very click bait and false advertising title! I'd expect better from a production that values factual correctness.
Clarkson 🤮🤮
Time is Always, NOW. ''what time is it?'' you're not going to give a number other than what is Now. no matter the number Time is always, Now.
But we measure time. So now is the time for you to stop that pedantry.
bollox
"When will we meet up?"
"In the future now!"
It's a constant process of coming into being and passing away.
"When will then be now?" "Soon".
This is supposed to be funny?
QI still pushing Fantasy History.
The Babylonians? Why not say the Teletubbies? They're as real.
The French were FAR too late .............
By the time (no pun intended) they got around to the French revolution (so named to differentiate it from the several earlier revolutions (in France)) the 12/24 was too interwoven with navigation which also used degrees, minutes & seconds as measures of distance ............ Which overlaid with duration makes it far easier to calculate where you are 🙄
Keep your nasty condescendance
@nikandisaac