Why is a minute divided into 60 seconds, an hour into 60 minutes?
As an American with a physics background, a while ago I casually reviewed how bad our non-metric system is -- <a href="http://joshuaspodek.com/metric-system-isnt" rel="nofollow">http://joshuaspodek.com/metric-system-isnt</a> -- and found it not nearly as bad as people treat it. Among other things, when I build things it's useful to divide in half a few times, which is easier with inches and feet. And I've found no benefit to Celsius's 0 and 100 coinciding with water's state changing.<p>I bring that up here because I've never heard even the staunchest metric proponents use kiloseconds or megaseconds or hesitate to use hours, minutes, days, and so on. I know people experimented with decimal times, especially around the French Revolution, but it didn't stick. It's funny when someone talks about the value of using base ten and then switches to base 60, base 12, and base 24 in the next sentence.<p>I should say that in physics experiments people used seconds only (which is where I learned that to within about a percent a year is pi times ten to the seventh).