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gleenn 5 days ago

Case-in-point, you are mistaken. The duration of a day changes due to many things, both logically and also physically due to the nature of Earth. Also just because you can call a second a second doesn't mean that is helpful making datetime software usable or easy on a different planet.

mikepurvis 4 days ago | parent [-]

I think he's speaking historically. Obviously now a second is a fundamental SI unit defined in terms of physics experiments, but the origin of it was as the amount of time that was 1/3600th of an hour of which there are 24 in the day.

shadowgovt 4 days ago | parent [-]

Similar to how almost-pi-squared meters-per-second shows up in the constant for gravitational acceleration near Earth's surface because the meter was originally "the length of pendulum that ticks once a second" and there's a pi in the pendulum motion equation.

(... it's not exactly pi-squared because the French yanked it around a bit before settling into the modern number based on light in a vacuum and cesium atoms).