The french:
Why the ‘IIII’ insted of ‘IV’?
Prevents confusion between the four and the six: III, IV, V, VI, when the watch is not held perfectly vertically for viewing.
Actually very common in watches with roman numbers iirc
i’m pretty sure that IV is a modern typographic thing
I’ve also heard that, because in Latin IV is the beginning of “IVPPITER” (Jupiter), there’s a theory that people avoided using “IV” as to not “disrespect” the god’s name. 🤷♀️
Also, on a 12 hour clock, 3 sets of four looks clean af I guess, e.g.:
- I, II, III, IIII
- V, VI, VII, VIII
- IX, X, XI, XII
Since the IIII usage is common in the Middle Ages and even into the Early Modern Period, when nobody believed in Jupiter, that is obviously just something somebody made up.
It could have also started from that and continued on despite people not knowing the reason, no? I do agree that it’s quite silly and unlikely, though.
May as well just go with VIIII then. Or maybe 9.
IIIIIIIII
Goddamn metric time
Even the French figured out that decimalized time was stupid after a couple of years.
Which has added credence to the old saying that “The French follow no one. And no one follows the French.”
I kinda want to try it out lol
Why is it stupid beyond, “nobody else uses it”?
Well, beyond the sheer social resistance to the idea. Turns out everyone needs to agree it’s a great idea and almost no one did. Evidently humans are wired to the base12 time format far better.
The attempt at switching to base10 time quickly fell apart when people started notice that the the “time markers” were starting to drift. And at some point they finally figured out that what we call “noon” was going drift rather quickly to not happening until evening and therefore Monday was going to move to a different spot also. This is a very bad thing. Because any kind of calendaring system needs to be as consistent as possible. Noon must happen at the same point in the day every day or as close to it as it it can mathematically get. If it drifts to fast and far, then it’s a worthless marker for time. And decimal time has that problem in spades.
Now, no calendar system is perfect because the orbits of the planets in our solar system isn’t perfectly consistent. Sometimes the orbit of earth is a tiny bit faster or sometimes it’s a tiny bit slower. So we strive to get a close as we can but we still need to make adjustments. Turns out, all that math is really bloody hard.
??? That’s not how it worked at all.
They still had the same length of time per day; 24 hours was equal to 10 french hour, each french hour was 100 french minutes, and each french minute was 100 french seconds. So noon arrived at 5 every day.
Now I really want a .beats watch. That’s so retro cool.
If you’re ok with a screwdriver, you can mod a Casio F91-W and add a .beat watchface https://www.sensorwatch.net/docs/watchfaces/clock/#beat-time
Why does everything that comes from Switzerland always seem to be owned by Swatch? Do they not have any other brands there?
Swatch is the largest watch company in the world and you’ll be surprised which brands are owned by them. Omega for example
