SciShow Tangents - Timekeeping

Episode Date: March 19, 2019

If you think about it, we’re all time travelers moving forward at one second per second… right? This week, we try really hard to define time, get sort of existential about it, and then talk about the science of timekeeping, from circadian rhythms to weird mechanical clocks. What happens to someone’s sense of time if you put them in a big bunker locked away from the outside world? How did we decide there would be 60 seconds in a minute, and did we ever try to measure time with a decimal system? And if a human were to instantaneously dissolve into a pile of goo because their time was up, what would it sound like?Sources:[Truth or Fail]https://mechanism.ucsd.edu/teaching/F11/philbiology2011/aschoff.circadianrhythmsinman.1965.pdfhttps://www.mpg.de/943613/S003_Flashback_060_061.pdfhttps://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/science-obituaries/6216073/Maurizio-Montalbini.html[Fact Off]Music & walking:https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0067932Castle Clock: http://muslimheritage.com/article/al-jazari%E2%80%99s-castle-water-clock-analysis-its-components-and-functioninghttps://artsandculture.google.com/asset/al-jazari-s-book-of-knowledge-of-ingenious-mechanical-devices-the-castle-water-clock/DgF6LT4UYXvU4Ahttps://www.ee.columbia.edu/not-your-father%E2%80%99s-analog-computer-professor-yannis-tsividisAnimation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz7soHvy-Pw[Ask the Science Couch]60 seconds/minutes:https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-1487,00.htmlhttp://curious.astro.cornell.edu/161-our-solar-system/the-earth/day-night-cycle/761-why-is-a-day-divided-into-24-hours-intermediatehttps://gizmodo.com/why-there-are-24-hours-in-a-day-5926491http://mentalfloss.com/article/32127/decimal-time-how-french-made-10-hour-day[Butt One More Thing]Speed of poop:https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/speed-of-poop-big-or-small-mammals-drop-a-deuce-in-12-secs-study-finds/https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2017/sm/c6sm02795d/unauth#!divAbstract

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen. This week, joining me as always are Stefan Chin. Hello. I'm Stephen pretty good. I'm feeling energized today. Oh, nice. Not usually, not how I feel. That's great. What's your tagline?

Deep thinker. Sam Schultz, deep thinker. Sari Riley is also here with us today. Hello. How are you doing? I'm sorry I can't turn toward you. My neck hurts. That's okay.

It's been a weird day, so I'm going to compartmentalize and let the science wash over me. That sounds great. Is that your tagline? Oh, yeah, sure. Compartmentalizing and letting the science wash over me. Sorry, Riley. And I'm Hank Green. It's a pleasure to be here today. My tagline is floofadoofa. Every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together, try to one-up and amaze and delight each other with science facts. We're playing for glory, but we're also keeping score and awarding Hank Bucks from week to week, and we do everything we can to stay on topic. But the podcast is called Tangents, so sometimes we're bad at that.

And if the rest of the team deems the tangent unworthy, we will force that person to give up one of their Hank Bucks. So tangent with care. And now, as always, we're going to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem. From sticks in the ground to the watches we wound to centralized, standardized, atomic clocks, we time infinitesimal

down to the tenth decimal and we know when to check the mailbox. Our rate, I reckon, is one second per second. Even knowing this changes the paradigm, while our telomeres unravel, each of us will travel through space, but also through time. I love the idea that we're traveling through time at one second per second. We're all time travelers. We're all time travelers.

We're headed into the future. What's a telomere? It's the thing at the end of your chromosomes. They get shorter and shorter as you get older. It's one of the processes through which we age. So we're getting older and older on this, the arrow of time. And we must travel at one second per second. We can travel no faster than that or no shorter than that. though there are weird relativistic things that maybe now that I've said that, people will yell at me about. All the pedants. I don't know how to say that word. The pedants.

The pedants will come out of the woodwork and yell at you about plane travel and mountains. They're going to come at you about the pronunciation of pedant as well. Yeah, also that. Hey, what's time our subject today is time and time keeping and now i guess sari has to tell us what time is yeah i was trying to think about this and i looked it up and then uh i made up my own definition because it's a construct and because i'm a human i can do that i guess um and so that's the dance suck it the dance so the way i want to define it is time keeping is a way in which we observe the

natural natural world and divide it into chunks to let us predict stuff plan ahead or communicate with each other about when things are going to happen or things like that. I'm sure there's more things outside of that umbrella, but... Time is so weird. It's so upsetting. It seems like upon first blush, you're just like, oh, yeah, sure, that's a thing. I've experienced that my whole life. No big deal. Time, of course. But then you're like, wait, why? Why, though? Why are we in this weird boat that goes and it's always going? Is there like an infinite nature, like it will go on forever? And also, does it go infinitely backward?

And physicists say no, that it had a start. There was a time before time, but that doesn't make sense. The sentence I said doesn't make sense. It's a bad sentence. Yeah. I get very upset by time. But it is very helpful to keep track of it so that we know when we need to get to the studio to record tangents and in general i do not think about that in an existential upsetting way i think

time makes us think a lot like really hard about ourselves and our worlds because it is just a product of our brains right so it's like i'm gonna stress about time wait time is just a product of our brains is it is it though because there's all this stuff about like increasing entropy which seems like very outside of our brains well i also think that like time seems to be a thing that exists regardless of humans like there seems to be an arrow to the universe you know it's doing a thing with or without us yes time exists with exists with or without us. That's fair. But our perception of time, like the things that time can psychologically do to us.

And also physiologically, there's just keep going down and then eventually you fall apart. All your proteins get too short and you just fall into a pile of worm food. Yeah. Decomposition happens. But the way you describe that makes me think that everyone just poofs one day into a pile of bones. I mean, in terms of geologic time, that's what happens.

You sort of hold together for a blink, and then suddenly... It's like a more squelchy noise than that, I think. Sam, can you make the noise of the instantaneous dissolution of a human into a pile of goo? It's a two-part sound. So I guess we know now a little bit about timekeeping,

and it is definitely a construction of humans. I googled real hard to find other animals that whole time, and according to Google, they don't exist. I thought a bee maybe. Bees would. But bees don't. Yeah, hey, hey, other bees. Let let's do something at like 4 30 yeah animals with jobs seem like they would have like a little watch in their head they do respond to stimuli like the sun and moon and stars traveling yeah so like they can navigate based on celestial bodies but i think that's different

than time idea yeah the time keeping yeah so navigating based on celestial bodies is different than yeah planning out your day based on their movement i don't know if i agree with that i guess like the things that we do in our day like we make ourselves think about time but also like our bodies experience it as quickly as they do and like the sun happens and we have to do things and like everything's paced out to our life. Now we have physiological timekeeping that happens inside of our bodies. It's like a thing that is just happening. Like we get tired and we have circadian rhythms and all of that,

which other animals also have. But timekeeping as a technology is certainly unique to humans. I agree. We fought through it, everybody. And now it's time for Truth or Fail. One of our panelists has prepared three science facts

for our education and enjoyment. But only one of those facts is real. The other panelists have to figure out either by deduction or wild guess which one is the true fact. If they do, they get a Hank Buck. If they're tricked, our fact presenter gets a Hank Buck. And this week, our fact presenter is Sam Schultz.

Here we go. Like we were saying, a lot of life on Earth has, like, its own internal way of keeping time. And that's the circadian rhythm. It's like the sun-dictated sleeping and waking cycle that we all experience. But since we figured out the circadian rhythm thing, there's always been the question, what if there was no external way to tell time? What if we couldn't see the sun? Would that just like screw us up completely?

So in the late 1950s through the 1980s, a pair of German scientists put 300-ish people in little fully furnished bunkers and told them to just live their lives, their normal lives, devoid of knowing what time it was. Okay. What do you think their results? They put 300 people? Uh-huh. That's a lot. That's a lot.

Yeah. They had a lot of booths, it seems like. Like a lot of little apartments built in a big bunker. With no windows. With nothing, yeah. But they can like turn on and off the lights if they wanted to. They had a little kitchen. They had to. They had a little kitchen. They had food.

They had a record player. They had people? Not other people. No other people. All by themselves. How long did they stay in? 18 days. Okay.

So, did the people's cycles shift to 20 hours awake and 10 hours of sleep schedules, accompanied by the impression that less time had passed than actually had? the impression that less time had passed than actually had. Two, people started getting their sleep in the form of frequent naps with most of their non-nap activity happening to occur around dawn and dusk. Like if they could have seen the sun, that's what would have been happening. Or three,

nothing really and everybody was just normal. Everybody was just normal? Yeah. Oh no! Because I was going to go with number three after hearing the first two. But then that seems extremely unlikely. Yeah, there's no way they were normal. But I also feel like it would be impossible for us actually to line up with actual dawn and dusk,

which is also kind of normal. I feel like you get messed up at the beginning at least. Because I've heard the thing about that our circadian rhythm is not exactly 24 hours. And so it just feels correct to me that like if you were in this bunker without knowing what actual time it was that you would slowly drift onto a different schedule.

20 hours awake, 10 hours asleep. But I didn't think it was that different. That's pretty dramatic. Yeah. I also feel like napping would be much more likely. Especially because, like, what am I doing? Like, do I have an activity I need to accomplish?

Have you given me, like, craft work to do? Do I have knitting needles? Because if there's nothing to do, I'm going to nap all the time. They were German, so they could probably listen to craft work. Thanks. They did have records in books and stuff. They had records in books and stuff they had records and stuff i worry about the nap one it could either be true or convincing lie because i feel like that would be a justification

for those like the ideal sleep schedule for humans is taking 20 minute naps in the middle of the day or or things like that i was hearing that yeah and so it could either be a weird pseudoscientific thing that has come up nowadays that you just adapted as a lie to be from this study. Or this could be the study that kick-started those thoughts and ideas. Could be. When was this study from? The late 1950s to the early 1980s. Oh, so they did this for a while.

Yeah. Okay. So the things we have. We have cycles shifted, 20 hours awake, 10 hours of sleep. Two, frequent naps, most action at dusk and dawn. Or three, everything was normal. Feeling normal over here. Why is normal the weirdest one?

You guys, I'm going to go with normal. I'm going to go with naps. All right. I'll go with the 20 hours and 10 hours. Oh, we're denying you any point clusters, Sam. You jerks. All right, so the right answer between 20 hours awake, 10 hours asleep, people taking naps, or nothing, everything's normal.

Nothing, everything's normal. Nothing, everything's normal? Yeah, so number one was the 20 hours awake, 10 hours asleep thing and the impression that less time passed than I actually had. awake, 10 hours of sleep thing, and the impression that less time passed than it actually had. So Maurizio Montalbini was a cave diver who spent 210 days underground in 1987. Then in 1989, a woman named Stefania Folini spent 130 days in a cave. I've heard of these people.

I've heard of this cave thing. Yeah. Both of them were studied by NASA to some degree. I couldn't quite tell. It's kind of like sketchy details and I'll tell you why that is I think in a second. They both lost a ton of weight and experienced a huge shift in their sleep patterns to 20 hours awake, 10 hours of sleep.

And they also thought that way less time had passed. Stefania Fellini thought that two months had passed when in fact four months had passed. And it was pretty similar for the other guy too. They both had like the same results. And I think, I'll tell you why I think that is when I get to the third one, that's right.

Number two, that's just cats. Cats nab all day and then they're gone. Well. Good lie, Sam. And number three, they were all okay. They spent 18 days in isolation in a little nice apartment where they could turn the lights on and off. Their sleep turned into more like a 25-hour cycle.

And I read somewhere that that was just because people like to stay up late. That's normal. It's normal. It was like 24.8 or something. That's pretty normal. That's pretty normal. Yeah. And then after they got into that cycle, when they stayed there, it totally remained constant. Like for everybody that they tested, once they got into that slightly longer cycle, it stayed exactly the same.

They figured this out and they set this baseline for how people in this isolation would be living. And they identified things called zeitgebers or time givers. And those were things that people did like socially that made them know internally like what time it was. So like eating, like when they got hungry or needed to drink water or stuff with their internal temperature. Okay. Could tell people what time to go to bed.

So then they started messing with those and like cranking like the temperature, like giving people less food or less stimulation. Then they started getting results like the people who stayed in the cave. So that was like, it would mess up your internal temperature and then you'd start getting like real weird. But I think the two people in the cave were so weird

because it seemed more like a publicity stunt to me. And like the lady didn't have anything. She had like cardboard and scissors and like a rat or something. So they were... What? She picked three items to go into a cave. What do you want? Cardboard, scissors, rat.

She had two mice and like cardboard that she's doing crafts with. Was she friends with the mice? Were they like companions? She said she talked to the mice and had conversations with them. Do they live there or she brought them in with her? I think they were brought in with her. This is very weird. It's very MacGyver thing.

This is like, and then she exploded the door. That's how she got out. When they let her out, she said she didn't really want to leave. Like when she was ready, when they told her it was time to come out

because there was a predetermined time, then she was like kind of sad that she was getting out of the cave too. Generally, as long as you can turn on and off your own lights,

that seems like the thing that you will stay consistent no matter how long you are away from the sun. Wow. At least among 300 people. As long as they're German. As long as they're German. It's very precise. For 18 days. The people in the caves were in there for

longer. They were in there for a really long time. I just think that there was so much stress associated probably with the way that they were living. Living in the cardboard and really long time. I just think that there was so much stress associated probably with the way that they were living. Living in the cardboard and sleeping on scissors. And I couldn't find if Stefania had a bed or anything. I know that Maurizio slept in a wooden box.

So I think that they were setting themselves up to be in an intense situation. If I am sleeping in a box with two rats cardboard and some scissors yeah i'm not gonna sleep for 10 hours a night i'm gonna sleep for like three hours and be like ow my back well maybe you'll be but you'll be awake for 20 hours so maybe you'll be like i don't want to fall asleep it's no good uh did you say why they went down into the cave marizio just liked to do it and he wanted to set world records and he was a caver so like eventually he got hooked up with nasa it seemed

like and they were like testing him just when he would go down there to try to set the world records yeah and uh stefania was a fan of his and just did it to do a world record too so i think she still has the longest world record for a woman being isolated like the woman's record for isolation oh huh and i think he might too but i don't know he just died in like 2006 and i think he had just set the world record when he died so maybe by now somebody else did but for like overall isolation he has overall isolation i'm pretty sure and did he die of isolation He died of heart problems that a lot of the obituaries I read said was not related to the stress from living in a cave a lot. But they all said that, and it seemed very suspicious that they would all say that.

Just with everybody wanting to be very clear. Yeah. But the way I got clued onto this was that there are some studies and stuff that say, like, the human body has a 30-hour sleep cycle, and I think it seemed like it was only based on these two. These two random cave people who slept on scissors. People who had bunks and

lights and lived in a place and they had books and stuff. They just went to like 24.8. Yeah. Well, you know, it's like the paleo diet. All those old inhumans just lived in caves with scissors. Gotta go back to our ancestors.

Two mice, some scissors, and some cardboard to do some crafts with. Yeah, she comes out of the cave and she's just got a bunch of really great cardboard crafts. She was an interior designer, so she probably had some good ideas while she was down there.

Now we're going to head into our fact off. But before we do that, we're going to hear some words from some sponsors. We're back. Hank Buck totals right now. Sarah, you got nothing.

Stephanie, you got nothing. Sam and I are tied with two. Now get ready for the fact-off. Two panelists have brought in science fact to present to the others in an attempt to blow our minds. And we each have a Hank Buck to award to the fact that we like the most. If both facts are a giant snooze, then you don't get a Hank Buck. We throw it in the trash. So who goes first? It's going to be the person,

and I've been watching, who most recently checked their watch. I don't have a watch. I know. Did I check it since coming down here? You haven't, no. But you probably did, because you have one, yeah.

I don't think I've had a watch since junior year of high school and it i wanted to be edgy so instead of having a watch with numbers i had a watch with colors on it instead and a little circle that moved around that's how sari was edgy it was just so when people looked at my watch they'd be like how do you tell time on that? That's not edgy. That's pretentiously nerdy. Okay. Maybe those are synonymous in my head, and that's how I've become the way that I am. All right.

So, Stefan and Sari are in charge of the fact-off this week. Hit me with your facts, Stefan, of the normal watch with numbers on it. We do a lot of timekeeping with clocks, but there's one area where humans themselves have to act as the timekeeper, and that's when it comes to music. Oh, yes, of course. So I was looking at

different studies that were related to that idea and found one that was kind of interesting. So when you're walking and listening to music, most people naturally sort of synchronize their steps to the tempo of what they're listening to. And so there's this kind of intuitive idea that like, if you listen to faster music, you'll walk faster. If you listen to slower music, you'll walk slower. But this study was trying to figure out if you listen to different pieces of music that are all the same exact tempo, how does that affect how you walk? So they had people walking on a circular track while listening to 52 different

musical samples that were all 130 beats per minute, all had four beat meter. And then they also had them walk to a metronome at that tempo just for like a neutral baseline speed. But they were explicitly told that they had to walk in sync with the music and they discarded anything where they did not take 130 steps per minute. Okay. So they're taking the same number of steps, but maybe at different lengths of stride? Mm-hmm.

Okay. They also noted that a different study had found that loud bass drums make people have vigorous horizontal hip movements, which wouldn't affect your forward momentum. But they noted that they were not measuring that in this thing. Give me that phrase again. Vigorous

horizontal hip movements. That might affect your walking too. I feel like I make some vigorous hip motions sometimes if I'm listening to a good song. I'll check. Okay. Yeah. Keep an eye out for that. So they had people walk to the music and then they came back a couple days later to listen to the music again and they assigned specific adjectives to the music.

Okay. Deciding whether it was like good or bad, tender or aggressive, soft or loud. And then they did all this analysis and they scaled the metronome speeds to 100% for each person and then found that different music induced variations up to about 10% faster or 10% slower than that baseline speed. And aggressive, loud, fast, stuttering music made people take longer strides and walk faster. And that was usually like pop or techno style music. And then tender, soft, slow, and fluent music tended to make people take shorter steps. And

that was more in like jazz reggae style. And it seemed like personal taste didn't really matter. It was just like these qualities of the music that affected how vigorously people were walking. And this is something that we now have done research on.

The main thing that they're sort of looking into this for is for physical rehab. Oh, okay. Because they already use music to sort of influence how people are moving. But the way they've categorized it has been much more general, and this was trying to get more specific about what kinds of music affect people in different ways. So what's better for me as a human? Should I listen to more reggae? Should I take my time more?

Or should I get to where I'm going? I think that's something you have to decide for yourself. All right. That's a good fact, Stefan. I'm into it. I'm into it. I'm afraid for you because Sarah usually gets something good together. But we'll see what happens.

I fucking love timekeeping. I love watches and clocks and technology involved in it. And so when I started researching this, I expected to find straightforward devices like pocket watches or hourglasses or sundials or weird variations of them. And there are some, and I could tange about them forever. But there was one inventor who lived around 1100 or 1200 CE named Al Jasseri. And among many devices he designed and built is an over three meter tall clock. It kept time throughout the day and night with little doors that popped open

or circular discs that would light up and showed the phase of the moon. It had automaton humans, which played music on fake trumpets or drums at a few specific times during the day. And falcons, which dropped bronze balls onto cymbals every daylight hour. And all this intricate machinery was entirely powered by water and a couple systems of pulleys

and gears, which had to be reset every 12 hours by a human. And all of this was before electricity and modern technology. And it's also considered to be one of the earliest examples of an analog computer because it's like a device that is performing actions based on essentially an equation. And by changing the amount of water you loaded it up with, it could be reprogrammed to account for different amounts of daylight or nighttime hours. And he called it the castle clock. But it was cool because he had to have measured out different weights and set different weights. So like a solid dribble of water would cause the normal hours to tick. But then on certain hours, there was a bigger rush of water so that the automatons could be powered to move their arms to play the drums or play their trumpet. Yeah.

Their symbols. Air pressure would change so that they actually played trumpets. The trumpets made noise. The trumpets made noise. Ohets made noise oh my god geez back off a little bit leave something for the future he's too smart he and this was like hundreds of years before european automatons as far as i could tell because those dates range from like 1600 1700s well i guess it's time for us to award our fact to either Stefan's How Fast Do You Walk When You Listen to Reggae vs. Jazz vs. Lady Gaga. And How Far Do You Shake Your Butt. Or Sari's Al Jazeera Castle Clock of Pretension.

Yeah. I feel like if you got a castle clock in your house it's like oh by the way the smartest guy living in the world right now built this thing that I have a room for I'm gonna go with the current science I'm gonna go with scientists being like

I wanna see how big your steps are when you listen to Ariana Grande yeah I think I am too it's like mall science. I like that. It's like mall science. I'm asking me

to get you in and out of these stores. Yeah. Let's figure that out. All right. Well, geez. I'm just going to sit here with my colorful watch

and my fancy clock and all my clock facts. Yeah. And no one's going to appreciate it besides me. Clocks are lame. Well, Sari, here's your chance

to redeem yourself because it's time for Ask the Science Couch. It's a thankless job. It is. It really is. You don't get any hangpucks for this. We're going to ask listener questions to our couch of finely honed scientific minds.

And we got a question for us to be read by Sam. At LadyBluebell65 asks, Why 60 minutes, 60 seconds, 60 everything? Oh, boy. Right? I'm so, I'm over 60 everything? Oh, boy. Right? I'm so, I'm over it. All of these 60s. Everything would be much easier.

I also feel this way about the degrees of a circle. I know exactly how much half of 100 is and half of 50. I'm all here for that. And that would make all of this circle stuff so much easier to calculate. Yeah. But I assume that it has something to do with that. Sari, tell me what I'm missing.

It does. 60 in general is better because it's more divisible than 100, including like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. It's the smallest number that is divided by all those factors consecutively.

Whoa. Everything makes so much more sense now. Everything should be 60. There's a lot of speculation as to why this became the basis of our time number system but the Sumerians and the Babylonians used what's known as a sexagesimal system. To further answer that question, it's not 60 everything. It's 24 hours in a day. I think the 24-hour thing traced back to the ancient Egyptians. So after the Sumerians, after the Babylonians, some of the first timekeeping devices were sundials. And nighttime divisions, divisions at least came from the observation of 36 constellations known as decans so stars in the sky constellations as the earth revolves around

the sun different constellations appear in the sky and so these 36 constellations that the ancient egyptians marked would mark out 10day periods over the course of a year. So, like, 10 days would pass, a new constellation would show up first in the eastern sky. And from what I can tell, about 12 of them would cross the night sky in one night as the Earth rotated through the night. And so that set up for, for like a division of nighttime into 12 hours not entirely sure where the daytime hour thing came from well probably daytime is the same length as the nighttime roughly especially in egypt uh so just do that yes this is where my my fuzziness with the idea of an hour came in because they didn't have 60 minutes, 60 seconds. They had sundials that just, I don't know,

pointed to a number as the sun moved through the sky. They also had constellations that gradually progressed through the sky during the night. Those are relatively standard units, but if the daytime grew slightly longer, slightly shorter, I could see that those 12 units would progress slightly differently.

It took until mechanical clocks for us to actually standardize and people in Europe to say, okay, we're going to do 24 hours based on the ancient Egyptians, 60 minutes, 60 seconds based on the system established by the Babylonians, and we can create devices to measure this. So they just did whatever they wanted to. Yeah, well, yeah. All whatever they wanted to. Yeah. Well, yeah.

That's all, like, all of this is arbitrary. Yeah. Somebody had to make a choice. Right. I guess that makes sense. And I think there was an effort at one point to make it, to make, like, 100 second minutes and 100 minute hours. The hour was going to stay the same length and it's still going to be 24 hours in a day. Mm-hmm.

The hour was going to stay the same length and it's still going to be 24 hours in a day. But ultimately, you know, what I often find in these conversations is like, it would be better if it were different. And it's like, but you know what's better than different is just agreeing on something. Yeah, yeah. The really amazing thing about time and clocks is that we have a global system. We have a global system of months and hours and seconds and years. And there are some places where like the year is different than our year. But the fact that we all sort of have this standardized system of timekeeping is actually pretty amazing. You know, that there were plenty of opportunities for it not to be that way. Yeah. And it is really nice.

Like, it's quite good that we have all agreed on that because it would be very annoying to arrive in a country and be like, well, not only do I have to, like, reset what time it is, I need to go buy a new watch that goes by their time system. Not something I thought about before I said it, but that would be annoying. That would be awful. That's why Decimal time didn't catch on. It was instituted in France with a decree put out on October 5th, 1793, which was like a year and a half before the introduction of the metric system. So before they did, they standardized all other units.

They were like, hey, let's try standardizing time. And so they created decimal time clocks dividing things into tens and it was really unpopular because people were like you fucked up my time i don't know what i'm supposed to go to this meeting anymore yeah what time are you on what time are you on yeah and there were so few practical reasons for like your average person to change how they use time as opposed to the metric system applied to a lot of other units where that standardized commerce weights and measurements helped with a lot of science things. And they helped with a lot of knowing how much to pay for what and standardizing

what you're getting for your money and was easier to communicate because then people could just change how they measured things as opposed to like replacing every single clock and watch in a whole country and telling people like, this is the thing that you need to own now. And the thing that I like about this most is that the people who are like on the sesagesimal system are so dead and forgotten that we will never have anything like an understanding of who they were as individuals, much less what their lives were like. But we are all very deeply affected

by their decisions to this day. If you want to ask the science couch your science questions, please do, because that was fascinating. Thank you, Sarah,

for doing all of that research. You can tweet us your question using the hashtag AskSciShow. Thank you to RBT Matrix and Myrthalia and everybody else

who tweeted us your questions this week. Final Hank Buck scores! Sarah, you got nothing. And the rest of us are tied! What a good episode. I love it. I'll give you my non-existent Hank Buck because I like

yours a lot. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's really easy to do that. First, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. Super helpful and it helps us know what you like about the show. Second, you can tweet out your favorite moment from this episode. And finally, if you want to show your love for Tangents, you can just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us this day.

I have been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. I've been Sam Schultz. And I've been Stephen Chin. Was that a different order than usual? Yeah, it was. Sorry. SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly and WNYC Studios. It's produced by all of us and Caitlin Hoffmeister.

Our art is by Hiroko Matsushima, and our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. Our social media organizer is Victoria Bongiorno, and we couldn't have made any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you! And remember, a mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. There's a small 2017 study called Hydrodynamics of Defecation, published in the journal Soft Matter. And in it, researchers estimated that the

average mammalian shitting time is 12 plus or minus 7 seconds, so I propose that as a new unit of time.