60 seconds

Random thought I had last night:

We count years starting with 1 AD, January is month 1, and the first day of the month is 1.

The first hour of the day is 12.

The first minute of the hour is 0, as is the first second.

I expect Wikipedia can answer why this all is. The years/months/days is almost surely related to the fact that Arab mathematicians first introduced the concept of '0' -- before that, there was just I. II. III, IV, etc.

But what's up with the hours? When was the hour first introduced? And minutes and seconds? Before or after we had mechanical clocks?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hour

I knew that the Mayans had a base-60 numeric system, but I didn't know the Babylonians did as well -- this is what Wikipedia credits with our 60 seconds to a minute:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeral_system#Sixty

Base sixty is awesome, in my opinion, though it might make arithmetic tricky. Why so cool? Because you can divide sixty by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 -- so if you need to split stuff between people, 60 is a good number to divide. 10 sucks. 2 and 5. 12 would be better -- 2, 3, 4, 6. Interesting how prevalent 12 is, yet 10 managed to win out as a counting system. Guess it's easier to just count fingers than to count fingers plus your feet.