Talk:Ke (unit)
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[edit] 100 Ke in a day?
This is the first time for my 3x years living on the Earth to hear that there are 100 ke in a day! I wonder where did the original author wrote this passage? We have been knowing that each double hour is divided into 8 ke. Therefore, computerized fortune-telling program need to know only a person's birthday up to a quarter of an hour. If a day was divided into 100 ke, I wonder how can people tell the time? Before that, we can say "half past three p.m." as "申時二刻" (the second quarter of the 9th double hour". But you cannot divide the 100 ke equally under the twelve double hours, right? -- Tomchiukc 16:30, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
- If you read my text again, you will find that the ardent Jesuit missionaries had an itching finger and changed the original Chinese invention to 8x12=96 "new" ke a day, which seems OK with your fortune-telling..........
- I added my source so you can check it out! :) Kurtan 00:00, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
- Sorry, I missed your point. If you have the ke=centiday, you can skip both minutes and [double] hours. You just count the kes from midnight=0 one night on till noon=50 and the day on again till midnigt=100 ! :) Kurtan 00:12, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
[edit] NPOV + Speculation?
The article as it is written now speculates that the French Revolutionary time/calendar system would have been successfully adopted if they'd known about the ke/short-quarter-hour. There's no way anyone can make that call, it should be rewritten.
The article also uses the word "unfortunate" which to me suggests an agenda.
- agreed, the tone of the whole article seems wrong to me, ill try to do something about it --gwc 17:25, 30 July 2006 (UTC)
How do we know for sure that the French revolutionaries were entirely unaware? The article says that the Jesuits were aware of it, and they were there about a century before the revolution, and they were also in France. The 10x100x100 model was obviously based upon existing European analog clocks, but that does not prove that they had not heard of the Chinese method.
As for the French not using 100/day units, the laws establishing decimal time stated, Le jour, de minuit à minuit, est divisé en dix parties ou heures, chaque partie en dix autres, ainsi de suite jusqu’à la plus petite portion commensurable de la durée. The fact that these "dix autres" were intermediate between decimal hours and decimal minutes gives them the same position that quarters have to standard hours and minutes, which are still used today.
As for the centiday, this is not accepted for use with SI. In fact, it is expressly prohibited. The day (d) is accepted for use with the SI, but not with prefixes. See the SI brochure, which states:
- Prefix names and symbols are used with a number of non-SI units (see Chapter 4), but they are never used with the units of time: minute, min; hour, h; day, d.
--Nike 08:33, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Reference
The article references
the Shuowen Jiezi" from Xu Shen, "
There are several problems with this citation. First, the quote marks don't seem to make any sense. Second, the Shuowen Jiezi apparently is a dictionary by Xu Shen, not from Xu Shen. Finally, the editor does not say what publisher published the version that was relied on for this article. I've never seen this dictionary, and I don't know if you can just look up ke as you would in a modern dictionary. If not, some directions about how to look up ke would be in order.
I am asking about this because I want to add the reference to the article [Metrication]. Since I don't speak Chinese, I can't do so unless I can find a reliable English translation. --Gerry Ashton 23:06, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
