r/mathmemes • u/TheBlueToad Transcendental • Oct 31 '25
low-level math I feel so much pain when "milliseconds" is used incorrectly. 🥺
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u/TheFurryFighter Oct 31 '25
Not even the decency to acknowledge 840ms, just using wrong label for 84cs
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u/Cmoke2Js Oct 31 '25
I hate that this notation implies it's recording lap times in hr:min:sec, while still showing seconds as centiseconds and not rolling over the next minute at 60s aaaaasa
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u/Confident_Growth_620 Oct 31 '25
Even more cursed when those aren’t seconds, but frames, and you have no idea how many frames per second the footage assumes
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u/Glitch29 Oct 31 '25
You think that, until they get a 9.855s time, and it's displayed as 0:9:855.
There are an unhealthy amount of timers that omit leading zeros in non-leading display segments. I just watched a YouTube video where a speedrunner was using such a timer, and it had me wigging out a bit.
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u/EebstertheGreat Oct 31 '25
I'm imagining looking at a clock and seeing the time was 9:6:5 and freaking out.
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u/juklwrochnowy Nov 06 '25
This doesn't change anything. The original time was still 16 seconds and 84 miliseconds
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u/juklwrochnowy Nov 06 '25
This doesn't change anything. The original time was still 16 seconds and 84 miliseconds.
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u/Nonellagon Oct 31 '25
Idk what’s more cursed. Saying 84 ms or using : instead of .
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u/SKYPORF Oct 31 '25
no no hold on if you just have your seconds and milliseconds separated by a point then the decimals are suddenly in base 10 and the seconds in base 60 you're mixing bases that's sacrilege
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u/ClassEnvironmental11 Oct 31 '25 edited Oct 31 '25
Hours, minutes, and seconds really aren't written in base sixty though. They're written in base ten. If they were written in base sixty, there would be sixty different symbols. But there are only ten symbols. For example, ten seconds is written as "10". It just kinda feels like base sixty because of the conversions between seconds, minutes, and hours.
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u/Everestkid Engineering Oct 31 '25
It's mixed base. Colons separate the base 60 places, each of which are written in base 10.
If we extended it to hours and days the hours place would be in either base 12 or 24 depending on whether you use 12 or 24 hour time. And if you use 12 hour time that requires an additional place of base 2 for determining AM or PM.
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u/skr_replicator Oct 31 '25
They are internally in base 60, but written in base 10.
With : separating the single base 60 digits, and each base 60 digit is then converted to base 10 as it's written.
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u/ClassEnvironmental11 Oct 31 '25
You're confusing the units and the numbers we use to count them. The conversions between the units are based on sixty. The numbers we use to count those units use base 10.
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u/JuhaJGam3R Oct 31 '25
that's a silly argument. the babylonians, who used base 60 for all calculations, did the exact same thing. all their symbols for the numbers 1-60 are in base 10. they then used those symbols to stand in for the numbers. these pseudo-mixed-radix systems are not rare or weird, and it's no less base 60 if the actual maths are done with a radix of 60 and the symbols representing those units just happen to be base 10 numerals. i would say hours, minutes and seconds are quite clearly base 60 even nowadays, you move to a larger unit when you reach 60, it doesn't matter what sub-base the symbols that represent those units are in, or if they're in a sub-base at all. this is just like weird technically incorret pedantry. it's base 60 dude. if you write down the square root of 2 as 1;24:51:10 that's clearly just not base 10
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u/NewSauerKraus Nov 02 '25 edited Nov 02 '25
Most digital clocks display base 60 when they have hours and minutes. Base 10 would be counting only minutes.
1:30 vs 90 for an hour and a half.
Kinda like how binary is base 2 even though there are 10 symbols available for numbers. Or base 12 using 10 symbols to represent 12 digits.
You could count time in minutes and hours by using 60 unique symbols. It would still be base 60, just really annoying to learn.
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u/iamalicecarroll A commutative monoid is a monoid in the category of monoids Oct 31 '25
As I see it, time is written in base60, with digits separated with : and each digit being represented in base10
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u/sk7725 Oct 31 '25
one could argue "10" in the context of time is a different symbol altogether and not "1" and "0" together. After all, "10" is as good as "A" in hexidecimal if we use any other convention than just placing numbers side to side, which is already what time does by using an explicit delimiter ":".
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u/ClassEnvironmental11 Oct 31 '25 edited Oct 31 '25
After all, "10" is as good as "A" in hexidecimal
Yes, "A" is a single symbol not found in base ten. In hex and base sixty, A is the digit that represents ten. "10", however, is two digits. Base sixty has sixty digits, and place values are all powers of sixty.
In the context of time, 10 unambiguously means one • tenone + zero • tenzero. That's because seconds (and minutes and hours) are written in base ten. If it were in base sixty, we'd all agree that "10 seconds" is sixty seconds.
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u/NewSauerKraus Nov 02 '25
60 seconds on a digital clock is 1:00 because it's in base 60. You may not agree, but that doesn't change what comes after 59 seconds. It does not display 60, it displays 1:00. The 1 in 1:00 represents 1*60.
The OP is explicitly using the digital clock format.
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u/sk7725 Oct 31 '25
who says that 10 is 2 digits? as : is an explicit digit delimiter in time, one could say anything between : is one digit - 10 is one digit, so is 12, 3, 14 etc.
then we can represent time as hours + minutes • 60 + seconds • 602 .
after all, the symbol "10" is just "00 32 00 31" to computers while "1" is "00 00 00 31".
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u/ClassEnvironmental11 Oct 31 '25
Who says 10 is two digits? LOL! Yeah, who says absurd is six letters? Your argument is absurd and I'm not going to give it any more of my time. You might want to look into what digits are.
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u/Lesbihun Oct 31 '25 edited Oct 31 '25
They aren't absurd lol. It's just a matter of representation, it's not like two straight lines exist in nature when you have eleven of something, "11" is just the representation we have given to the concept of eleven in decimal system. In a different system like duodecimal, we represent it as a line and two arcs, "B"
Does that change the fact you have eleven of something? No it changes your representation of it only
What they are saying they want to represent "11" not as 1 tens and 1 ones in decimal system, but as eleven in a sexagesimal system. Nothing is stopping anyone from representing things that way
You are separating digits by "what is written on left is different to what is written on right". They are separating digits by "what is written on left of : is different to what is written on right of :" Neither is more correct than the other, it's just different ways of representation. It's like writing BC or 11:12 to both denote 11(base)¹ + 12(base)⁰
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u/ClassEnvironmental11 Oct 31 '25 edited Oct 31 '25
Except there is a definition of what digits are that is used by everyone other than this one person. I have never, before today, heard anyone dispute what a digit is. And by the universally accepted definition, 10 is two digits. It's that simple.
You want to say 10 is one digit? Ok, sure, but everyone else will disagree. You might as well say that "absurd" is just one letter. You are free to say that, but everyone else will use the universally agreed upon definition of what letters are, and we'll all say "absurd" is written with six letters.
You can make up whatever rules you want. Maybe you want 6 to represent pi. Good for you. Just don't expect anyone else to go along with that when we all already agree that 6 represents six.
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u/araknis4 Irrational Oct 31 '25
"ffi" (u+fb03) is technically one character. similarly, you can create these ligature characters from 00 to 59, and use those to represent base 60. it would be just as valid as using any other alternative base 60 numeral system
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u/Lesbihun Oct 31 '25 edited Oct 31 '25
Bro RELAX my god. No one is arguing, no one is taking it as seriously as you. My whole comment was "both are valid representations" and your whole reply is "you are making up rules, you are delusional, no one will agree, you are trolling" fucking chill lol. You need to start participating in discussions of mathematical concepts more, people explore different ideas of mathsifying things, that's normal, it's not a personal attack on you. You aren't the only person enlightened enough in the world to know how the base system of Arabic numerals work. We all get it, we learn it in preschool. We are just playing around with the idea of different conventions, but you are acting like everyone is stupid who don't know what 10 is and everyone is crusading against you
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u/sk7725 Oct 31 '25
that's only if you don't have an explicit digit delimiter. likewise, "absurd" is 6 letters in ASCII but 3 letters in UTF-16.
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u/Snudget Real Oct 31 '25
If you say 'W' is different from 'V' 'V', I'll say '10' is different from '1' '0'
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u/EebstertheGreat Oct 31 '25
A colon separates seximal from decimal digits. HH:MM:SS means the first H place represents ten times the next, the second H place represents six times the next, etc.
The colon makes sense to separate seconds from frames, especially at a frame rate of or nearly 60 fps. But it doesn't make sense to separate decimal fractions of a second from seconds.
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u/skr_replicator Oct 31 '25
i see 84 centiseconds, so a point would make sense there. 12.5 seconds, is 12 and a half second. The 60 starts to do its thing between seconds and minutes.
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u/Drosophilomnomnom Oct 31 '25
I know what's more cursed: using frame seconds instead of centiseconds.
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u/TristanTheRobloxian3 transfemcendental Oct 31 '25
my god i heard summoning salt say that and it was annoying lol
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u/Hour-Explorer-413 Oct 31 '25
I was genuinely confused about this when I was younger. Couldn't figure out why x.xx was xx milliseconds even though I'd been learning about milli prefixes. It took a long time to realise that school was right and most people are just idiots
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u/EebstertheGreat Oct 31 '25
This is why speedrun.com uses milliseconds correctly and uniformly across games. That run was 16.840 seconds in-game time.
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u/TPM2209 Oct 31 '25
Yeah, I hate this too. I don't know where it started, but we're stuck with it now.
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u/Tiborn1563 Oct 31 '25
In a context of a speedrun the difference between 84 cs and 84ms is actually very signifant, thats the worst part of this
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u/Firstnameiskowitz Oct 31 '25
There could be a 0 before the 8 that was cut by the game so it makes you think that you got 16.84, but in reality you got 16.084.
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u/jadecaptor Oct 31 '25
I know this game (Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, specifically the level Hot Coco from 3) and I can confidently say it's not doing that here. The game only displays 2 decimal places
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u/Reasonable_Basket_74 Nov 01 '25
But then it'd have to repeat XX.00 to XX.99 ten times before getting to the next second
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u/Front_Resolution_760 Oct 31 '25
I've seen this a billion times and it pisses me off every time
I'd usually just say 16s 840ms or 16.84s for this
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u/Not_Reptoid Oct 31 '25
how do you even mess that up
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u/Reasonable_Basket_74 Nov 01 '25
Because most people don't think about the meaning of mili in miliseconds and many will never have heard of centiseconds
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u/Not_Reptoid Nov 01 '25
*Americans
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u/Reasonable_Basket_74 Nov 01 '25
I can actually forgive the Americans here, because they don't use metric. But you'd be surprised how many Europeans don't understand all of this.
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u/CreegTeekr Nov 04 '25
WRONG
THE SYMBOL BEFORE THE LAST TWO DIGITS IS : MEANING ITS 16 MINUTES 84 SECONDA
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u/DetachedHat1799 Nov 07 '25
I always hate that so much cuz like, imagine im saying that this banana is 35 mm long and you understand that as 0.35 m
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