why are there 24 hours in a day

[johnfowles]

vis a vis the recent thread on love songs I have always found that adding up hours minutes and seconds is a tedious task that consistently lends itself to arithmetical errors, hence my attempt to find an easier way for adding up the Total Running Time of a proposed selection
I did once find a brilliantly neat Java applet at:-
http://www.troon.org/developer/java/timecalc.html
The interface of this small program consists of a few output fields which display what the user has entered, how many times in total and what the total result of the times entered is
note that it keeps a record of the valiue and number ofentries for easy checking on how far you have got.
But as my Windows XP SP2 computer steadfastly refuses to allow me to display any Java applet I am SOL.
but first of all the obvious question is
"why are there 24 hours in a day"
it is hard to argue with 365/366 days in a year
divided into 12 lunar Moonths although there must be a better way than the current random allocation of 30 or 31 days to each and one stray at 28 days come on!!
Surely it would for many purposes be so much simpler if there were say 10 hours a day split into 100 minutes of 100 seconds each
I therefore googled for
"why are there 24 hours in a day"
and from an amazing 30 million resuls I selected
http://www.astro-tom.com/time/24_hours.htm

which the writer redily admitted was based on a fascinating page at:-
http://james.lab6.com/2003/09/16/24hours
This explanation boils down to the Sumerian’s 12-segmented hand system being incorporated by the Babylonian’s 60-centric system. Perhaps our 12-segmented hands were a reason for liking base 60 in the first place.(in other words everybody has four fingers and each one has three segements making 12 an ideal base system for the stoopid Sumerians who obviously were unable to grasp that they actually had 10 fingers including their thumbs and could therefore have begun the digital revolution eons ago!!
Nonetheless I still have a problem so I googled again this time for
"online spreadsheet hours minutes"
and from the1.4 million results selected one that promised
"Online Conversion - Advanced Time Calculator
Advanced time calculator. Add and subtract hours and minutes. ... Enter the hours, minutes, seconds (any or all). Hours, Minutes, Seconds ..."
Bingo!!!
an easy to use on line addition machine at:-
http://www.onlineconversion.com/adva...calculator.htm
and here is a screenshot after I had entered Ruth's final 21st love song:-