this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
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Post inspired by this recent comment about how useful 120 is (or 240 in this case), because its can be evenly divided so many ways: https://sh.itjust.works/post/40842670/19379837

Source: https://www.royalmintmuseum.org.uk/journal/history/pounds-shillings-and-pence/

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[–] positiveWHAT@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Some inspiration if you want to torment your DnD players.

[–] Skua@kbin.earth 5 points 1 year ago

Let's be real we all already ignore electrum and it's nowhere near as stupid as this

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No wonder the British empire didn't last! It's worse than french numbers

Didn't stop the french from having more fields medals than every country but the US.

https://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_fieldsxnation.htm

[–] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago

Another example of 120: the California State Legislature is a bicameral body with 120 total members, with 80 in the Assembly (lower house) and 40 in the Senate (upper house).

And a related piece of trivia regarding fractional currencies: although the USD has been decimalized more-or-less since its inception, the USA stock markets continued to use fractional prices for shares up until 2001, down to 1/16 of a dollar.

[–] Twosheds@piefed.social 3 points 1 year ago

Haven’t seen a ten bob note (10 shilling) since I was a kid. Hardly ever had a farthing or a crown in my change, but the rest of the coins are familiar to me.

[–] MudMan@fedia.io 3 points 1 year ago

With money you don't want everything to be as divisible as possible, you want everything to be able to be put together with as few pieces as possible.

So 20 is very useful, 120 not as much.

60 Hz power is the rare good call over European 50, though. Gets you 60Hz television as a standard and even though modern displays don't care about the frequency of power as much that eventually gets you to 120Hz displays, which is super useful to support tons of display frequencies on even intervals. You can finally get evenly paced 24fps movies again.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

IIRC several of the like top 5 schools of math are french so that checks out.

[–] Etterra@discuss.online -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Meanwhile in America: hey let's put a deer on the money lol

[–] RickyRigatoni@retrolemmy.com 1 points 1 year ago

Deer are friend