Bill Bailey Erases Time | QI

At least he didn't waste any.

This clip is from QI Series G, Episode 15, 'Green' with Stephen Fry, Alan Davies, Bill Bailey, Danny Baker and Jeremy Clarkson.

[devlinburgess]

So basically, "I'll make my own system of time! With blackjack and strumpets!"

[BooksandArmchair]

One of my favourite facts. Well done Ruth Belleville, I absolutely love those old jobs like selling time. Also, definitely need to get Mr Baker and his brilliant trivial mind back on QI.

[ttthttpd]

Bill Bailey understands how King Crimson works

[romulusnr]

Swatch tried the metric time in around 1998. You can tell how well that did by the fact you've probably never heard of it. They divided the day into 1000 pieces, and they did away with time zones so it was the same time worldwide. You'd just say "it's at 332" and it would be 332 the same time everywhere.

[martinmills]

I‘ve always been slightly disappointed that we never say “a third of an hour” for anything. Seems a waste of a perfectly good fraction.

[greg_]

12 is a unique number in that, counting up from zero, it's the first number that's evenly divisible by 1, 2, 3, and 4 -- all the smallest whole numbers. You don't get that much even divisibility with 8, 9, 10, or 14.

60 is also unique among the tens (i.e., 10, 20, 30, 40, etc.), as it's the only tens =<100 to be evenly divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

[sstills]

And it passes faster and faster each year. It feels like just yesterday I was planting my tomatoes. Now it's only a couple more weeks until Christmas.

[Screedledude]

Bill Bailey has the power of KING CRIMSON

[EJ]

Little did Bill know that at 3:14 he inspired the name to Paganis successor to the Zonda...

[misterkami]

I'm just imagining a company having an subscription with this woman to come around wednesdays at 5 pm before closing time.. and when she arrives there right on time, the company was closed because their clock was still incorrect and they thought she didn't make it during work hours

[allbrave]

9 year old me 12 hours before Christmas: "UGH, Christmas is ages away, HURRY UP!"
29 year old me 12 months before turning 30: "Oh god, I'm going to be 30 soon, SLOW DOWN!"

[dorkarama]

I thought it was going to be about the Knocker-uppers; the people who got folk out of their beds on a morning, before alarm clocks. I think they used long thin hammers to tap on their bedroom windows. One woman used a pea shooter, I think.

[ash]

Danny Baker, what a mind of trivia that guy has.

[faenethlorhalien]

One of those topics that I learned of on Tech Diff's Citation Needed before I saw it here on QI.

[anthonylancaster]

when I was in high school, I had a chance to go on a few trips to Europe through and educational tour program. One time our group was paired with a group from Canada that was always late for the bus in the morning. We started joking that they were on metric time.

[Kombivar]

So good to see the Technical difficulties topic covered years ago being on the QI - Anyone else seen this episode of Citation Needed?

[hiltonian_]

She could have been superseded by a Wauchope time ball. A British naval officer wanted to help mariners synchronize their watches for navigation. In Portsmouth he constructed a device with a large ball on a pole on the roof of a building. Every day at 1PM it dropped. Ships captains could watch from the harbor and set their chronometers.

There were time balls set up on prominent buildings in a number of cities, including New York.

It was the inspiration for the New Years Eve ball drop in Times Square.

[HologramDK]

Interestingly, Swatch invented a new time system called the Swatch Internet Time. A day consists of 1000 .beats and there are no time zones or summer and winter time, so time is the same all around the globe. This was back in 1998, so as you might have guessed, it never really caught on.

[StarkRG]

You can count to 12 on one hand by using your thumb to point at the creases in your fingers. Not including the thumb (because the thumb can't point at it yourself), each of the four fingers has three points it bends (3 * 4 = 12). You can extend that to 60 by keeping track of how many 12s you've counted using the fingers (and thumb) on your other hand (12 * 5 = 60), usually by using that finger to point at the creases. Look up "babylonian hand counting" for better explanations than mine.

[nigelwest]

When I was a work study analyst (time & motion) we recorded activities on a watch that was divided into centiminutes (100 cm per minute) rather than seconds because when it came to applying our percentage rating for the operators performance it saved a lot of messing about