> It would be weird if we rounded for years, months and days, that's for sure. I think most people think of those scales as intervals. In other words, July is a period of time, with a start and an end. So are years, centuries, seasons. We are inside of it or outside.
I feel like my sense of time is different from the author's. While it can be useful to round the current hour/minute on some occasions, the information about which exact segment of the day/hour you're in can also be very useful. I can certainly tell that I ask the question of "when exactly is it going to be 12:00?" far more often than "how many seconds have statistically likely elapsed in the current minute?"
The biggest issue for me is that the precise moment of when one minute/hour transitions into the next is important for people. Like, when coordinating an event or meeting, would you prefer it if your clock indicated the precise moment when 12:59:59 becomes 13:00:00 and told you to start the meeting, or would it be better if the clock instead told you that it was "13ish" and you'd have to wait out ~30 seconds by counting in your head?
This also causes a jarring discontinuity - now clocks with a ticking hour hand appear to run 30 seconds late than clocks without, turning on the digital clock setting to show seconds offsets it, and so on. Some people celebrate New Year's or occasions that happen at a specific time 30 seconds early because they no longer have a strong reference point.
I feel like my sense of time is different from the author's. While it can be useful to round the current hour/minute on some occasions, the information about which exact segment of the day/hour you're in can also be very useful. I can certainly tell that I ask the question of "when exactly is it going to be 12:00?" far more often than "how many seconds have statistically likely elapsed in the current minute?"
The biggest issue for me is that the precise moment of when one minute/hour transitions into the next is important for people. Like, when coordinating an event or meeting, would you prefer it if your clock indicated the precise moment when 12:59:59 becomes 13:00:00 and told you to start the meeting, or would it be better if the clock instead told you that it was "13ish" and you'd have to wait out ~30 seconds by counting in your head?
This also causes a jarring discontinuity - now clocks with a ticking hour hand appear to run 30 seconds late than clocks without, turning on the digital clock setting to show seconds offsets it, and so on. Some people celebrate New Year's or occasions that happen at a specific time 30 seconds early because they no longer have a strong reference point.