Why does Erik care about sloppy seconds?

-The question was spurred on by the famed Alien vs. Predator paradox
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Erik asked me to post this (abridged) discussion he and I had offline about the topic. I realize most of you don't care. For those that do:

Parke:
As I recall, the second is a break-down of the arc, as defined by the
time it takes the sun to travel across the sky, meaning the sun (from our
primitive geocentric perspective) travels overhead sixty seconds of arc in one
minute.

Anticipating your motive, this is what pisses me off about your AVP
postulate. Even if they gave us the base-60 method of measuring time, could some alien culture happen to have exactly the same rate of rotation on their home planet? What are the chances? 1 trillion to one? It's practically guaranteed that the speed of our rotation would be faster or slower than any other planet within several light-years. You think they came here back in Babylonian times, walked out with a stop watch, realized we were 15% too slow and called out the intergalactic tow-service to speed up our rotation until we were in sync with their clock?
I call bull.


Erik:
i stumbled across that explaination googling this s$%t instead of riding
my bike...

but what is amazing to me is that they even bothered at all... it seems
utterly useless... and until very modern times was not even practical to
measure seconds!... the concerns of ancient people as far as measuring
time went probably didnt revolve around the order of a unit so small as
the second... hey.. but its thorough... people are a trip man...


Parke:
Oh time was VERY important.
People wanted to predict things (or more accurately, better anticipate the cyclical nature of life) and the observation of the celestial heavens was tantamount to knowing the gods, gazing into a crystal ball, or at least making a better farmer's almanac. Ptolemy's work calculating a more precise mean second/division of circle gave us a new calculation of pi to 3.14166, which is startlingly accurate (3.14159 by SI).

So what?
Well think of what this new tool did to manufacturing-how much more accurate could wheels and gears be? How about architecture? The pyramids in Egypt were built based on ratios of squares and triangles inscribed inside cirlces to an accuracy of only two decimal places. (Still damn amazing).
The circle is one of the three vitruvian forms, and knowing it better and relating it to the real world is big stuff. Ditto for time. And relating time and spatial measurements... that's everything. We're still working on that today.

You might also find Hero's engine to be interesting... A steam turbine some 2000 years before anyone had a use for it.

{End Transmission, remove soap-box}

Have at it folks. Please be gentle, though, all my reference texts are packed to be moved to my new house...