What about time and date formats? While some formats based on a single scalar value (e.g. Unixtime) are common in certain applications, the system most commonly used by humans to specify the time of day uses at least three different units (hours, minutes and seconds), with a conversion factor (60) that isn't a power of ten. The rules for calculating dates are even more complicated. Time zones complicate matters further; a single '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S' string doesn't even unambiguously specify a point in time, unless one already knows what time zone the sender is using. From a purely algorithmical perspective, this is a really poor way of specifying a scalar (approximation; none of the systems mentioned deal with time dilation) value. While it encodes certain additional information (position of a planet relative to the local sun), it also makes performing arithmetic on datetimes a lot more difficult than it needs to be.