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Somehow, I think the BIPM would would a little more weight in this then some random /. troll. Although you are partially correct, 'K' is supposed to be lower case.

http://www.bipm.org/

"However, if there were only one time zone I would have to find out when people work, but after I found out when they work I wouldn't have to do any math to figure out what time that was to me."

Instead, you'd have to write it down, just as you'd essentially have to do with the operating hours of all businesses you deal with, local or remote. You'd be eliminating anything resembling a rule of thumb for business hours.

"I also can't figure out why you think businesses would adjust their schedules to local noon, as opposed to adjusting their clocks to matches the businesses that they work with."

Aside from the human health aspects and the transportation safety aspects (always safer to commute in daylight), there will always be businesses in that network you deal with that rely on available sunlight for whatever reason (agriculture, construction, power generation, etc.), something that has little bearing to any manmade time standard. Because their business depends on where the sun is in the sky and not so much on other businesses, they will ultimately be the ones that dictate when the rest of their community operates.

"Companies with nation interests are already open from 8 AM EST to 5 PM PST, because that when they do business with are open. "

Beyond opening offices across multiple time zones for load bearing (since nobody can be working more than 40 hours a week), nobody actually does that. Either they're open 24/7 (and ultimatley have a skeleton staff around when the sun is down and most customers are asleep), or they tell you to please call within certain operating hours, and the time zone those hours are in.

"The 9-5 standard didn't come out of daylight hours. 9-5 came out of daylight hours, but it became standard because there's a distinict economic advantage to being open at the same time as your business partners. I don't see any reason to think that eliminating time zones would change that."

Because, without standardized time zones with integer hour differences, no two meridians agree on where the sun is in the sky. The earth is round. Time zones allow a synchronized window of operations within the zone where the difference in local solar time is acceptable (within 15 degrees). Without this common frame of reference, there is no good reason for two communities 3 degrees apart to not set their operating hours (even if not their clocks) apart by 12 minutes. This is exactly the situation we had before time zones were introduced, and there is no reason to believe it won't revert to that situation. GMT was alive and well (which is how they knew what meridian they were on), but railroad and telegraph lines required that standardized frames of reference be agreed upon and established across the country, then the world. And you're trying to argue that the same technological and economic advancements that required the establishment of time zones would now magically funtion better in their absence?

You're supposed to adapt your frame of reference to suit your purposes, not the other way around, and the less your clock resembles the world around you and your personal experience, the less you're actually going to use it to define your frame of reference. As the original post was referring to the situation in China, without time zones, somebody would just have to invent them. The history of mechanical time has been a history of trying to make a more perfect sundial, and if you are going to abandon the sundial meme, mechanical timepieces become useless for all practical purporses.

But, again, your hypothesis of an easier life is easily testable: here is International Atomic Time, where each and every hour is exactly 3.6 ks (no leap seconds). Set your watch by it and live by it. See how well it works for you.

Atomic clocks count the number of vibrations within an atom, so know how much time has passed to a high degree of accuracy. Absolute time however, cannot really be known, as we have no reference point to measure it from (unless we find someone who has been counting since the big bang happened!).

The standard day-to-day time system is UTC (rather mysteriously standing for Coordinated Universal Time) and it is based on the rotation of the earth. This is decided by the BIPM. As the length of a day is not precisely divisible by a second, leap seconds occasioanlly have to be added.

Yet check out the definition of an ampere, which involves "parallel conductors of infinite length, of negligible circular cross-section, ...".

This would seem to constitute a physical reference that is impossible to generate.

Dont miss the followiing FAQ about the kilogram from the same site

http://www1.bipm.org/en/scientific/mass/faqs_mass. html.

Answers all types of questions people asked here, like why they chose that composition, why the shape, etc.

Here is the article linking to the above picture. Anyone know why they chose platinum-iridium?

Picture of the International prototype kilogram:

http://www1.bipm.org/utils/common/img/mass/prototy pe.jpg

when you buy a new 1000baseT ethernet card it can potentialy hit 1,000,000,000 bits per second. The storage and networking worlds use the true meanings of Kilo = thousand, Mega = million, Giga = billion, Tera = trillion, Peta = Quadrillion ...

You don't see peaple bitching that they paid to travel a Kilometer in a taxi but they only went 1000 meters...

The problem is actually that WAY back in conputing history the term kilo was misappropriated because there was no verbal shorthand for 1024. Since then we have come up with the alternative terms of KiBi(KiloBinary) = 1024(2^10); MeBi = 1,048,576(2^20); GeBi = 1,073,741,824(2^30); TeBi = 1,099,511,627,776(2^40)...

Check out http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Byte.html
http://www.bipm.org/en/si/prefixes.html
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
for more info.

I must admit that they sound a bit funny though...

How odd. Especially see BIPM - the name "kilogram" which seems to use both forms interchangably.

For example, since many mass measurements of the time concerned masses much smaller than the kilogram, they decided that the unit of mass should be the "gramme". However, since a one-gramme standard would have been difficult to use as well as to establish, they also decided that the new definition should be embodied in a one-kilogramme artefact. This artefact became known as the "kilogram of the archives".

Next up, metres and kilogrammes (you can spell them American if you really want).

I should point out that kilogram is spelled just that way in the international standards. And living in England as I do, I must report seeing "kilograms" more often than "kilogramme."

Technically, it does. The definition of the mole is:

1. The mole is the amount of substance of a system which contains as many elementary entities as there are atoms in 0.012 kilogram of carbon 12.
2. When the mole is used, the elementary entities must be specified and may be atoms, molecules, ions, electrons, other particles, or specified groups of such particles.

You can find this information directly from the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM)

Now, should they just scrap that definiton and just say that a mole is an Avogadro's number worth of elementary entities? I don't know. Maybe, but in that case, it would be based off an arbitrary value instead of tied to a physical representation whose value could be calculated experimentally.

The gram is defined as the mass of 1 mole of neutrons.

Well, not really. The gram is based off of the kilogram, which is equal to the mass of the international prototype.

Technically, it does. The definition of the mole is:

1. The mole is the amount of substance of a system which contains as many elementary entities as there are atoms in 0.012 kilogram of carbon 12.
2. When the mole is used, the elementary entities must be specified and may be atoms, molecules, ions, electrons, other particles, or specified groups of such particles.

You can find this information directly from the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM)

Now, should they just scrap that definiton and just say that a mole is an Avogadro's number worth of elementary entities? I don't know. Maybe, but in that case, it would be based off an arbitrary value instead of tied to a physical representation whose value could be calculated experimentally.

The gram is defined as the mass of 1 mole of neutrons.

Well, not really. The gram is based off of the kilogram, which is equal to the mass of the international prototype.

Technically, it does. The definition of the mole is:

1. The mole is the amount of substance of a system which contains as many elementary entities as there are atoms in 0.012 kilogram of carbon 12.
2. When the mole is used, the elementary entities must be specified and may be atoms, molecules, ions, electrons, other particles, or specified groups of such particles.

You can find this information directly from the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM)

Now, should they just scrap that definiton and just say that a mole is an Avogadro's number worth of elementary entities? I don't know. Maybe, but in that case, it would be based off an arbitrary value instead of tied to a physical representation whose value could be calculated experimentally.

The gram is defined as the mass of 1 mole of neutrons.

Well, not really. The gram is based off of the kilogram, which is equal to the mass of the international prototype.

The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second.

The kilogram is the unit of mass; it is equal to the mass of the international prototype of the kilogram.

The kelvin, unit of thermodynamic temperature, is the fraction 1/273.16 of the thermodynamic temperature of the triple point of water.

http://www1.bipm.org/jsp/en/ViewCGPMResolution.jsp ?CGPM=17&RES=1
That resolution is from 1983 and as I understand it, it is the current definition of a meter (or is it metre?)

"Personally I think 2.54cm is pretty arbitrary."

The "inernational inch" number of 2.54 was arrived at as a compromise between the relatively insignifigant discrepancies between inches as defined in the US, UK and Canada. For the record, 2.54 was first used by the Canadians, with the US version slightly bigger and the UK slightly smaller.

As far as surveying is concerned, instead of resurveying the third-biggest country on the planet the USGS still uses the older number of 1 inch = 10 000/3937 cm (i. e. 1 meter = 39.37 inches) that was chosen by Congress in the late Nineteenth Century. The US was the first inch-using (and English-speaking) country to agree upon the standards that are now known as SI. This is where "statute feet" and "statute miles" come from. True, these are the same number to five 9's, but people who worry about 1/12ths of inches (called a "line" and is abbreviated with three apostrophes to contrast with feet and inches) tend to be picky like that.

"Then again, cm are based on a fraction of a wavelength of a certain coloured light,"

The centimeter is 1/100 of a meter. The meter is currently defined as the distance EM moves in 1/299 792 458 second in a vacuum, which in turn defines c as exactly 299 792 458 m/s. The inch, like the centimeter, is also defined in relation to the meter, so you can express c exactly in US customary units as well.

The "frequency of light" you're talking about was an older definition.

"The first attempts for standardising the inch were many hundreds of years ago,"

Not really. Every European country had it's own measurement system which were quite different from everybody else's (consider the French "toise" and "arpent," which the USGS still has to deal with in the Louisiana Purchase and Canada in Quebec). The only real standardization came in the Twentieth Century as other inch-using countries other than the US came into the SI fold.

The only real reason feet and pounds survive to this day is the Industrial Revolution. Reciprocating steam engines were developed and perfected by the British, who used their own measurement system at the time. They filled out their steam tables using feet, pounds and Farenheit/Rankine, which everybody else (read "the US") used to build their own reciprocating steam engines. This also gave us things like "BTUs" and "horsepower."

At any rate, These people are in charge of SI globally, these people are in charge of SI within the US, and they maintain a list of conversion factors to, from and within the US units here.

the concept of the meter was soon replaced for practical purposes with a platinum bar. All subsequent definitions of the meter have been improved replicas of that platinum bar

WRONG!

Straight from the horse's mouth: definition of the metre ; evolution of the standard and practical implementation.

They still have the platinum-iridium bar though, but it hasn't been used to set standards for the last 43 years.

the concept of the meter was soon replaced for practical purposes with a platinum bar. All subsequent definitions of the meter have been improved replicas of that platinum bar

WRONG!

Straight from the horse's mouth: definition of the metre ; evolution of the standard and practical implementation.

They still have the platinum-iridium bar though, but it hasn't been used to set standards for the last 43 years.

Nice troll but Germany made metric as compulsory in 1868 and both Germany and Russia signed the Metre Convention in 1875 long before Lenin and Hitler.

Really, you shouldn't use the word 'degree' with the work 'Kelvin' as in the case used in the Story. It's preferable to write simply 5789 Kelvin.

Since we're nitpicking... its kelvin, not Kelvin.

First of all, you're right--it's an international community. Thus, international standards should apply!

The USA is the ONLY "localized community" that misspells metre. The rest of the English-speaking world gets it right.

And who am I to say that one spelling is "right" and another is "wrong?" Well I'm no one, but the BIPM seems to claim some authority, and they say metre is official.

Look, it's like this. There is an official, universally recognised, standard unit of length called the metre. Its definition is as follows:

"The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second."

A meter is either a different (and unrecognised, unstandardized, potentially unknown) unit entirely, or a misspelling. That's all there is to it. The meter is not an SI unit.

Maybe you can call it 'imperial' system because some people will categorize America as an empire.

While I can see some valid points in that argument, the whole system with inches-feet-yards, quarts-pint-gallons and ounces-pound-stones are know as the imperial system because it was the system used by the british empire, while the metric system is know as the metric system because it was developed by the french...

Considering how anti-british and pro-french the US was in it's infancy, it's surpricing that they didn't adopt the SI (System International) the second it came out - when all is said and done, Thommas Jefferson did propose a decimal based system in 1790, five years before france adopted the first metric system. In 1875, the US was one of the first nations to sign the The Convention of the Metre, which was nine years after the metric system was made legal (but not mandatory) in the US. Even so, 213 years after a US stateman suggested a system close to todays metric system, the US remains the only industrialized country in the world that does not use the metric system, but instead insist on using an outdated system of measurements inherated from their earlier cononial overlords...

That's what's ISO is doing all the time! E.g. the standards for the C programming language are not available to the public for free, there are only old drafts.

Can a modern (I mean democratic) world live with such a kind of "standards bureaucrats"?

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