Slashdot Mirror
Isn't it Time for Metric Time?
xenocytekron writes: "Sure, our time system is ok, but does it make sense? Is it easy? Think about it: 60 seconds to a minute, 60 minutes to an hour, 25 hours to a day, all the way to 365 days to a year. Currently, all the world uses the Metric System except for the US. But what about Time? The solution is Metric Time, that is, a time system which uses Base-10 and Metric Standards. So what do you think: Is it Time, for Metric Time?"
It's running on METRIC TIME!
When did this happen? I have only been getting 24 and I sure could use an extra hour to sleep in.
"60 seconds to a minute, 60 minutes to an hour, 25 hours to a day"
;)
Cool... Where do you live? I can use an extra hour of coding time every day...
Have I been working under a false assumption that a day is 24 hours long?
Wow. What could I have been doing in that other hour?
-JPJ
Feh.
"The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car
gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!" --Abe Simpson (Homer's dad)
It should be the same time everywhere in the world. Instead of adjusting clocks, we should adjust our schedules. Does it really matter if you go to work at 8 or if you go work at 13? No. It's just a number, really. When it comes time for daylight saving, just change your schedule, not your clock.
The link appears to be slashdotted.. 2 minutes after the story was posted.
...if we could convince the article's web server that there were 25 hours a day, it would have an extra hour of CPU time and it wouldn't get slashdotted until AFTER some responses were posted.
When is the US going to officially switch to the SI unit system. I know it's taught in public schools, typically in science classes, but it isn't used in public places. If so many European countries can switch currencies without huge problems (so far), surely we can switch from our archaic units system! I don't understand why so many people are so vehemently against making the switch. Is it that hard to (re)learn?
Is your workplace ADA compliant?
Much like the previous article on changing US bills for the sake of convenience, I think the amount of work it would take to not only convert all the hardware and software out there, but getting people used to it, would outweigh the benefits for far too long.
Besides, Swatch's internet time has been around forever, and few besides the geeky have paid attention to it.
For the first step, we need to get some really big rocket engines so that we can make it so that the Earth only rotates 100 times in a year. Or 10 or 1000.
I think it is time for more interesting stories on slashdot. These are getting lame......
Slashdotted already? Here's the Google cache of the page.
So how do you divide 356 by 10? Or is a year now 1000 days?
i think time haw to relate to how long it takes the earth to go around the sun and how long it takes the earth to spin about... not like distance or wieght which really isn't based on anything... maybe the article covers this, but i can't get to it.
Their base unit could be how long their server survived /.
well they are dowm in record time... maybe their server is as slow as mine (p83, 16meg ram)
Do we suddenly change the measurement units for navigation also? 60:60:24 exists for a reason, and directly translates to measurements in navigation (latitude and longitude.) Sounds like a blast.
"Why do you consent to live in ignorance and fear?" - Bad Religion
I wonder if it uses "time until Slashdotted" as the base unit.
http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:r9MHgtv93-YC: zapatopi.net/metrictime.html+Metric+Time=en=UTF-8
Yes, I am too lazy to make it a link.
Americans.....
Disclaimer: I too am an American, calm down.
ummmm.... ?
i think we found who stole the crack from the space shuttle...
Dividing time into steps of 60 and 24 makes sense, in a way, because these numbers are more easily divisible.
60 = 1*60 = 2*30 = 3*20 = 4*15 = 5*12 = 6*10
24 = 1*24 = 2*12 = 3*8 = 4*6
10 = 1*10 = 2*5
So we can split an hour or a minute up into halves, thirds, quarters, fifths and sixths and still have an integer number of hours or minutes. Similarly the day can be split in half or quartered and still have a whole number of hours.
Metric divisions can only be split into halves and fifths. I don't know about you, but when I say it's quarter to ten, I wouldn't want to see it represented as the fiddly non-integer 9.75.
Yes, the current system of time makes sense.
e .html
n it s/Time/Alternative_Schemes/
The time system in current use is a standard that the SI has signed off on, so it is Metric Time.
Actually, there is absolutly no reason to revamp how the global standards for time keeping are operated.
Good page about time history.
http://physics.nist.gov/GenInt/Time/tim
Here are Yahoo links to the page about alternative schemes.
http://dir.yahoo.com/Science/Measurements_and_U
10 months to a year, 10 days to the month, 10 hours to the day. 10 minutes to the hour, 10 seconds to the minute. Might as well force pi to be 3 while you're at it. Or how about 10?
The description from the Google cache is just plain bizzare. Of course, it could just be that I'm used to using regular time.
47345.6 :-)
An interesting caveat in there about how metric hours wouldn't be very useful for evenly blocking out television programs of the length we are accustomed to. But which came first: is there something crucial about the 30/60 min timeslot (with ads), that is inherent to the human attention span? Or is it simply a case of people becoming accustomed to that length of time. If programs were generally 35 minutes instead of 30, or 70 instead of 60, I would guess that the depth of the narrative structures of most programs benefit greatly. Maybe there's a real psysiological limit for which that's pushing people's time too far, or maybe it's mere convention to keep tracking easier.
Personally, I think metric time would lead to exactly what it led to in France: lots and lots of public decapitations.
"Hey, two weeks ago it was really bright at 13 o'clock, but now it's dark!"
Metric time site is down, try the wayback machine @
This Link.
"If you're going through Hell, keep going." -Winston Churchill
Google cache for this story
...but it might have been another comedy sketch show (and this was long ago) with a comedy skit about a conversion to "metric time", moving to a "100-hour day". While the "hour" would be altered by changes to the minutes and seconds, one "day" amounted to three sunrise/sunset periods.
Wish I could find an MPG of that. Wonder why no one else seems to remember it...
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
When I learned "metric" time in school, the idea was there was a set order that everything appeared in: biggest to smallest. Therefore, the time now is 2002 07 04 23:04. That still makes a lot of sense to me, compared with 7/4/02. It always confuses me - which is the month, and which is the day? Just to be sure, I've actually started spelling out the month like this: 4 JUL 2002. That way, there's no doubt.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Of COURSE that's too much to ask.
:)
We've been asking for it all along.
A lot of good its done
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
...because 60 is evenly divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 10. So dividing the day into 60 hours, each of which contains 60 minutes, and each minute of which contains 60 seconds, would probably be more convenient.
"Remember this date folks, 80 past 10 on April 40th, we have officially switched to metric time..."
What's the line, and when was the last time they played that episode?
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
60 seconds to a minute, 60 minutes to an hour, 25 hours to a day, all the way to 365 days to a year.
Yeah, we should really change it to 100 days per year, that would be much easier. The only time we may need a new time format is if we seriously get into space, and I can't see that happening in my lifetime.
Personally, I'd just be happy if people started writing dates and times in a common format, even if it's the USA's confusing mm/dd/yyyy version.
im wondering why thats in the funny catagory, althoguh i have a feeling it might make more sense if the page wasnt slashdoted.... or maybe it was the 25 hours in a day thing..... :p
The French tried to implement this a long time ago. It just didn't take.
It was just too much of an adjustment.
Seconds were okay... minutes were too short, hours were too long... things just didn't quite seem right.
Last I checked, the year had roughly 365 days in it. No matter how you look at it, every earth year is going to continue having approximately 365 days in it. That's not exactly metric friendly...
As far as I'm concerned, the way we keep time currently is fine. It's a world accepted standard that works and, quite frankly, I can't see any advantage to changing it.
But I propose a switch to hexadecimal. While we're at it, let's switch the U.S. to Celsius, switch the U.S. to metric units, win the war on 'terrorism', save the whales, and assume pi is equal to 3.
Or, we could just not attempt to change things that have been established for centuries.
The following error came up when I tried to access the site. "Service Temporarily Unavailable The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later." Oh well, I'll try again at 25 o'clock. There should be less traffic then.
why stop at adjusting the seconds? how about evenly spaced months of 30 days a piece, with six day weeks, the last five or six days of the year a big holiday called "adjustment week"? Four day work weeks, two days off. No more need for Monday, Tuesday, etc, you'd have dayzed, dayone, daytwo, daythree, dayfour, dayfive, daysix (modulus of six), or name each day of the month its corresponding day, i.e. daythirty. This would require no adjustments to seconds, minutes, or hours (a system that works out nicely), but just to the days and months. Years remain the same time frame (365 or 366 days, inclusive of the leap year adjustments).
Another Metric time link
Decimal Time
Digital Time
Medevoor will metric time make dates/timestamps become almost like dates/timestamps in Star Trek?
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
This has been tried and died earlier (like the 19th century)... check your history. Standard measurements are one thing, but people think about time differently (which may explain a few difficulties with modern physics).
PS. there are 24 hours in a day (well closer than 25 anyway)
imagination is more important than knowledge --Albert Einstein-
Dispite mainland Europe trying to change us the UK is still just about metric. We still use feet, inches, pounds and the like.
Our cars and road signs are in miles/hour - the only country left in Europe to use this system.
RULE BRITANNIA!!!
Aside from the 25 hours a day in the post, I can't see how the fuck this is supposed to be funny. Are we supposed to be laughing at the idea of metric or something?
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
One of the interesting properites about using the 60, 60, 24 is the number of divisors..
To wit..
60 can be evenly divided by 2, 3, and 5 (and multiples of those).
24 can be evenly divided by 2 and 3 (and multiples of those).
It is also one of the reasons why 12 inches is still popular ( 12 can be divided by 2, and 3) so that you can have 1/2 and 1/3 (or multiples of those) of a foot without getting into fractional inches.
However decimal (metric) runs into problems. You only get 2 and 5 as the multiples without getting into "weird" decimals. Exactly how many centimeters is 1/3 of a meter? how many millimeters?
first off, we are all used to the current time scheme, and converting would cause much much more confusion than it all generates.
second, 10 days in a week would be all the more confusing as we couldn't relate it to the setting and rising of the sun.
third, think of all the computer apps that would need fixing as suddenly they would all be incorrect. it's like the y2k bug all over again except this time it's intentional.
...the entire world bases everything from medication prescriptions to work schedules to billing to school days to birthdays/anniversaries/holidays(ie, everything in most of the world's societies)... ...this is about THE most asinine thing I've ever heard of. Conversion is only appropriate when it would safe effort/time; converting to "metric" time would:
...the list goes on. Every facet of our society and in fact planet, revolves around the current concepts of time, and it makes sense; 12:00 is generally about when the sun is highest, 6am/6pm is generally when the sun sets, etc...
a)require enormous work beyond comprehension for almost everything in the world of computing that deals with time/date. The year2k "bug" would be dwarfed
b)confuse the #$@! out of people for years. And years. And years.
c)make every single date/time piece instantly useless(think: alarm clocks, microwaves, stereos, TV/VCRs etc)
I mean, who the fuck thought this up? Katz? Someone PLEASE bitch slap him. Even if he didn't think this up, he needs it anyway.
Just what I need, a 10 day week... bet weekends wouldn't go metric too.
Why would the United States ever switch to the metric system? Is the system we have not not working, or something? Or wait, do we have to be in line with the rest of the world?
Bullshit. When the US Standard System stops working we will switch to the mertic system. Until then, we will continue to use our (superior) system.
"Remember this time people, 80 past 2 on April 47th, it's the dawn of a new enlightenment."
Since the since has been quite very well slashdotted, we can always review Google's cache of Metric Time.
--- Fox
Does anyone remember the Prologue in James Gleick's book Chaos: Making a New Science?
In 1974, Mitchell Feigenbaum was a new researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Shortly after arriving, he began "experimenting with twenty-six hour days, which meant that his waking schedule would slowly roll in and out of phase with [his co-workers']. This bordered on strange, even for the Theoretical Division....The twenty four hour day seemed too constraining. Nevertheless, his experiment in personal quasiperiodicity came to an end when he decided he could no longer bear waking to the setting sun, as had to happen every few days."
The world has three language-universal methods to communicate: 1. Mathematics, 2. Music, and 3. Time. Changing the time system would be worse than trying to get all the computer code in the world, not to mention other devices, to prevent Y2K. It's too costly to convert, then you have to convince the entire world that the current system is inadequate, which has worked fine for centuries. Our sense of time is engrained into ou brains from childhood. We "know" how long an hour is. Changing that is not realistic. I can just see it now....my daily scheduled work time is 3.33 decidays. Ain't gonna happen.
If we change the rotation of the earth, there's a very good chance we'd get a number other than 42.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
The system was actually a division of the world circumference into 400, eg 40,000 km. Dividing the day into 40 kilohesits, each of 1000 hesits wuld make 1 km/kh = 1 m/h, etc.
If the plan had been to base a system on decimal divisions of the circle/day/earth circumference, then a unit of 4 km, divided into 10000 units of 400 m/m, would be more appropriate: 1 mph = 1 eps.
But why bother with decimal time, when there is base 120?
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
Cost? Tens of billions, possibly hundreds. It doesn't buy us anything.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Actually, wouldn't a better system incorporate the sun, earth and the moon? 28 seems like a nice number anyway. Does ANY country even use the metric time system? As far as I know it hasnt. A metric second would be different than what anyone knows as a second universally(or should I say globally). With that, the equations that use the second as its unit for time (which is a good majority in the scientific world from what I remember in my days in physics) would also have to be changed. On a slightly different tangent, I was told one reason the US didnt go with the metric system was that it'd be cost ineffective to change to it. Things such as machinery parts (adios 3/4inch hex bolt driver, hello 2cm(or metric equivalent of 3/4inch) hex driver). Also things like the tools that would go into the new parts would have to be bought and so on and so on.
The World is so small now. In less then a day I can be on the other side of the world. Would it not be so much easier if we all kept time by following UTC? I flew to Dallas a couple weeks ago. They are one hour behind EDT. I told my friends I was kind of time traveling. Because of the change from one timezone to another, if you looked at my departure and arrival times you'd think it was a 2 hour flight even though it took about 3 hours. Granted, the only people who would feel normal are the folks in the UK. When the sun would rise here in the Eastern Time Zone, it would already be 10 am by UTC. It would feel too weird to alot of people.
Gorkman
Is it me or has the quality of the material lately posted on slashdot been "quite shitty" ? I might as well read cnn.com if I wanted mindless babble from non-scientific monkeys with access to a typewriter...
Why do nerds have to screw up everything for everyone else?
I just don't get it. VCR programming now this.
Get your Unix fortune now!
The biggest problem that I see with the proposed time system is that it's based on Earth's rotation period.
We're not going to colonize Mars next week, but we could conceivably do it within a hundred years. That makes this system just as ill-fitting as the current system is to timekeeping.
IMO, the best solution for those who insist on changing the timing scheme at all is to have the second as the fundamental unit of time, with order of magnitude multiples of seconds being the official SI units.
A hundred seconds is just over a minute and a half; close enough to serve the purpose of a "minute".
A thousand seconds is about 17 minutes. Long enough to serve the same purpose as the "centiday" proposed by the article.
The day would be an ugly number of minutes long, but we're used to this ugliness when converting days to years anyways, so I don't see this as a big problem. Earth's day is an artifact of Earth; it doesn't have to precisely match the timekeeping system any more than its size has to match the metric system.
All of our scientific literature is now based on seconds. Remember the whole ergs/joules thing, as just one small example? Changing the time base would be worse.
In summary, I think a system based on existing seconds would be best.
I'm not going to throw away my existing clocks any time soon, though.
BSA: Sasquatch Militia - zapatopi.net/bsa/militia.html.
H TgisC:zapatopi.net/bsa/militia.html+sasquatch+mili tia=en=UTF-8]
[google cache:http://216.239.33.100/search?q=cache:v0VM31
Those crazy Sasqatchians...
--- Why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit? | Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?
365 days for a reason! It is the time (in units of
one day and one night) for the earth to go over the
sun for one circle, roughly speaking. It is a nature
definition!
Closely related to this, a full circle is 360 degrees. So it is convenient to use the clocks:
12 hours for one day, 12 hours for one night.
Seeing as the week would then be 10 days, it would be feasible to add another day to the 2-day weekend we currently enjoy. If you do the math, 28.6% of our current week is on the weekends. If we had 3 days for the weekend, that would be 30%. You know what that means... 1.4% more time to play Diablo/Neverwinter/Quake/.
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
Based on the base 60 number system, our current time is ok.
60 is divisible by 1,2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20,30.
This post needs to be modded up.
And as an Anonymous Coward, I never say that.
Until now.
Well, at least your spacecraft could have avoided this little $125 million accident: Units Blunder Sent Craft Into Martian Atmosphere: NASA ;-)
Trusted Computing FAQ | Free Dawit Isaak!
The French Revolution of 1789 set up a system of metric time, with 10 days a week. It was not popular in the least, mostly because people are used to working the amount of time they currently do, and there is no good way to divide 10 by 7. Thus, under a metric week, people would have to either work a longer or shorter portion of the week. Our current system has a 2-day weekend out of a 7-day week -- ~28.6% idle time. With a metric week, you'd have to have either 3 days off every week (30% idle time; less work) or 2 days off every week (20% idle time; less rest). The French chose 2 days a week off, and tried to make up for it by giving a week of holidays at the end of the year. The peasants would have none of that, and within a decade the 7-day week was back.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
As far as I know, after the French Revolution, French scientists tried to use metric time as France's official time - but, like the problem of the US adopting the metric system, the civilians did not use it. Similarly, many people use 12-hr based time while the rest of the world uses 24-hr time, but they are not willing to change.
People are the biggest hurdle to this change.
-LionMan
In the appendix to his 1991 novel Martin Rainbow, Robert L. Forward devised a Martian calender. It is based on the standard second, and uses a regular system of leap seconds to keep the calander close to Earth's.
h tm.
Rather than try to summarize the system, I was fortunate enough to find the relevant passage on the internet at http://pweb.jps.net/~tgangale/mars/other/forward.
Usually, most science fiction characters refer to something like "Earth Standard Time," or something like that. This is the first attempt I am aware of that deals with the issue of timekeeping for off-Earth colonies.
They have a Java applet and everything. I don't think they do metric dates, though. It would be hard to justify anything other than 365 days a year. However you break down the months, it should probably be divisible by 4 to account for the solstices and equinoxes. And then there's the phases of the moon, which might make a good basis for months, but that's not how the Gregorian calendar works. It's also off by twenty days for each of the seasons. Fucking Christians can't get anything right!
Look, this is slashdot, give this guy a break. 3 out of 5, uh.. 4.. ain't bad right? ;)
Tired of legitimate data sources? Try UNCYCLOPEDIA
Think about what time really is. Without delving too deeply into metaphysics, you should realize that any sort of system for measuring time is inherently arbitrary. That is to say that whatever way we choose to measure time is artificial, unless you care to use sunrise and sunset as your starting points.
Substituting one Metric Time for 24/365 may make sense in theory -- after all, base-10 is quite logical -- but its real world application is nil. I can't think of any advantages to switching, outside the abstract notion that it's better. On the other hand, there are a number of downsides, implementation and an inevitable learning curve being the two most obvious.
Bottom Line: Sure it's a good idea, but it's not worth the time. *ducks*
Didn't swatch try to do something like this with Internet time?
The day was divded up into 1000 sections, and the time was jsut a 3 digit number. 111 - 376 - etc.
Here's the full link on swatch.com about it. http://www.swatch.com/alu_beat/index_section.php
You think we have a generation gap now, think about 30 or so years after this being implemented, if it is(probably not though). You: "Just a minute Tommy, I'm listening to Weezer in my car right now" Tommy: "When with your who in your what?" You: "Um, just go outside and play" Tommy: "What's an outside?" You: "You've never been out of the dome? God, I need a cigarette!" Tommy: "I don't know what a cigarette is, but you shouldn't take Bill Gate's name in vain!"
Because 120 is 12 by 10. While 12 divides 60, it is like using scores with decimal: ie a right pain. Also, a lot of fractions come out with shorter periods in base 120, eg:
base 120 base 60
1/ 7 0:17.17.17 cf 0:08.34.17...
1/11 0:10.V9.10 cf 0:05.27.16.21.49...
1/13 0:09.27.83 cf 0:04.36.55.23...
1/17 0:07.07.07 cf 0:03.31.45.52.56.28.14.07
This means that periods for many multiples of 7, eg 42, 84, 224, all come out with a one-place period: eg
1/10! 0:00 00 00 57 17 17 17 17
1/12! 0:00 00 00 00 51 E3 91 E3 91
I use base 120 quite often, and have done so since 1976: base sixty is *much* harder.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
also: Is this ment to imply that they rest of the world uses metric time, if so that's worse than the 25hr day.
It would create such a big problem to adjust computer times... But actually that might be a good thing. One of the biggest contributions to the economic boom was the fear over the Y2K bug. It put alot of people into work and created alot of jobs. Maybe a big overhaul, such as Y2K can help the struggling economy along.
100% Insightful
how high are you?
Carter tried to convert USA, but raygun stopped it. He declared it too expensive, even though much of the conversion cost was already done (Unfortunatly, many ppl agreed with the idiots) And now, you wish convert us to metric time?????
How about we in the US worry about adopting the metric measurement system first, and then we can worry about things like time. It's rediculous that we still use inches, feet, and yards.
Man, his mileage sucks!! That's only 1 mi / 504 gal.
Hup, right here. The Zhirrzh aliens in Timothy Zahn's "Conqueror's saga used a metric time scale based on heartbeats (beat ~ second, hunbeat ~ minute) and, I believe, the movement of the sun.
That's my contribution to the discussion.
Karma: T-rexcellent.
France actually tried this. I believe it was during the revolution when they cooked up the metric system, they also cooked up a calendar system. I assume that it was metric (I haven't ever seen it), but it was the one bit of the metric system that flopped.
BlackGriffen
So then how many centimeters cubed are in a metric minute?
I'm not sure if someone else pointed this out, but the current way and measure of time is the basis of the metric system. To be more exact, the unit of one metre is specifically linked to how much the light travels in a certain amount of time.
:)
The meter is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second.
To be more specific here is the URL where the following comes from:
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/meter.html
So making time "metric" would be a bit hard, since "metricity" is based on time itself
Yes, you could divide days into funny measurements, and change weeks; but the most needed change is away from the 28/29/30/31-day months (yes, only one has 28, and only once every 4 years is there 29...) The year could be almost perfectly divided into 13 28-day months. (hence the origin of 'month', look it up.) Then you'd be left over with one 'extra' day. It would be perfect for new years. Heck, I also think that the seasons should be CENTERED on the equinoxes and solstices, shouldn't they? So that the very MIDDLE of Summer is the longest day of the year, instead of the very END? And, the year should begin either on the Winter Solstice, or halfway between then and the spring equinox, shouldn't it?
But, enough of my rambling. I think a 13 28-day month calendar, with 4 perfect 7-day weeks a month, is better. Yes, then you could change the individual days to have metric times, such as 10 'hours', with 100 'minutes' per hour, and 100 seconds per minute. That comes out to 1.14 new seconds per old second. (so a 'new second' would be only slightly faster/shorter than an old second.)
While we're at it, we need to re-number the years. One: Most of the world isn't Christian. Two: It has been determined that the current calendar is something like 6 years off. So, based on when Jesus was actually born, it should really be A.D. 2008. (I think. I know the 'real' figure has been determined, I just can't remember what it is.) We should re-number based on something definite, that we know factually exactly when it happened. There was one organization a few years back that was trying to get it re-numbered based on the moon landing (it also recommended a 13-month calendar, with 'new years' falling on what is currently July 20, being newly called 'Armstrong Day', and leap day would be 'Aldrin Day', to keep all 13 months always at 28 days.)
Unfortunately, what havok would THAT cause to computers?!
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
25 hours a day... This guy must be a Martian, since they get nearly 25 hours a day there (24.75 to be more accurate).
This clearly demonstrates that the whole metric system is a Martian plot!
That's way Mars Polar Explorer got killed by the metric/imperial system mix up! They've already infiltrated NASA!!!!
Watch the skies!
Service Temporarily Unavailable The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later. ----- Apache/1.3.26 Server at www.zapatopi.net Port 80 -Looks like its time for more bandwidth!
There is actually a reason for minutes and hours to be divided into 60 units. It's the lowest number that is divisible by 2,3,4,and 5 i.e. it's easy to divide an hour or minute into sections: 1/2 hour, 1/3 hour 1/5 hour etc.
And why 24 hours do you say. Well 12 is divisible by 2,3 and 4, and there's two parts to a day (night and day).
365 days is just the way it is.
So those anchient babylonians really did know what they were doing.
Swatch tried this with their silly little "internet beats" idea. It never took off because the time system is so ingraned in peoples mind that changing it would be next to impossible.
The new Harley Davidson V-Rod, not only is the first to feature a water cooled engine, but its
ONE HUNDRED PERCENT METRIC!!!
This shows that some die-hard American companies are jumping on the bandwagon.
"Where is my mind?"
...I'm surprised you didn't recommend switching to stardates :P.
One variation would be to make the basic "day" 25 hours long to correlate with the natural human sleep cycle (e.g. the cycle humans adopt in the absence of external cues, such as sunlight). But, of course, if we (the human race) get enough people far enough away from earth to make decimalized time necessary and convenient, we will likely have started to tinker with our genetics enough to break the universality of the 25 hour sleep cycle.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
people have already tried this and failed, end of story, thing being, the planet, moon, orbit of the earth around the sun is NOT metric, so the current time system developed over thousands of years works fine
if it ain't broke, leave the fucking thing alone
Both the day, and the year are unavoidable units of time, so we are utterly stuck with the fixed 1:365.2xx ratio, no matter what time system you care to apply. If you pick one, you will not have a nice multiplier to get the other. If there is a unit you ought to pick, it would be seconds. But even then, the IERS is inserting leap seconds about every two years or so. Calculate everything in seconds and use precise multiplier constants for conversion to the Earth-Arbitrary units: days and years.
That would be the thing to do that would be closest to the SI philosophy (which is to make things as simple as possible, but no simpler! -- Einstein?)
blah blah
Bodø community site
The reasoning was -- I think -- (this is why I learned it in sociology) that people were prepared to switch how they measured most things, but not time/dates because the latter at least is grounded in religous dogma (ie. Thursday was Thor's Day or whatever, etc.). I was never quite sure if I bought it, but the points remains that although it might be funny to think "Ha ha! Divide up the day into ten metric-style pieces! Fun-ny!", it's been tried. I guess it's still sorta funny :)
Lastly, for those saying it's too hard/expensive/whatever, remember that Canada used to be Imperial. It was well before my time, but my parents told me it was a pain in the ass for a couple of years, but it worked out. Now, we don't have your gi-normous road infrastructure (though we're not exactly road-poor) but surely it can't be that bad. 'Sides, spending money on something like this may hurt, but it's a primo opportunity for some politician to get elected for "creating jobs for thousands of out of work Americans" :)
Wood Shavings!
- Godai
But at the time I'm posting this...
It's Miller Time!
[Stick to metric time if you're under 21]
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
"biggest to smallest" is the ISO standard. Read all about it here. This has always made most sense to me too, and is completely unambiguous. I've been using it in my programs for years now (and since y2k, whenever I write dates by hand, checks, etc) and it looks like now many XML applications use it too.
If you've ever had to write a program to parse non-ISO dates from some other program's output, you'll wish the rest of the world used it too...
I really don't see any need for any other time system, especially one that's based on something OTHER than planetary movements. Yeesh....
The division into 60 is a Sumerian system, but their native system is to divide the day into powers of 60.
The uniform hours divided by base 60 is a Greek invention. The Romans divided the hour into 12 uncia. [The romans used weight-fractions: the unit = 1 libra: therefore a scruple of time is 12 1/2 seconds = 1/288 hour]
The metric system was meant to replace the angle and the length with a decimally divided quadrant: so it would be appropriate to divide the quarter day likewise. It makes some sense to do it like this.
Of course, you can consistantly divide the circle, day, and circumference into any system. Eg I use a circle divided into powers of 120, a nautical system of a marinal (9120 ft) of 120 segments (76 ft). This is the 'minute' and 'second' of the base 120 system. The day is divided into 12 hours of 120 min of 120 seconds
You can use other divisions as well, eg a decimally divided circle.
One thing I keep in mind is the clock division. In our clock, the hours use the major markings, which serve as multiples of the minute. So you could, in something like base 14, use a day divided into 16 hours of 56 minutes a peice. The clock is divided into hour-octants, each of sevenths.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
In an interesting, but startlingly unrelated, circumstance, I found that not all of the U.K. has bothered switching to the metric system.
My kid has Avent baby bottles, which are high quality bottles manufactured by an English company called Avent. The directions for all baby formula instructions are "one scoop per 2 fl. oz." All the bottles have fluid ounces measurements, too. However, the British FL OZ is slightly smaller than the American FL OZ, and I know this because the bottles have markings for both countries!!!
What amazes me is that the directions don't say which is the appropriate marking to use, so apparently American children require more sustenance than the British. Or maybe it's just adjusting disposable income for taxes... grin.
Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
While I agree that 60, 60, 24 isn't the most easy thing, it has been done far longer than would be easy to switch. FYI, the whole sets of 60 came from the Babylonians (which is also where we get 360 degrees in a circle). By the way, I don't see anyone trying to get the world to go to gradians (100 grads per quarter circle instead of 90 degrees).
But anyways, I'll bite. Why not go to a "metric time"? Here's why: the entire metric system is based on other parts of the metric system. What is a milliliter? Yes, it's 1/1000th of a Liter, but it's also one centimeter cubed. It's also based on water: one cubic centimeter of (pure) water is one gram. (Here's a hint: this is where mass comes from). But where do we get distances? The meter is derived from the SECOND. Translation: the second _IS_ metric. If you try and introduce a "metric time," it will most definately _NOT_ integrate with the metric system as we know it, and it will seriously mess up any hopes of getting a stardard in science and engineering - at least in the US. The rest of the world has it nailed, except us. What's the Earth's gravitational acceleration at sea level? about 32 feet/sec^2 (imperial) or 9.8 meters/sec^2. You change the second (or introduce a new replacement), and this value, which is very well known to physicists and engineers, you're going to mess everything up.
Force, mass, pressure, acceleration, etc. would all be skewed when trying to go to some "decimal" time system.
This is another reason why this "Internet time" nonsense will (should) never catch on. It's not going to help the world in any way. Not possible.
-Xyphoid
I guess slashdot now has it's first Martian reader. There must be a hellish latency between here and mars! http://stoner.eps.mcgill.ca/wtp/planets/welcome/ma rs.htm
Not if, for example, you want 1/3 of an hour.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The second is part of the metric system - you can't change how long it is (or replace it with another time unit) without changing most of the rest of the metric system too (such as units of energy, voltage*, power, torque, pressure, force ...) If you stay with the second, you are stuck with the fact that the apparent motion of the Big Light has a period of 86400 seconds, which is not a power of 10. Any time system that does not sync well with the Big Light will not be popular so long as we stay on Earth.
* Technically I should use something like 'electric potential difference' here, but then hardly anyone would know what I meant. Analogously, some people use the terms 'wattage' when they should say 'power' and 'amperage' when they should say 'electric current', but that is just rank ignorance. It is in no way comparable to my use of the term 'voltage'. Nope, not at all.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
But don't mix things like you're doing.
The "cost of change" is nothing compared to the cost of using two systems, plus the cost of the confusion inside the US, plus all the costs US has to bear when everybody outside in the other countries can't understand what you're saying.
To be more on-topic, by strange coincidence, my 4-year old child yesterday asked me about the clock having or not a 0 (zero)... Many things came to mind: the invention of zero, the extreme (and unnecessary) complexity of this system I'm gonna have to teach...
I believe this format is popular: yyyy-mm-dd (remember to use hyphens, not slashes).
It's great for naming backup zips like so:
Blancmange
A similar system was flaunted in one of the 19th Century Pyramid books. It had a system based on base 50, with some of the 2's removed ^_^.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
However, if whatever technique you applied to stretch 24 hours into 25 could be applied to the Timecube days, perhaps that would give us 100 hours...metric time!
The 13 month calendar is one of the cooler calendar reform movements.
_______
2B1ASK1
Lyrics From You Talk Too Much
25 Hours a day
8 days a week
13 months a year
Is when you speak
When the French first tried to impose the metric system on its own population, there was significant resistance - particularly among tradesman. The ever-efficient French simply applied the death penalty for a tradesman to own a non-metric measuring tool. Catch your builder owning a yardstick meant you didn't have to pay the bill, if you get my drift, so pretty soon the metric system caught on.
Even so, the metric time was so universally ignored that the government had to choose between dropping the time requirement or depopulating the continent.
And this was at a time when hardly anyone even had a clock.
Sounds double-plus-good.
So, I know there have been ~200 posts already, so no one will actually read this (either that, or I'm being redundant), but:
24 hours in a day and 60 minutes in an hour is kinda handy, when you think about it. It's easier for people to think about. You can divide 24 into halves, thirds, quarters, sixths, and eights pretty easiliy. It's the same deal with 60 minutes in an hour. Tenths, halves, thirds, sixths, they're all easy to wrap your head around. No fractions, no decimals.
Metric would still be pretty good, but after halves and quarters it begins to get messy. Hey, I'm lazy, so it's 24 hours days for me for the forseeable future. ;)
"I'll say it again for the logic-impaired." -- Larry Wall.
The US military (particularly the army) has been metric for a long time now. They had to be so they could work with the Europeans. So is NASA...remember the Mars probe that pancaked a couple of years ago? That was because information was supplied in Imperial units and not Metric units to NASA (NASA requires Metric AFAIK).
The reason we have twenty-four hours in a day has to do with basic trigonometry. The ancient Greeks were able to find algebraic expressions for the sine and cosine of 30 degrees and 45 degrees, and the equations for the sines and cosines of differences are:
So one can find the algebraic expressions for the sine and cosine of 15 degrees by using the above equations. (This is left as an exercise to the reader.) So 15 degrees is the smallest whole number interval (in degrees) with an algebraic expression for the sine and cosine, and 360 divided by 15 is 24. Therefore, one hour is the amount of time for the earth to rotate through 15 degrees of arc.
Source: Ptolemy's Almagest
The major reason we like base-10 system is that we have ten fingers and we used to it. In fact having to use 12 hours(24 hours a day) and 60 minutes/seconds system is much better.
Those numbers can be divided by many integers, e.g. 12 can be divided by 2, 3, 4, 6, while 10 can only be divided by 2 and 5. The characteristic is so useful but most people don't realize. Say, we usually use 'a quarter' than '15-minute', right?
10 days in a week? Go read the first chapter of Genesis, you'll find that a week should consist of 7 days. Also, 7 days is one moon phase.
Also, if we had a 10 hour day, we would have to have 10 time zones instead of 24.
I'm sure that there are many other reasons why this is dumb... probably also a few for it, but since I don't like the idea, I won't mention any f those.
God became man to enable men to become sons of God. -C.S. Lewis
Suggested reading: Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness In The Sky". It has a very simplistic use of "metric time". One has to admit, basing time on the rotation of our earth, may make sense while on earth, seeing as humans and time are cyclical in nature, but once you start populating other world's, it would be best to come up with some universal time scale. Basing it on something arbitrary, like a second, makes a lot of sense.
I had this whacky idea a year or so ago, where we'd track the passage of time by the number of seconds that have passed since the conception of the idea for "metric date/time". It was received critically by my peers, and fell into disuse. Unfortunately, I am unsure how many seconds have passed since that moment and have since lost track of all time and dates.
Time is based on a circle, or an elipse
as in the orbit of the earth around the sun.
Next thing you know some smarty pants is going to say a circle should have 100 degrees...
or maybe in base 2 there could be 256 degrees,
oh I know lets change pi to 3.2768
Dont be stupid, metric time is dumb.
The thing about metric is that it has even less to do with observable references than even US customary units.
"How long is a foot?"
"About the size of my shoe."
"How long is a meter?"
"One ten-millionth of the distance from the Equator to the North Pole along the Prime Meridian."
"... which is how long exactly?"
"Ten million meters."
*sound of slapping forehead*
"Is it easy? Think about it: 60 seconds to a minute, 60 minutes to an hour, 2(4) hours to a day, all the way to 365 days to a year."
Hate to tell you this, but there is no international comittee out there that decides how many days there are in a year. The mass of the sun and our distance from it set that number to about 365.2425 (solar) days per year. And there is also no department of the UN that decides how long a day is, either.
As to seconds, minutes and hours, do you have any idea how much that would seriously fuck up longitude? You literally have no idea where you are if you can't remember how many degrees are in an hour, and if you want to change it from a nice even 15, the least of your worries is the replacement cost for that constellation of GPS satellites up there.
Or do you want to use radians there instead? There's an idea, basing your navigation system off of an irrational number, guaranteeing that you could never know where you are for sure.
"General, why did our 'smart' bombs miss their target?"
"We didn't carry pi out to enough decimal places..."
"Currently, all the world uses the Metric System except for the US."
What, 5.7 billion people can't be wrong? Metric wouldn't be the first bad idea that has come out of France, you know.
"But what about Time? The solution is Metric Time, that is, a time system which uses Base-10 and Metric Standards. So what do you think: Is it Time, for Metric Time?"
Why not base-2? Everybody will be using a calculator anyway... Hey, why not make all our numbers base 2? Whoops, I mean base-00000010
The Hives allready did this.
Listen to their album 'Veni Vidi Vicious' and behold:
The Hives... Introduce the metric system in time.
Swatch is trying to do that with their Beat system... and we all know how populur that is..
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
if you're going to do it all do, do at once, other wise dont fucking bother. No exceptions. Thats what sank the metic system in the US in the first place...well abe and Abigael aren't up to speed on the convertion.
FUCK, I SAY, FUCK THE CONVERSION
if you say this is 1 liter of water whoooooo gives a fuck what that is in gallons. This is the type of shit that public schools where selling to their students in the 70's and 80's. bullshit
Have you any idea at all of what the cost would be for such a misadventure?? ... and all done because of the difficulties of the math of tracking time? Many algorithms exist that have done the job for such chores,
.. Yet, there are things known as 'realities' ... and i'm afraid the earth's time-tracking method is here to stay.
...
... 100 secs per min. ... Your suggesting 25 hours / day, while possible, merely re-invents the problem you're trying to solve!)
and changing things would cost *billions* of dollars.
Where would you prefer such monies go? to solving the inconvenience that concerns you? or to adding to the pot available for care of the dying of Africa thru disease?
or to other worthy causes that , frankly, should be much higher on the planet's 'must fix' priority list!
Every 'techie trained' person has thought of this, and it's a good thought
Maybe it'll be different on Mars
(Btw, i'm curious as to why you'd break the logic and opt for '25' hour days. 100 hour days would be much easier, woould it not? 100 mins per hour
jon
"There are 11 kinds of people: those who know binary, those who don't, and those who could not care less!"
The only challenge I see is moving Earth to an outer orbit so that a year would be 100 days.
Screw the whales and innocent civilians. Killing whales and blowing up world trade centres has been established for centuries, as you say. Best not to try to do anything about it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This kind of topic points out how irrational and arbitrary the idea of an 'edict based' system of units really is.
The people who imposed the Metric System on France after the French Revolution did try to impose a certain measure of 'time improvement' on the world, in that they tried to renumber the years starting from the dawn of the 'new era' of post Revolution France. I believe they may have even tried to redivide the year into ten months.
I can just see it now, some bureaucrats in the EU... trying to coerce the earth into revolving around the sun in 100 days. Maybe they'd settle for a 1000 day year. We could adjust the seasons or something. Anything is possible when a committee is designing reality.
I beg your pardon, MY senses are morally upstanding, although I don't know about yours...
You can learn more about circadian rhythms here (they claim the cycle is 25 hours, in case you don't actually feel like reading through their tutorial)
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
I'm surprised none of these tings were said when I read through the comments! Sorry I'm coming to the party late...
1) This would wreck the world economy, because so many people get paid "by the hour". If hours got longer, people would earn less!
2) This would completely fuck up our T.V. shows. In order to get an existing rerun of a show like Star Trek or X Files to fill an hour, they would have to pad it with a million commercials!
3) We already have a relevant time for this... It's called StarDate, people! Learn it! Use it! Live it!
4) If we do this, I say forget trying to coordinate the 'year' to seasons. Lets just make a one hundred day year.
5) How would we convert existing holidays (like George Washington's Birthday, or the fourth of july!) to the new calendar?
6) Forget the concept of 'birthday', since the 'date' would not be relevant under the new regime of 100-day years. You will instead have a 'sun-revolution celebration'.
In all seriousness, I used to think that the temperature system the U.S. uses (farenheight) was completely bizarre and arbitrary (32 for freezing? 212 for boiling?) and celcius made much more sense... until I learned where the scale came from... the Farenheight scale was devised so that 0 degrees was about as low as a person could stand, and that 100 was about as high as a person could stand... very metric-ish, but with human perception as the calibration instead of the boiling/freezing points of water. And ya know... it makes a lot more sense in practical terms for weather, too. Farenheight degrees have much more 'precision' to them than celcius does (imnsho).
Well, not without changing the Earth's orbit or
rotational velocity. And we can't do that yet.
As long as we inherently have 365ish days per year, we're not going to have a usable, truly metric system.
The 60/60/24 thing is kind of silly, but when the natural world works on 29ish (lunar period) and 365ish, you're kind of screwed to begin with. There are also aspects of our biology that might not work too well with multiples of 10 (e.g. a 10-day week would probably be too long between breaks).
So I'm all for metric, but until/unless we move predominantly into space, I'd stick with our quirky Earth-based time system.
Of course, the potential to expolit this financially is great. Consider the frou frou surrounding the Millennium Bug!
F Associates have a team of fully experienced programmers that are ready to tackle all your Metric Times Conversion needs!
I can't see any mention of how this metric time takes into account the seasons. What do they base a "year" on? I hope the metric year is alot more accurate than the current "year" in which we need to add a day every 4 years and then not add some years......
So that leaves us with subdividing the hour into either 36 units of 100 seconds, but that's not something people can really wrap their brains around. Or...
Once upon a time I worked in a place with a timeclock that showed decimal hours. (Instead of saying 12:15 it would say 12.25 etc.) The clock made an audible 'click' sound every 36 seconds, and everyone called this unit of time the 'click'. That would be confusing, given the slang 'klick' for 'kilometer' popular with military types, so we'd probably just call it a 'centihour' This would soon be pronounced "Centaur", but that wouldn't be quite as confusing.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
We'll just have to define a "metric circle" of 100 metric degrees, each containing 100 metric minutes of 100 metric seconds each.
No matter how we define time, a day will still take the same amount of it and a year will still take 365.25 days.
Not that the current system is totally logical in all ways. In fact, it sucks. The division of minutes, seconds, and hours are downright illogical. So there must be some way to improve it.
I notice that all the important, natural time phenomena (the days, the years, the months, and the seasons) are essentially circular in nature. So why not just talk about their passage in terms of the fraction of the circle that has passed? We'd then just produce a set of standard conversion constants (let's face it, there's no way around them) to apply to our now fewer units of time all indiviually measured in radians.
Imagine your new watch with only one hand running anticlockwise (cuz that is, by convention, the positive direction; did that ever annoy you about clocks?) and you have four markings: 0, Pi/2, Pi, 3Pi/2, and 2Pi. Now you always have Pi for lunch!
If nothing else, it's at least a way to force people to be able to handle simple division.
-Zuchinis
That's the only thing that drives me crazy. I can deal with miles, inches etc. because I know what they are--they have sysmbols telling me so. But when you come along something like "1/6/2002" (neary half a year apart!), there is nothing to indicate which way around it is. This isn't much of a problem in RL (whether you live in the US or not). But on the net, it's insanity!
We use base 10 because we were born with 10 fingers. But that doesn't make it the "best" numeric base. In fact, base 12 has a lot of advantages over base 10. 10 can only be divided by 5 and 2. 12 can be divided by 6, 4, 3 and 2.
:-]
Time is based on bases 24 and 60, which are multiples of 12. It's easy to count exacly half a day (12 hours), one third of a day (8 hours) and one quarter of a day (6 hours). The happen to correspond (roughly) to day / night, awake / asleep and morning / day / afternoon / night, which are "important" periods from a biological & natural point of view. Same goes for years (if a year had 10 months, each season would be 2.5 months long, and seasons are not quite as "artificial" as they may seem).
Here are a couple of pages about base 12:
DGSB
StudyWorks
Of course, changing everything from base 10 to base 12 would be more trouble than it's worth, but there's no reason to "downgrade" the way we count time just to comply with a "rule" that exists only because some people count by their fingers. I suppose men could learn to use base 11 with a bit of training...
The main problem with the way we keep time is converting quickly (mentally) between seconds, minutes and hours. But the solution is pretty simple: always work in seconds (the SI unit).
P.S. - In fact, it's possible to count up to 32 using just one hand (think binary), but I've never met anyone who does it intuitively.
RMN
~~~
Julian day numbers are the count of days since noon GMT on January 1, 4713 BCE (on the Julian calendar); the fraction is simply an expression of the fraction of the day elapsed. Astronomers have used this scheme for a long time; it's perfect for the nocturnal. Since it resets at noon, it can be confusing for diurnal people in Europe, but it could work well for those in the western hemisphere.
Here is a converter, along with more information.
Google's Cache Of The Page
The author of the linked article has written wmzcalock, a nifty little dockapp (for Window Maker / Afterstep / Blackbox fans) that can display time in metric units. It's .01536 as I write this!
Metric time is a very nice idea. You divide the day up into 100,000 seconds (instead of 86,400); 100 "seconds" is a "minute," and 10,000 "seconds" is an "hour." (Alternately, you can have 1,000-"second" "hours"---it depends on whether you want your day to have 10 "hours" or 100.) You can imagine a digital wall clock for this time standard as simply three or five digits counting up, i.e. the decimal part of the day (hence "015" or "01536" for approximately 12:22am).
As for the silly remarks about a 100-day year, a metric time system would only be relevant in the division of a single day, as natural events pretty much dictate the larger time periods. A 10-month year is conceivable, though I think a better case could be made for a 12- or 13-month calendar (either with identical months and 1-5 extra days not belonging to any month), in light of the lunar orbit.
(Our current calendar, IMHO, needs reform more than our current system of timekeeping. Exhibit A: that weirdass formula you need to use to compute the day of the week for an arbitrary date)
iSKUNK!
I was just at FermiLab last Saturday, and got to hear a physicist friend of mine complain about how all the engineers that design most of the stuff around there use Imperial, and how it confuses the hell out of the foreign scientists trying to build the damn accelerator + detectors. At least one reason to switch to metric (SI) is to make the Tevatron run a little smoother. I'm sure that NASA has seen the same problem, remember that Mars satellite that missed because of a bad unit conversion?
What gets me is people who claim that Imperial is "easier". Whenever someone tells me that, I really feel the need to dish out pain, but this is a civilized country (if you ignore the fact that Bush wants immunity from the war crimes tribunal).
Don't Bogart the fish sticks
We have a large number of units that depend directly upon the unit we use for time. Something fundamental as the Hertz would be redefined if we choose to use something new for a "metric" second (ignoring the fact that a "second" is already an SI unit).
The biggest problems with our method of measuring time (the requirement for leap years, leap seconds, etc.) won't be solved just by changing systems, since our planet doesn't rotate at a perfect rate and doesn't orbit the sun at an integral number of days.
You have to base a new system upon the rotation of the earth, because any time system that doesn't make sense relative to a single earth day would not be accepted. So while we can very nicely subdivide a day, a "day" is still pretty arbitrary and specific to the earth. When we deal with astronomical events, or have to tell time on another planet, we're still stuck with doing it like they do on earth.
It might make more sense from a scientific point of view to adopt a "second" that's more closely tied in "metric" respects to the half-life of a known element, or perhaps something like the absorption spectrum of hydrogen. (Normalizing to the latter, keeping the base unit as close as possible to a traditional second, a unit equivalent to exactly 1 billion times the absorption frequency of hydrogen would be about 0.7 traditional seconds, which would put closer to 123000 of them in a day.)
Units of distance should be measured (regardless of our definition of "second") in some form of light-seconds. Using our new and improved second, 1 nano-light-second would be equivalent to about 21cm (or nearly 8-1/2 inches). Not coincidentally, this also happens to be the wavelength of hydrogen absorption. Not too cumbersome, eh?
(Warning: I haven't checked my math too closely.)
http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:-6x_4SGDzHgC: zapatopi.net/metrictime.html+METRIC+TIME=en=UTF-8
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Let's just get the US onto using the existnig metric standards first. Currently everyone agrees on time (including nature, to within a few jump seconds or so). Seriously, no more miles, no more yards, no more NASA rockets going BLAM into Mars because of stupid units being used.
(where <year> is the ideogram meaning "year", etc.) They also have characters for the days of the week which can be written much faster than English words. I can't write Japanese in a slashdot post, but check out for example the "old stories" sidebar on the right on slashdot.jp to see what it looks like.
This is so neat that I wish English would adopt a similar system. If we introduced a few simple symbols that meant "year", "month" and "day" and appended them to the numbers, there would never be a problem. Unfortunately, because our writing system is so glyph-starved, and it never even occurs to anybody that characters outside our 40 or so symbols could exist, this will probably never happen.
If God had wanted us to use the metric system, He'd have given us 10 fingers.
That's already been more or less done - gradians. 400 gradians to the circle. But it's rarely used. Serious work with angles is done in radians.
A standard deck of cards makes an excellent calendar system.
:) Considering the calendar we use now is off every 3,000 years anyway, I think my calendar is fairly accurate. (Note: if you absolutely HAVE to make the two correspond, you could always add a day every 675 years...maybe make 675 years a different type of "suit" and then put a "Triple Joker Day" in after each one...)
Gregorian Solitaire Calendar 2.0
Adapted from the beginnings of said calendar in The Solitaire Mystery
First of all, this idea is not TOTALLY my own, as the idea for a card-deck calendar was first presented in The Solitaire Mystery and then slightly elaborated on....I however, took that one step further and worked out the details for a true honest-to-god calendar that is reasonably accurate...Here it is...
A Normal Year
52 weeks (of 7 days ) + 1 Joker Day = 365 days, or 1 year Each week is named after a card starting with the Ace of Spades and ending with the King of Hearts 4 weeks = 1 month (28 days). Each month is named after the # that each of its four weeks espouses. Thus, we have 13 months of Ace through King, each week within given a different suit in this order: Spades, Clubs, Diamonds, Hearts. The last day is not in any month or week, it is Joker Day
Year Numbering
First, allow me to explain the traditional Gregorian Leap Year system:
In our current calendar, every 4th year is a leap year EXCEPT when a leap year falls on a century (as it always does) EXCEPT when said century-leap-year is divisible by 400.
For example. 1904 was a leap year. 1900 was NOT, even though it was a fourth year....1996 was a leap year and 2000 WAS a leap year because it is a century-leap year divisible by 400....thus, 1600 WAS a leap year, 1700, 1800 & 1900 were NOT, but 2000 WAS
My solitaire calendar works like so. Each year is to be numbered as a card in a similar manner as the weeks (Ace of Spades through King of Hearts) HOWEVER instead of doing all four aces followed by all four twos, etc., we would group the years by suit...thus Ace-King of Spades, followed by Ace through King of Clubs, etc. When the years repeat, add a # and start over...thus years would be in a notation like "32 7D" (32nd 7 of Diamonds). At the end of every fourth year (a Hearts year), we add a Double Joker Day (equivalent of Feb. 29th, but placed differently). Thus, leap years would feature every card in the deck, including both Jokers.
To account for the funny century rule, I would add units of measurement called the "Deck" and the "Suit." A Suit would be 13 years of one suit of cards (Ace through King). A "Deck" would consist of four Suits (52 years) PLUS two Joker years which would NEVER be leap years. This has the effect of inserting 4 years into every 108 years that do NOT have a Double Joker Day, a close parallel to having no leap year every century. Additionally, the "400-divisible-leap-century-year-days" are accounted for by stretching the number of years before a "skip" from 100 to 108.
Does this work out exactly? Not quite, but it's pretty damn hell close. Watch:
Every 2,700 of OUR years, we would have spent 986154 days
Every 2,700 of MY years, we would have spent 986150 days
In other words, I'm off by 4 days every 2700 years. Not bad, eh ?
our 24 hour day, 360 degree circle, 60 sec. minute, 60 minute hour, etc, were all used in Sumeria.
from them we also get, amongst other things, the most common astology system, the double entry accounting system, and some important foundations of western religion.
it's actually very surprising how much of hour modern lives were first established in the world's very first civilizations (or earlier).
The metric unit for time is the second. This new unit may be useful in a base-10 system, but don't call it metric. In fact, if you replaced the second with a new unit for time, you would have to change the entire metric system.
For example, the newton (kg * m/s^2) would need to be replaced, because it is based on the second. So would the joule (N * m), because it is based on the meter, which is based on the second. So would the volt (J/C), because it is based on the joule, which is based on the newton, which is based on the second.
IMHO, there's no problem with the second. Our units don't need to be based on properties of this one planet. In a few hundred years few people will know or care how the unit of time relates to an earth day. If we really used metric time, we wouldn't even need minutes or hours or weeks or months (though days and years would still be meaningful). We'd talk about seconds and kiloseconds and megaseconds.
All it takes is nukes and nerves.
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way i likes it!
The way I see it the measurement system you use should be as individualistic as the OS you run. Just because everybody else is using SI units doesn't mean I should give up my Engineering units! It's almost like trying to convince your boss at work to use Linux instead of Windows. Sure I like to run Linux (and do on most of my personal computers), but I still have to use Windows at work. Similarly, I prefer making all of my engineering calculations (mainly heat, fluid, and mass transfer calculations) in SI units and my boss (Lebaneese?) understands things in SI, but my complete understanding of measurements are in English! So you really need to understand and be able to work with both units equally well just like you should be able to use several OS's equally well.
Sometime during the revolutionary period, France officially went to a metric calendar. It came out of the new idealism and the desire to replace old things with new ones. However, the change was soon undone.
Ready are you? What know you of ready? For eight hundred years have I trained Jedi. - Yoda
0000-0059 = 1 (Midnite)
0100-0159 = 2
0200-0259 = 3
0300-0359 = 4
0400-0459 = 5
0500-0559 = 6
0600-0659 = 7
0700-0759 = 8
0800-0859 = 9
0900-0959 = 10
1000-1059 = 11
1100-1159 = 12
1200-1259 = 13 (Noon)
1300-1359 = 14
1400-1459 = 15
1500-1559 = 16
1600-1659 = 17
1700-1759 = 18
1800-1859 = 19
1900-1959 = 20
2000-2059 = 21
2100-2159 = 22
2200-2259 = 23
2300-2359 = 24
2400-2459 = 25
So as you can see, technically, there is 24 hours 59 minutes, and 59 seconds, and 59 milliseconds, and so on and so fourth.
Instead of changing to decimal time, why not change everything else to base-60 ? I mean, maybe the Babylonians had it right to begin with. For all you wimps out there we could keep 0-9 and separate the base-60 places by colons, like 14:59:21, but I'd much rather just write e2fÒ7Éz or something...
If we introduced a few simple symbols that meant "year", "month" and "day" and appended them to the numbers, there would never be a problem.
How about the symbols "y", "m" and "d". Sheesh.
Ok, as has been mentioned, this was tried after the French Revolution (and failed, of course). The interesting part is that, for a while, all watches were, by law, required to show decimal time. The watchmakers, though, couldn't make any money selling decimal time watches, so they made the watches cross-compatible. The watch had to show the whole day, as opposed to half a day, since there was no longer an am set of hours and a pm set of hours. So they used one hour hand, but showed both hour scales on the watch. For minutes, however, they needed two hands, with two different scales.
A horologist friend has one of these watches, and a link to a picture is below. We were working on a project to make a clock tower on the Univ. of Fla. campus with, essentially, four clock faces from 300-400 years ago that few people know about (one face for each side). BTW, converting the one revolution per hour signal from an old clock mechanism to output decimal time on a clock face with mechanical gearing is a mess.
Here's the link for the site.
http://www.ce.ufl.edu/%7Echiep/
This takes you to the clock tower project site. Click the 'Dials' link on the left hand side, and then click on 'Revolutionary or Metric Dial' on the page it takes you to.
...Stardates (Ask your local trekkie).
How about rational time, like Julian time in Pascal (Delphi, anyone?) Each day is 1.0 and time is divided as rational portions.
If it is midnight today and it's 123.0, then noon today is 123.5, and tomorrow (24 hrs) from midnight is 124.0.
What ever happened to gradians (?) for trig. Instead of 360 degrees in a circle, there are 400. So, a right angle is 100 degrees. I never used that nasty 'grad' mode, as I was always an under-grad and considered myself a radian (pi) man.
-
Suncoast Linux - Sarasota, FL
Paying to have thousands upon thousands of miles of road remarked with new signs would be prohibitively expensive.
Pul-leeze. "Prohibitively expensive"? The US is the richest country in the world. Going by GNP there isn't even a close second. There is very little question the US could afford to do it. Would it be expensive? Sure. But it could easily be done. The only reason we don't is because we have a bunch of troglodytes running who (correctly) realize that even though converting to SI has advantages, the current system actually does work fine. Don't get me wrong, I'd love for the US to go metric but it isn't going to happen anytime soon. There is no compelling polital need or will to do so.
Sumerians divided the day directly into powers of 60.
Greeks used the sumerian fractions on regularised Egyptian hours.
Romans used hour units, which were devided by any fraction, eg weight-fractions (ounce = 5 min, scruple = 12.5 sec).
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
why dont you tell me quickly off the top of your head
how many cubic feet is a gallon of water?
how many inches is one thousandth of a mile?
how much would 23 ounces of water weigh roughly?
You have to look for a table and a calculator to answer those questions. See how broken the english system is?
I'm all for a form of base-10 time, but the one proposed in the article seems too complicated.
:-))
Why not just take a year (a "real" year, not the rounded 365 days), chop it into 10 million, and make one of those the base units? Each one would be just over 3 seconds long. Then if people really need to define an hour, a day, a month, etc. they can still do it using some convenient round number, for example, 25000 units in a day (or even 30000 for longer days!
This keeps the base unit reasonably close to a second and allows for a kind of "backward compatibility" while doing away with the different bases and complex leap calculations. Saying "I'll see you in 100 TU." (Time Units) is no less reasonable than "I'll see you in five minutes".
I vastly prefer the metric system for measurements but for time it just would be too radical of a step. A simpler system with a base unit close to a second would be a lot easier for people to adjust to, I think.
This obviously isn't perfect but I think it would at least be a good step in the right direction.
IIRC only seconds are a SI unit. Minutes, hours and days ar auxilluary (there really needs to be an CmdrTaco button to help with spelling, while posting :). This implies that we use the normal prefixes in conjunction with seconds ie. 1 ks for 16.67 minutes and so on. Convert it to DHMS if you need to get a feel of how log a time is and frankly in daily life there is no need for a change.
:)
When I was atteding engineering school we, on a daily basis used things like nF and MOhms after a while one got rether jaded and did not realize that from atto to exa there is an enormous span of magnitude, but after applying it to time the magnitude issues quickly became obvious. 3 Gs is approx a centrury just as an example.
Finally, it is the Unix/Linux way of counting time how can it be wrong
a sig with any other name would be as witty
The metric unit for time is the second. For intervals less than a second we use milliseconds, microseconds, picoseconds, nanoseconds, femtoseconds, etc... I don't think we need to change the basic metric second that is already in use. What's the point of changing to a day unit?
The problem is that for anything above a second, somehow we change to minutes, hours, days, months years, etc... What's us with that? Why not use deciseconds, centiseconds, kiloseconds, etc... I for one, like the sound of decisec, centisec and kilosec, megasec, etc...
...they've been telling me there is only 24 hours in a day; i knew they were lying!
I put on my robe and wizard hat.
Lots of various cultures have used such a system. *independtly* of mesopitania.
look at the egyptins for example
Metric time is for communists
Real men base their clocks on the rotation speed of the galaxy! Not on some obscure backwater planet that nobody cares about!
Then learn how to convert base-60 to base 10 off the head.
Why should everyone be forced to accept a new standard because a few people want a change?
Sounds like a "Tyranny of the crybabies....."
No, it's HAMMER TIME!
Base-12? Base-10? I would think /.ers would rather have a Base-16 system! I mean, who among us doesn't love to do hexidecimal math? Not to mention the more interesting times things could happen:
Saw a hot woman coming home from work at around B:0D. Had a late dinner of fish at C:0D. And a good midnight(ish) snack at F:ED.
Ok I'll stop now.
i do not know about car companies specifically (even the new Harley bike is metric), but industry in general would be taking a big hit. actually car companies could handle it easier i would think (if they have not already). try going to a Home Depot or some place like it. wander around and think of every wrench, pipe and whatever else that they have. then think of evey one that every hardware distro has sold. every little machine shop, every mechanic, every plumber every weekend warrior. every last little worker bee, as well as every company has to replace nearly every tool they own. every blueprint would suddenly become confusing. every pipe under every street would require some adapter when repaired.
on top of the physical demands, every worker would have to be retrained as well as carry a conversion device for when they are repairing old systems that are a mix. the heater repair guy would need to carry both tools when working on a building's system. changing everything at once would be a mess. on top of that i guess suppliers would have to carry both sizes. we have some european machines in the small machine shop/manufacturing place i work. i know the first thing that was done (if not done by them time we got em) to them was to replace every nut and bolt on the machine, and retap every hole. everything was converted out of metric. all the small machine shops did it that way. it was/is just too much of a hassle to have double the sets of tools floating around for tweaking. it is also too much hassle to make sure every machine operator can use both systems. when dials just have numbers you don't want an operator to assume it's one system or the other. things can go very wrong that way. i guess also 50-some years ago when they started, not as many people knew they metric system well? either way having a plant with both systems seems like potential mess, as well as a safety hazard.
the whole thing is a massive undertaking that is just getting harder and harder to pull off every day. all that being said, i wish the USA had changed over at some point. i think it would take some sort of insane event to justify retooling a country in this day and age.
geniuses?
If we change time to a metric system, shouldn't we change kilobytes to 1000 instead of 1024 ?
What I would like to see is the 12AM and 12PM thing changed. Why in the world does it go from 11:59 PM to 12 AM? Wouldn't it make much more sense to get rid of the 12 and use 0 instead (0 AM after 11:59PM) or change it so that 12PM comes after 11:59 PM (and midnight is at 1AM)
As simple as it still works, not simpler... yes, Einstein (who said many other wise things).
NTSC video runs at 29.97 frames/second, which people in production just round to 30. Programs are timed precicely on the 30's, be it a 30 minute program, or a 60 second commercial. This is also based upon the fact that there's 60 cycles of electricity per second, the whole concept around interlaced scanning. This whole metric time thing would just throw everything off. Personally, from working in production, I have it ingrained in my mind that there's 30fps. In our control room, we even have a neat little sheet titled "How many frames?" which breaks down the common fractions and their second counterparts(1/5 second = 6 seconds, etc). I couldn't deal with it being 50 metric minutes for a metric half-hour show, it might make sense, but if it ain't broke why fix it? I wouldn't even know what would happen to video equipment that relies on 60 cycles/second.
When I was an undergrad, I had to take an American History/PoliSci class. I was a French Lit major, having spent several years living in Bordeaux, and I found some things the teacher said interesting.
Showing how unrealistic the expectations of the French Revolutionaries were, he mentioned how they changed the months around so that they were metric.
Oddly, he didn't comment on the metric system for volume, distance, weight, or mass. I began to wonder what makes time so different.
I think, as it has been pointed out already, that we want to confine time to measures that have some meaning to us, like days, but also to standards that are easy to work with. We cannot have it both ways. There are 365 days to a year. That's not a multiple of ten.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Moreover, this was already tried and it failed. After the French Revolution, they forced decimal time on everyone. (Take a read through any good book on calendars; it's usually mentioned as a curiosity.)
No one liked it except the theorists. Workers hated it. Employers hated it.
Think about using it. I mean really think about how it will affect you.
A ten day week. How many days do you plan to work?
Eight on, two off? Ridiculous work amount.
Seven on, three off? Every weekend is three days, but do you really want to work seven days in a row?
Six on, four off? Too much idle time.
You'd think people would read history books once in a while.
Actually, base 10 is a funny business and is probably only really popular because we have 10 digits on our hands. Even base 12 makes more sense as it is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 12 while 10 is only divisbible by 1, 2, 5, and 10. 60 has 12 whole factors and, since we like to divide time up so much, it makes a lot of sense to use the base-60 time system. even if 60 weren't a factor of 360 (useful for making those lovely circular analogue clocks and watches) it still makes a lot of sense as a base system for time.
`which fortune`
So then, with 10 days to the week, that means we would have an 8 day work week? 5 days work and 5 day weekend? How about counting a second as 1 one-thousand, 2 one-thousand, etc? Or which day is the famed "7th day of rest?" Is it day 7 of month one week one, day 4 of week two, days 1 and 8 of week 3, day 5 of week four, days 2 and 9 of week six, day 6 of week seven, days 3 and 10 of week eight, back to day 7 of week nine, then day 4 of week ten, and wait! we're in a new month now, so now it's days 1 and 8 of month 2 week 1... I think I've already gone too far. But I can do more for ya! When's the 4th of July? When's Christmas? Frankly, I'll wait until we get conquered by the Army of Metric Time and they destroy all the evidence of any existence of our current time system. That's the only way I would replace every clock in my house, every clock in my cars, all my watches... Ok, I'll shutup now.
For a long time I feel that numbers 128, 256, 512 are more "natural" for me then 500, 1000..
I will consider my 32(20) year to be an anniversary, not 30(1E).. ;-)
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
So will a fortnight become a twentnight?
Just put an 'm' next to month. July 4, 2002 will become 2002 7m4 or 02 7m4 or 4 7m 2002 oe 2002 7m 4.
25 hours to a day huh? Time to lay off the 'ole coding sessions there Timmy.
Many metric units are based on the relation of two metric units, often one of them is time.
"One newton is the force required to cause a mass of one kilogram to accelerate at a rate of one meter per second squared"
One of the benifits of the metric system is that these units have simple 1 to 1 relation ships (or at the worst base 10 relation ships) if you change the length of a second the definition of a newton would change to something like "One newton is the force required to cause a mass of one kilogram to accelerate at a rate of one meter per 1.00236283 second squared"
The worth of adjusting time to make it more base 10 pleasent is far less than the trouble it would cause for the metric system. Destory the well ordered relation of units, or redefine all the time dependant units, breaking all scientific equipment.
(* or base 16, since human beings are naturally adept at dividing things in two *)
No more so than say 3.
12 has the most going for it IMO. Not too many digits, and divides by the most base numbers.
Table-ized A.I.
IIRC, ISO-8601 is the spec for dates and times. It's 2002-07-04, or 2002W264 (if you prefer week numbers and days-of-week, plus variants for Julian days (not Julian Dates, which are entirely different), etc.
Most people who have tried it quickly like it. It's also trivial to sort dates without special logic.
Unfortunately, I think Windows apps may still not really support it. I remember trying to switch to it during Y2K, and a lot of programs barfed on this format (giving me an oh-so-useful blank field) even while working on silly formats like d/y/m.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
ROFL - I think that's one of the funniest things I've seen posted on Slashdot.
Right up there with that university that "lost" a computer during remodelling.
Let's see... I will assume that any metric time system will still be based on "natural" time periods relating to the planet earth. That is, we won't try to mess with the concept of a day (one earth rotation) or a year (approximately one earth orbit around the sun). I guess you could mess with these and replace them with some arbitrary units but I can guarantee that no one will want any part of a system that doesn't relate to good old terra firma and its inherent time periods.
So that leaves carving up the day into different parts or carving up the year into different parts. The French tried to go with a decimal month system after the French Revolution but it never caught on. You can try again but months are just an arbitrary way to divide up the year and the existing system (squirrely as it is) seems to work.
Now you can mess with dividing days into different arbitrary periods but I would point out that 24 has some nice properties (like being divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 and 12) that make it kind of handy. 60 has the same divisors going for it but in addition is also divisible by 5, 10, 15, 20 and 30. Systems based on 10 don't have nearly as many divisors and thus force you to work in some fairly messy decimals to get any kind of similar lengths of time (e.g., the 8 hour work day does not fall naturally out of any 10 based time divisions; instead you end up working 3.333333333 DecHours to put in the same amount of time: one third of a day). If you swap in such a system and either reduce or increase the workday to make the numbers nicer, it will not fly 'cause I'm not going to work a greater portion of a day to make math easy for some people and my employer isn't going to be happy about a system that has me working less. Looks like you're stuck with a 24 hour day. You can try 100 decMinutes to and hour and 100 decSeconds to a decMinute but making the decimal fractions easy to compute hardly compensates that some of these are messy because 100 doesn't have as many divisors as 60 or 3600.
I guess you could also mess with the 7 day week but I think that would fail for the same reason as a day divided into 10 parts: to much social upheaval to swap in a different "work week." I don't know about you but working 5 days out of 7 is about all I can do. Working 7 days and getting 3 off keeps about the same proportion of work and off time but working 7 days straight doesn't sound good to me.
Bottom line, don't mess with the length of a year or day. Don't mess with the way a day is divided up (hours) or the way hours are divided up into minutes and seconds. Also, don't mess with the number of days in the week. I guess that means you can try the old French experiment again and try to only have ten months but, since 365 isn't divisible by ten, you're stuck with 5 months with 36 days and 5 moths with 37 days plus you still have to tweak the number of days in a month once a year for leap year. Sounds like a far better system than we have now. Let me know if you can find more than ten people who think so.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
...calls them self-centered.
I'm kind of surprised that we've come so far, people are forgetting why the calendar and time are the way they are.
...
It's rather incredible to see that the ancient Egyptians, Chinese, Arabs -- with their sophisticated understanding of celestial mechanics -- probably score higher than the average American by several orders of magnitude in their knowledge of these things.
Have you ever wondered why time and calendar systems are so heavily based on highly divisible numbers? Some come naturally, like the number of days in a year being 365 (which is 360 + 5 -- ie. 360 divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 10, 12, 24, 60, etc). Sorry, but that number is not going to change any time soon.
The factors of 360 carry into the hours of the day, minutes, seconds, etc. There's a reason that you see them there, and it's not because someone just chose it arbitrarily. Think about 360 degrees in a circle -- think that's just coincidentally the same number as the number of days in a year? Those old guys spent lots of time trying to understand the significance of these figures and making them work in other areas of science, math, etc.
So don't just go and suggest that we'd be better with a metric time system -- have you thought about it's implications? Sort of like the military and the gradian system (as opposed to radians). It's kind of a metric system for angles, but who ever uses it?
What's with these degrees, minutes, and seconds longitude and lattitude? Come to think of it, what's with Degrees in trigonometry? Or radians for that matter? I suppose "Grads" that you find on calculators provide for a somewhat metric view of trigonometric functions. But no one has actually every used the "Grads" on a calculator, that's just there out of some sense of tradition, right?
...Nothing interesting here. Just move along...
It's already here, The Hives introduced it last year:
"Why settle for twenty-four when I can have a hundred fractions. Who knew I'd be the one pulling off the perfect crime. So here's my new line I'll change your mind and the metric system to time. Caused trouble all over town and it's bound to start a reaction. Metric time will come around it's gonna overtake your contraction I've found a way out yeah a way out of this stress.
I made my time last and its total success."
From the Hives album "Veni Vidi Vicious"
I admin a fansite for a game, and put datestamps on a lot of things. I'm australian, but half my visitors are american - and most of the rest european - the *only* way to be unambiguous is to stamp things '4 Jul 2002' or equivalent. (Well, when you write things to html pages, anyway. The Database can store things however it likes!)
...
:-)
As for the Metric system - for time - if anyone wants to see Decimal Time in use, there needs to be a simple way of marking decimal time as Decimal time (a D up the front, perhaps?) so that people don't get confused. Handy conversion ratios and utilities would also help. Then it can be adopted by a few groups of people, bit by bit, and spread as appropriate to its usefulness
The normal 'second' is pretty well entrenched. Come to that, I've seen 'kiloseconds' in use in some scientific contexts.
I find it interesting that I thought the most awkward thing with establishing metric time would be finding good names for the units (especially the 'hour' equivalents, 1/10th of a day) - then I read the article, and that's a large part of what it covers
Rachel
In some periods, it happens to me that everyday i got to sleep an hour later than the previous one, until one day I find out it's 6 am and i am STILL reading slashdot. That day, i usually either oversleep like hell (21 hours sleep and then days start at 1am and sleeptime starts at 3am) or I undersleep (i don't get sleep and at 9pm i am so tired i go to be). And the thing starts again...
Mind me, it's stable, but i'd better like to slow earth's spin a bit. Can it be down? We need to fix this 24 h./day bug!
unfinished: (adj.)
My parents took my sister and I on a road trip from Winnipeg to Vancouver in 1979 and all the road signs had both miles and kilometers for speed limits and distances. I think that the Canadian education system required all schooling to be done in metric starting in 1975.
Because I was partially educated in imperial, to this day, I have a mixed sense of measurements... I measure in:
feet and inches rather than meters
celcius rather than fahrenheit
kilometers rather than miles
pounds and kilograms are both ok
ounces rather than grams
liters rather than gallons
Most importantly, I know what a pint is, and how much it should cost when full of Guinness.
To make things even more confusing, I've been living in the US for that past 3 years, so now I'm getting used to fahrenheit and miles again.
I didn't think slashdot.org readers were that dumb...
Isn't not Base-60, its BASE-7 !!!!
It carries digits 0,1,2,3,4,5,6 . thats base 7
BASE 16 is
0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0,A,B,C,D,E,F
BASE 36 is all the numbers + letters in the alphabet.
BASE 60 would be all the numbers + letters in the alphabet + 24 more symbols....
Clearly time is NOT BASE-60..
Think about it. Inches and miles are really great, and if you make a foot be 16 inches, a mile is very nearly 4096 feet!
The English units of volume measure are already perfectly binary. cup/pint/quart/gallon, plus fractions of ounces.
And English is *much* better for nuts/bolts, where you choose to double your resolution by using 1/16ths, say, rather than 1/8ths. None of this 7.5mm crap.
Binary English forever!
I live a 3rd world country, namely South Africa. Could you please tell me, without resorting to childish name-calling or hyperbole, what 1st world countries have that 3rd world countries don't?
Cedric Balthazar Rotherwood
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java Platform +
System Admin. for Solaris
As I travel a bit back and forth I have documens
in both letter and A4 formats and this is inconvenient as hell.
Why cant US switch to AX standard as well?
AI=2x A(I+1) is smart, but what is the format
twice larger than letter/legal ? Twice smaller?
Drzewowy Misiek
The use of the specific units are brought back to the Duodecimal system. The mayas counted using the duodecimal system because they used their two feet in their counting, and thus got to base twelve. Furthermore, the Romans used base twelve, because it has more factors. 2/3/4 and 2*3 instead of only 2 and 5. The use of sixty is brought in to add the factor 5. This factoring has been made obsolete to all through 64bit floating point devision in base two, but could still provide ease of use if you had to calculate lats/longs and estimate time under curcumstances where your GPS and wrist watch failed. One of the threads contained info of writing a base 10 timer in base two. I would think that it would be just as much hassles writing it in base twelve.
!
There is 24 hours in a day pal.
Since E=mc^2
/sec or /hour etc.
If you change the length of the second, kilograms
and length will no longer be the same measure. They're all based on somthing
1 newton = the force required to accelerate 1kg at 1 meter / second squared.
If you change the speed of the second, you change the value of the newton, and consequently change the value of energy and mass.
So 1 kilogram in SI Time != 1 kilogram in MT Time
The choice of a given representation only has to fulfill one goal : commodity. Because when the industrial revolution occurred engineers began to deal more and more with scale changes, the metric system was a help, and was therefore kept. Please note that about the same time a metric time was suggested too, and later dropped. Why ? Because keeping the day (which is related to the earth spin) as a mesure is conveniently correlated to people waking up and sleeping habits, themselves loosely related to the availability of daylight.
:o) (mailto:armingaud@noos.fr)
Keeping the weeks and months (both *very* loosely related to the moon rotation) was a help when a) time was measured by moon aspect cycles and b) when it was useful to relate ones activity to the moon aspect or position (it would be the case for farmers planning to work late at night as well as for fishermen wanting to synchronize their actions with the tide for simplicity reasons. We can indeed agree that keeping weeks and months is not *that* vital today. Beware, however : the french revolutionary calendar created "weeks" of 10 days, and *nobody* liked to have only 1 day of rest in 10 instead of 1 in 7, one of the reasons probably why the whole thing was dropped rather soon (ti be constrasted with the base-60 for minutes and seconds, coming right from the Babylonians, just like everything else in base 60).
Finally, keeping the year (related to the earth move around the sun) is rather useful to plan holidays, because it is so much correlated with the weather. For the preceding reasons, and as relevant as the passage to metric for other measures can be, we are going to meet trouble doing that with time until we can for instance force the earth to cycle the sun in 1001 (or is it 999 ?) days, that is impose the duration of the year to be a decimal multiple of the duration of a day
(please note than when using MTM tables, 1/100000ths of hours are commonly used)
Can you say clocks and watches? The cost to replace all the clocks and watches would be in the billions. It is not possible. I am not going to throw my Rolex away just so our time can metric. And exactly how are you going to do a metric analog clock?
si is based on water measurements.
ie. a sq mm of water occupies i mL and weighs 1 g.
That's it. Everything else is based on those simple relationships.
Time is a completely different beast. I think we can all agree that the year and the day are good measurements and after that it's just a matter of subdividing arbitrarialy. So while you could arrange to have 10 hours a day, 10 minutes an hour, and 10 seconds a minute, there is really no advantage to it.
we should really change it to 100 days per year, that would be much easier Well, the only way we can accomplish that is though speeding up Earth movement around Sun. Nah, that is impossibly difficult to do, lets just make it revolve slower on its axis.
Actually, I remember reading that Burma also uses the old non-metric system. Of course, that info could be out of date, but I read it in curriculum material for classes I was teaching. Although I don't remember the source, I remember thinking at the time that it was in a source published by a company with a good reputation for clear and accurate materials.
I read about metric time a few years ago, and it would create a "solution" to leap year day... but then I, and many folks like me, wouldn't be able to celebrate our birthdays - except on a designated leap day, which isn't even in February - it's in APRIL!
Let's see, which is easier, stick with a method of time that I know like the back of my hand, can count through and work around in my head like clockwork, or a new method of time that is labeled "easier" just because it's base-10.... Easier is totally perspective, considering we don't use metric-anything in this country I don't think metric time would do anything besides confuse the issue. So no, I don't think it is tie for metric time. I think it's time for people to give up on the whole "oh my, it's base-10, so it must be easier" crap.... Just my $0.02
"The saddest words of mice and men, are not those which were, but should have been."
Check out the official definition of a meter. It is now defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1 / c seconds
The concept of 1 second is already integral to the metric system, and many other systems.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
and i'll bet they got the idea from the french.
I think that perhaps, he underestimates the difficulty involved in slowing the planet down to 100 revolutions per orbit.
Andrew
I used to always say this about the metric system when those elitist French and German bastards (am I being prejudiced?) would say, "Zee zystem international is zuperior to zee American ztandard zystem..."
Of course, the "Amercian Standard System" is just a standardization of the English Imperial System which is very similar to all the continental European systems of measurement. This is to say they are all based on odd (odd as in "weird" not "not even") numbers. This is not at all surprising coming from a civilization that did not discover the zero until they were at war (the Crusades) with someone who had it.
Anyway, my criticism was always that the International System (SI) was incomplete. It was created without any modification of time measure. Everything is based on 10... but time. Time is still in the cumbersome Sumerian notation. If that is not outdated, I have no idea what could be. These are people that could not even tell the difference between 360 and 365 (much less the 365.2422 of the Gregorian calendar), so why do Western countries still use this system? And why did Western countries export this stupidity to other cultures?
There is an ancient 10 based system that works, though. It comes from the culture that originally based everything on 10. This is the Chinese bai3 ke4 100 Ke system. In this system a 24 hour period is divided into 100 periods called ke4 starting at midnight. Each Ke works out to exactly 864 seconds in Sumerian measure.
I would not hold my breath for any sort of solution, though. I do not imagine people suddently getting comfortable with a 33.33 Ke workday. Lunch time would be interesting, too. Imagine your boss saying, "Take 3 Ke."
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
It's always hazardous to change a well-established standard that is attached lamprey-like to everyone in the culture.
... but everyone would have to change, addresses would be a generic series of numbers, typos would be easy to make, and local routing problems would remain the same.
... the second, minute, and hour being good time intervals for various Human functions.
... subfactors?: 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, etc.
.24 or so. Changing the calendar radically seems easier than changing the alphabet radically, and the calendar has been changed before.)
I recall a guy who proposed changing all postal codes to a latitude-longitude-altitude system. It would work anywhere, produce unique addresses, and allow distance calculations
Remember the Dvorak keyboard? Enough said on that issue.
I recall an article in Scientific American or Discover long ago, that proposed changing the English alphabet to a 40-character version to allow a much more phonetic language. It is a great idea, except for the utterly impossible job of changing the mother-tounge of 326 million people. And what about all that legacy information in the old alphabet? People would have to be bilingual in their own language for hundreds of years. It can't work.
We use our current time system for some sound reasons. The hour was a sensible division of the day; the minute (minn-it) was a minute (my-noot) form of the hour, and the second was the "second minute" or second smaller form of the hour. It's mostly cultural, but there's probably something genetic in there somewhere
I think these proposals are symptoms of a certain, greater disease that I don't have a name for. There is a diseased desire to optimize for calculations while letting other factors (arguably Humanistic) be downplayed. Is there any particular advantage to using 100-minute hours and 10-hour days over what we have now? I mean, it's not as if we use e, pi and radical-2 for measuring time. The closeness of the Human to the time he is immersed in seems to make the particular choice of numbers irrelevant (as far as the large integers go). We might just as easily use 18 hours in a day, 48 minutes to an hour, and 52 seconds in each minute. If anything, using 24 and 60 (Babylonian, Sumerian or Mesopotamian legacies?) gives us a good selection of -- er, I forget the exact term
(But I sure do wish we'd change that damned Julian calendar. Is the current month 30 or 31 days long? -- I can never remember, no matter how many days hath November, or whatever the mnemonic phrase is. I note that 13 months of 28 days apiece means 364 days, which means every year will be off by about 1.24 days -- we can adjust for that somewhere, since the leap years compensate now for the
I conclude this posting with a GREAT book recommendation: "The Science of Measurement: A Historical Survey" by Herbert Klein. It goes into heavy detail about where all those damned units came from.
[also misbehaves on Kuro5hin as Peahippo]
There's a very good reason there are 365 [1/4] days in a year...
Assuming you accept that 1 day is the time (however many hours, minutes etc you decide to divide it into) it takes for the earth to make one full revolution on it's axis, then it takes 365 1/4 days for the earth to do one full orbit around the sun.
Hence of course we get three years at 365 then all the quarter days get lumped together to give us a leap year every fourth.
Listening for the sound of the coming rain...
Now that we've mostly got the US converted over to the Metric System, it's the next logical... Oh... Wait...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
mod this comment up!
;)
That's the counter argument to metric time.
Talking about changing our time measurements, there's an area where changing some things would have some benefits.
What would be smarter would be a 28 days month, 13 months a year, the left over in a special week.
Advantages:
- easier to remember. Each month has the same length. Much more practical in terms of business.
Week 27? of course, 3rd week of the 7 th month.
- for each month, all days (as numbers) are the same days (as names). If the 3rd day of the first month is a Monday, then all 3rd days of each month the same year are Mondays
Disadvantages:
- we have to change all our special days (4th of July and so on).
- probably are going to pay one more month for each magazine subscription you have!
- going to lose our 13th month
That makes a lot of sense
Sneak teach kids Algebra using a game
Ten responses to this, and no-one points out the obvious: The main difference between imperial and metric measures is not the basis (human body versus some "arbitrary" measure), but rather the ease of use.
...). Or even the simple ones: how many inches to a mile? How many ounces to an imperial ton (or would that be "tonne")?
:)
For instance: how much does a pint of water weigh, in imperial measure (in ounces, pounds, whatever)? What is the length of the edge of a cubic pint of water (in inches, furlongs,
In metric measures the equivalent questions are trivial to answer (still didn't stop Arianne-V from crashing & burning tho
And as for the changeover: the question is hardly one of total cost, but rather one of specific cost. Think of the savings, in the very long run - the sooner the switch is made, the better.
yes, we have no bananas
There is no way in hell I'm gonna relearn 5 billion physics formulas based on a metric second!
I find it amusing that people keep promoting the idea of a metric measure of time as if it were a new idea. It was first brought up by the French Revolutionaries, you know.
... let that happen. What about the creationnist view with its six days of work and one day of rest?
After the revolution.
The new "de-christianised" calendar started in 1793 and was retroactive to 1792. The year started on September 22nd and consisted of 12 months of 30 days apiece. Each month was divided into decades of 10 days.
The end of the year had 5 days (6 on leap years) designated by roman numerals.
This was France's official calendar until 1806.
I don't think they changed the number of hours in the day though.
We have a metric standard of time, the second. Hours, minutes, days, etc. are all metric derived, the second is the only metric unit. Odd then that this wacko decides to base his system on the day and then work backward to destroy the second as a standard of time. Good work bucko, if your system gets adopted it will be fractionally more convenient to translate between different time units. Oh, but on the plus side it will also mean that all our current devices, measurements, etc. that use the current SI second in any way will have to be completely redesigned and replaced. Which means billions of useless dollars to change from one type of second to another, plus all the confusion as the system switches over.
Meanwhile back in reality we have a metric unit of time, as mentioned above. The one thing we do not have is a metric measure of "absolute time". Disregarding complications from general relativity for the moment, all that requires is a standardized point of reference (such as Jan 1, 1970). This is a problem that really does not need a solution. Especially a "solution" that is completely broken.
--
He lied to us through song. I hate when people do that!
One huge problem with the Western calendrical meausurement of time since the Gregorian reform is the year it begins with.
First of all, it is prejudicial. A.D. or Anno Domini literally means "the year of the lord." Most Christians say it means "in the year of our Lord." That is only our if you are a Christian, though. What if you are a Buddhist, Jew, Hindu, Muslim, etc.? The Christians will still claim Jesus is the lord of whichever practitioner of whichever religion, but it is hard to imagine that that practitioner would see it that way. Well, the masters of political correctness have come up with a solution for us: the Common Era. It has the same start date (which is still supposed to be Jesus' birthday), but it is the beginning of time when Christians inhabit the Earth with the the believers of other religions. Translation: Let's pretend this is not Jesus' birthday when everybody knows full well that it is.
However, this calendar is not good for Christians, either. The start date is off by four years one way or the other (I am not going to check which way because I do not want to find out that Nostradamus' prediction of the "fire in the sky over the new city" -- or something like that -- for 1997 was actually more correctly placed in 2001. Would that mean that George Bush or Bill Gates was the anti-christ?).
In any case, while this time reform is being done, the initial date for the calendar should be fixed to a date less culturally biased. That would, at the very least, alleviate the problem of opening a history book and having to see 1066 C.E. (excuse me while I vomit). Ending another politically correct "band-aid on a broken arm" would definitely be benificial for the intellectual progress of mankind. :)
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
The only cool thing about metric anything is that it's real easy to convert between different measurements: 1km == 1000m, etc. Metric distance is based on the size of the earth, and thus sorta loses it's meaning anywhere else in the universe (not that we'll be leaving Earth for awhile). Same with mass, force, energy, and even temperature (since temperature is based off of the boiling and freezing point of water, at sea-level on Earth).
What I'm saying is there should be something more universal, that leaves Earth out of the equation, and thus could be used with beings who don't have Earth as a reference point. Not that I think that's going to happen soon, but with the way us Americans have picked up the metric system, it probably needs to be changed now.
I've been thinking about this for a long time, and while it would seem that the speed of light is a universal constant, and we could base things off of that, we don't have a universal time or distance to combine it with that we could base everything else off of. Then I realized a few days ago that everyone has Hydrogen atoms. While I'm just a geek, I do remember that they're fairly universal, and are going to be the same no matter where you are (not counting isotopes).
Distance could be calculated based on the size of the atom, or the bond length in a H2 molecule. If this changes with pressure, make it in a vacuum (since anyone we'd meet in space would have access to a vacuum). Of course, you'd want to make it relevant to humans, so we'd probably make the "basic" unit of measurement a million of these end to end, and call it a MHBL, or something cute like "mibble".
Now that we have length, we can get time using the speed of light, and make a truly universal time based on how long light takes to travel a mibble. Again, adjust for human relevance. Mass would be based on the weight of the Hydrogen atom (of course), and energy would be what is released when the bond is broken (in H2), and temperature could be based off how much water (or whatever) is heated by this released energy. Force could be based off the kinetic energy of the bond breaking.
Of course, the energy could also be based off excited electrons jumping from orbital to orbital, or light itself, so my idea isn't perfect... hey I've only had a few days since I thought of it. But if you're still reading, I hope you see my point that the "universal" metric system isn't really as universal as we think it is, and we could do a lot better (yes, I am an Engineer).
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
I hate to be derisive on this, America's day of Independance, but American's couldn't grasp metric on the gas pump, on the thermometer, even though the rest of the world did.
:).
Something as so deeply ingrained as time would cause a mess beyond belief. Meetings missed, favorite television programs not seen. Chaos and the downfall of American culture. When do we start
Really, I'm just trying to be funny. Stop pointing that gun at me.
I design user interfaces for a free network management application,
Your thoughts sound interesting. On the other hand, here in Europe (Germany that is) we use the metric system. Still inches are common for many things, like 17-inch-screens, and every craftsman has a device called "Zollstock" (= "inch stick"), which is a measuring device (one side in centimeters, one side in inches). Ususally they print inches *and* centimeters on things like TV sets, screens, tubes and pipes, tires, pots and stuff like that.
:)
:)
It can't be really *that* hard to switch over from Imperial Miles, or whatever the U.S. system is called, to metric - if you buy an American car in Germany, it shows "km/h" for speed and "km" for distances. So they just could switch to it even in the U.S. and start as well printing "41 cm TFT Display" on this 16" TFT.
There will always be old measuring systems that refuse to die, like "dozen". It's a rock-solid part of the German language, still no-one I know uses it for going shopping. Hundred years ago, you went shopping for "a dozen eggs". Nowadays it's either "12 eggs" or "a pack of ten" (which is even healthier: less cholesterol
Back to the topic: There are watches that show metric time. Very confusing... Like watches that run in the wrong direction. Very - err - different. Think different!
See one running the wrong direction here:
Watch, running the wrong direction
Bye,
Gero from Germany
You can experience what it would be like by reading "A deepness in the sky", an (excellent) SF novel by Vernor Vinge.
Asimov discussed this idea decades ago...
well if you look at it this way you'll notice that there are 360 degrees in a circle. i find it quite interesting that a that the earth revolves just over 1 degree about the sun in 1 day. there fore close to 360 days in a year of course its a bit off but still you can see what i mean and of course 360/24 = 15 so every hour the earth rotates 15 degrees and every minute the earth rotates 1/4 of a degree and every second the earth rotates 1/240 of a degree. yes the smaller units of time are fractions but still they divide nice and clean resulting in nice rational numbers. well thats the best way i can describe it
OK im convinced.
So when are we going to see this as on option for time display on Slashdot?
What post? The one you're carrying inside your rusty innards!
Or I'll meet my girl for a dinner date at.... 0.8333333333? (but she probably will show up 0.208333333333 too late)
How the hell do you expect me to pronounce that?
Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers. -- Leonard Brandwein
Interesting, when I drove to work this morning I could have sworn I was driving on paved roads. If you can't provide a real argument, why bother posting a reply?
Cedric Balthazar Rotherwood
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java Platform +
System Admin. for Solaris
Metric system for distances, volumes and weight is way more usable than the so-called english system. US Government somewhat endorses the metric system but implementation is not gaining momentum. Americans don't want anything to change, that's the problem. Same Coke, same fuel consumption, same miles, same TV, same emptyness.
Martin
Lots of dates with beautiful stars like that hot Vulcan chick in Star Trek:Enterprise. ;-)
Money for nothing, pix for free
I'll be visiting USA in about a week - it would be nice if you could make the switch before then :p :D
How much are fractions (i.e. numbers of the form x/y) usd in the US? In Denmark, most non-mathematically inclined young people prefer decimals (i.e. numbers of the form xx.yy) because that is what calculators use. In fact, calculation with fractions has recently been dropped from primary school, so the new generations will not even know how to calculate with fractions.
The French tried metric time after the french revolution As a matter of fact, that is where the metric system for weights and measures got its beginnings. The systems for weights & measures worked, but the metric time (& calendar). Was too much.
Forget metric time. How about standardizing on a paper size? Everyone but the US uses A4. Does anyone realize what sort of headaches that creates? I can appreciate it and I'm from the states. We should have switched looooong ago just like we should switch to the metric system. Don't you think we look silly with our "feet" and "gallons"? Ha ha. Let's just start selling A4 printers already and phase out Letter. That's my vote.
Or what the hell, you could also do like this:
One pint: a little over half a liter. In the US, a pint is 16 ounces. In the UK it's 20. Or was it the other way around? Anyway, a UK pint is 550 milliliters, or 0.55 litres. In California it's simply a glass of beer with no nutritional value.
One half inch : something like thirteen millimeters
A gallon: about four liters, depending on whether you measure it in Lincolnshire, UK or Ada, MN.
A ton: thought to be around thousand kilograms. The legends of old are unclear on this. YMMV.
A mile: a little over one-and-a-half kilometer.
An english mile: almost the same as above. I think.
A knot: nearly 2 kilometers per hour. Pretty near anyway.
A foot: around a third of a meter. Almost.
9/16 wrench: a 15mm one usually fits here. Doesn't shave off too much of the nuts and bolts. Depends on the force really. And foot-long hotdogs aren't.
Big Gulp: Dunno. Europeans don't need a low-fat, 2 calorie cheeseburger with a 2.1 litre soft drink to go.
Or whatever. Imperial measure should be marked for destruction.
Before we change time ( hours and minutes ), why don't we change calendars for a much better system?
I, particularly, like the French Revolutionary Calendar ( used for a few years after the revolution until Napoleon ). With a little modernization, of course!
Let's see:
12 30-day months per year. The remaining 5 ( or 6 ) days are holidays to celebrate year-end. All the months' names change, and they become poetic references to the season. In French, the month's name within a season rhyme.
Each month is divided into 3 periods of 10 days ( weeks replacements ). Day 10 used to be a day off, but we modern people, could use days 8 and 9 off as well. Therefore we keep the 21 business day per month we currently use.
The advantages are many. Besides the obvious advantages of keeping the month size fixed in 30 days, we also get the benefit of the fixed relation between week-days and month dates. And I prefer the 3 3-day weekend setup then our current 4 2-day setup, since it is better for travelling ( which would also be good for the turism economy )
And, by the way, instead of saying that today is Friday, July 5th 2002, we would proudly say that it is 16 Messidor CCX ( and from 16 you already know that it is the 6th day of the 2dn period... )
Cheers
Time has 4 corners.
This has been tried somtimes ago in 1793 during french revolution. The metric (m,kg,s)system was a great success but not on time measurment in spite of a powerful enforcing machine called guillotine.
Why repeating the errors of the past?
Don't know if this is chip-truth, but AFAIK the transition from left to right came with the French revolution.
Before the revolution everybody moved on the left side of the roads. Many of the commons chose to switch to the right side, to avoid being driven/trampled down by nobles in the horsewagons or on their warhorses. This way, they could see the danger and avoid it.
When the french revolution came the nobles chose to switch to the right side and blend with the commons, to avoid losing their heads. After this became the norm, it only took Napoleon and a few counquered nations to make it happen in most of Europe. Napoleon didn't break the British Empire, hence the transition didn't happen there...
As for the salute? I've heard it was something to do with the british soldiers shielding their eyes before the Queen (whom they were not allowed to look upon).
- Carsten
Huh? Metric time is measured in 404? Wouldn't it be easier to use a base of 10?
I still speak about horsepowers when I speak cars, and I still use Centigrate instead of Kelvin. People are hard to change, regardless of the change.
Funny thing about the am/pm clock. My girlfriend who is american now uses the 24h clock instead of am/pm, and I didn't even suggest anything. It was just easier she said. So I think that children should learn both meter and feet/inches in school, and after having to convert volumes back and fort from cubic feet to cubic yards and cubic inches they will see how much easier that is done with meter. They will become lazy and prefer meters ^_^
Another interesting piece of history. Celsius was a Swedish scientist who came up with the 100 grade scale (centi == 100), but he put the boiling point at zero and the freezing point at 100. Am I serious? Yes I am. Another Swede who lived at the time, Carl von Linné (a.k.a. Carl von Linneaus (sp?), the man behind the latin name for species), who knew Celius suggested that he should reverse it. That is why I prefer to use centigrade instead of Celsius, but I don't think that is official. Both names means the same and we should abandon it for Kelvin.
Yeah lets change time to metric, so that we can go through another Y2K scenario again...great idea. Mind you, it might create some jobs in the tech industry :D
People think that by replacing a universally accepted system with one that is more logically organised that they are making things more simple. What they are really doing is making things more complicated, because the old system will never disappear and forever afterwards you have the hassle of converting from one system to the other.
And dates too, 28/30/31 days per month and 51/52/53 weeks per year is just silly. Metric all the way!
Bet you're not as drunk as I am. I've been drinking Tecate (in the CAN, muthafuck) all day long and all I can say is, whooooeeeey.
Mad props to ILLEGAL SAN FRANCISCO FIREWORKS! 20th and Bryant--I love you guys!
Time to pass out.
The problem I see is that 84.324 looks like a random number not a time. I think it needs another decimal.
Either 84.32.4 or 8.43.24 or even 84.3.24.
The 24 hour clock system is surely based on our own planet... what about others? That's discriminating against aliens, and so must be against their alien rights or something...
"Cattle Prods solve most of life's little problems."
I'm sorry, but it would be too totally confusing when the whole world adapts metric time apart from the U.S.
Powered by onion juice.
When we switch to metric time we could hit two bugs in one smash by switching language to Esperanto too.
The signs probably have to be replaced every so often anyway due to weathering, vandalism or whatever, so you could do a gradual changeover?
;-)
The few times I've been to the USA, I've noticed that the car speedometers are marked off in km/h and m/h, although this may only apply to rental cars as a courtesy to the civilised world
I guess they have to change name for CBS 60 minutes then! Or maybe shorten it a bit, (wouldn't hurt)
Just for the sake of simplicity, I don't think it is any necessary to change the time system to decimal. I like to have some scale in this world that is not just powers of 10.
If anyone could make a point proving that it would bring noticeable benefits, I could think of it, but not just for making the world even more uniform and self-similar that it is right know.
That's just my little thought on it.
Can't we just fix the earth' orbit around the sun so that we get better numbers to work with?
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
had have said "not as many paved roads", perhaps you might have had some kind of point... not much of a strong one, but a valid one nonetheless. Implying that there are no paved roads in South Africa is kind of stupid though, since about 60% *are* paved, i.e all urban and suburban areas.
Re qualifications, I also have a degree in Ecology, but that's hardly relevant since I've moved into the computing industry. Talking about relevance, what does this have to do with the current thread anyway? Seems that the age old theory that when people run out of fact-based arguments, they turn to personal insults. This seems to be the case here.
Have a nice day.
Cedric Balthazar Rotherwood
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java Platform +
System Admin. for Solaris
... but metric time would be worse. the time we use is inaccurate at best, hence the rather complicated system of daylight saving time, leap years, etc.
just to give you a small idea of what i'm talking about: a year isn't defined by fitting 365.25 days into it, it's defined by the time the earth needs to revolve around the sun. in the same way, a day isn't defined as being 24 hours long, the hour is defined as being one 24th of a day, which is from sunrise to sunrise (roughly).
to believe that you can fit n days as defined above into one year, where n is an integer (!) number - is rather naive. and i'm not even starting to talk about how weirdly months fit into that picture.
sure, metric time would clear those problems. but then you'd be faced with something as silly as 4 in the morning being in one day just about sunrise, in the next near evening.
a better idea would be to remove those restricting systems that try to fit n days and m months into a year, but accept that days vary in length, months have nothing to do with the whole thing, and years are just about only useful for telling the seasons.
with the technology we have nowadays, creating clocks that work that way, and not based on regular ticks should be possible, and definitely more natural.
I guess it would be easier for the entire world if the US would swith to the metric system first. Think of it... the entire world already is metric (even the British!).
It would also keep incidents like the mars lander from happening again.
>date +%s
;-)
1025857434
That one was easy
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
Why is this in the "funny" section??
Against everyone's will in 1969, the European Union forced Britain to go metric. Had it not been for that, the UK would have still had it's Imperial-ness to it.
* France tried to metricate time a few hundred years ago, but failed miserably. *
You were expecting a sig?
Over here to measure the hours we work we have a system to count the minutes and hours but we don't have metric hours or seconds. These minutes are called industrial minutes. My employer took some kind of industrial grade system to measure how log the employees aare working.
CAF
Well the guys over at Swatch already tried this with the Swatch time and now Internet time idea
hardly caught on has it???
We rest our case.
BBC Northern Ireland ran this as an April Fool's Joke in 1974. They said it was going to be a consequence of joining the EEC.
Biggest evidence that they faked the landing, IMHO.
Don't worry, you won't have to eat "113.4g burgers with cheese" - we still have Quarter Pounders here in Australia - "we just don't know what the *&%# a quarter pounder is" (sure isn't 100% beef like the wrapping says).
As for the salute? I've heard it was something to do with the british soldiers shielding their eyes before the Queen (whom they were not allowed to look upon).
Doesn't sound quite right. Soldiers should not salute when not wearing their hat (British army anyway. Doesn't seem to apply to the US). This seems to point to showing the badge.
The big problem with this discussion is that the second is the accepted unit time. Once that is fixed there will be so many seconds per day (assuming we want to stay in sync with the sun!) then its just a matter of finding nice division units.
A small percentage of people in the US have a lot of money. The rest take out loans and mortgages like everyone else in the world.
Cedric Balthazar Rotherwood
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java Platform +
System Admin. for Solaris
Swatch has devised and Internet time they call beats which has a neat feature for us netizens - no timezones. They divide the day into 1000 beats, but the factors of 1000 is 2 and 5 and that makes it rather inconvenient although 40 beats is close to an hour, 20 half an hour and 10 about a quarter of an hour. I use it sometimes, both my mobile phone and wristwatch can display it. Not to mention my desktop.
-- ICQ: 1645566 Yahoo: Ichimusai MSN: Ichimusai http://www.ichimusai.org/
Using a base system of 10 is a poor choice,
it may have made sense when the most convenient thing to keep track of a number was your fingers, but now the most convenient thing is a laptop, so we would be better off with base 12 or 16.
Another thing - the fucking metric system, is just not natural. The imperial system is inherited from measures that felt right in antiquity, rather than some arbitrary division based upon a bad original decision (a base 10 number system). And yes, I *was* brought up to use the metric system. Actually, I prefer meters to yards, a yard is supposed to be an average stride, but people are taller now. A pint is a sensible amount to drink when you're thirsty. Inches, pounds, pints and miles are just *right*.
I suspect that apart from the superficial explanation for imperial measures, there is something intrinsically better about them that we no longer have the science to explain. Some principle equivalent to the golden mean. One day we will rediscover the principles on which they are based.
So anyway, there's no fucking waay we're going to change time but if we really wanted to make a sacrafice along those lines, change the number system to base 12 or 16 and then the metric system can be consigned to the garbage bin where it belongs.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
I have a page about the Julian Day Number at http://webpages.charter.net/webmartians/Studies/As tronomy/JDN/index.htm that includes C code for a JDN module with a wide domain and small footprint. I'd very much appreciate comments: the main page (http://webpages.charter.net/webmartians/) has an eMail link. Thanks!
I set this decimal clock ticking at the start of Y2K. Not bothered about the earth's rotation, i standardisted on the (imperial) second. This gives us a decimal day of approximately 28 imperial hours. Every four (decimal) days or so my waking hours overlap with yours...
I don't have a chip on my shoulder. I seem to have offended you and I'm sorry about that.
I am still waiting for a reply that points out a specific thing that 1st world countries have that 3rd world countries don't. One of the more serious answers, "Money", isn't good enough, either. True, 3rd world countries might have less money than 1st world countries, but I didn't ask "what do 3rd world countries have less of than 1st world countries?", I asked "what do 1st world countries have that 3rd world countries don't?".The Paved roads replier claimed to be a troll, and I did suspect that, despite what he may or may not think. The reason I answered seriously is because troll or not, some other people who might be reading might have believed his troll that 3rd world countries do not have paved roads.
Please provide specific examples of what 1st world countries have that 3rd world countries do not. That is all I'm asking. I'm not trying to insult you or suggest that you have an evil agenda.
Cedric Balthazar Rotherwood
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java Platform +
System Admin. for Solaris
The Hives has a song called "Introduce The Metric System In Time". I'm totally for it! :)
The base units within the metric system are dependent on each other through some typical Earth properties. 1 kg is the Earth weight of a cubic decimeter (or "liter") of water. 1 second is the oscillation period of a 1-meter pendulum (this is the reason why the Earth gravity constant in metric units, 9.81 m/s^2, is "equal" to pi^2 within the measurement accuracy of the time of the French revolution).
You could be stranded on an island with only one of these units, and easily reproduce the metric system by cheap means. If you have a ruler with you, you can build a one-liter cup and weigh 1 kg of water. You can build a chronometer by having a 1-meter rope sway a weight. The 1/100000 part of a solar day as a second, would break these relationships.
Using a base system of 10 is a poor choice,
it may have made sense when the most convenient thing to keep track of a number was your fingers, but now the most convenient thing is a laptop, so we would be better off with base 12 or 16.
Another thing - the fucking metric system, is just not natural. The imperial system is inherited from measures that felt right in antiquity, rather than some arbitrary division based upon a bad original decision (a base 10 number system). And yes, I *was* brought up to use the metric system. Actually, I prefer meters to yards, a yard is supposed to be an average stride, but people are taller now. A pint is
a sensible amount to drink when you're thirsty. Inches, pounds, pints and miles are just *right*.
I suspect that apart from the superficial explanation for imperial measures, there is something intrinsically better about them that we no longer have the science to explain. Some principle equivalent to the golden mean. One day we will rediscover the principles on which they are based.
So anyway, there's no way we're going to change time but if we really wanted to make a sacrifice along those lines, change the number system to base 12 or 16 and then the metric system can be consigned to the garbage bin where it belongs.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
You can count up to 12 on the fingers of one hand (thumbs not included) just count the three main joints on each finger.
Voila base 12
Crazy Vlaclav : She'll go 300 hectares on a single tank of kerosene.
: What country is this car from?
: It no longer exists. But take her for a test drive, and you'll agree: (states their slogan)
Homer
Crazy Vlaclav
Same in mp3
jari / dj ken-guru
Since the site is slashdotted and I don't want
to grep 980 comments for a mirror, and am too
lazy to check google, only a short reply:
Why use metric at all? The only reason for the
metric system, the imperial system and the baby-
lonical time keeping system are history.
Men can calculate as well with sedecimal (base-16)
numbers, and I found, where the average people can
hold seven decimal numbers at once, they can hold
seven up to eight sedecimal (or hexadecadic) numbers,
too. (Sometimes the inserted alphabetical characters
make some sense, that's why.)
That I can hold eight at once while in the background
there is some annoying music I found out yesterday while
typing a kernel panic (BSD) message including ps and trace
into my laptop.
My Karma isn't excellent, damn it! (And
After the revolution, from 1923 to 1931, the russians used a 5 day week, with 6 weeks in each month, and 12 months in each year. The extra 5 days were specially named holidays related to revolutionary dates. Each worker got 1 day in 30 off, staggered throughout the community so no more than 1/30th of the workers were off each day. (Not everybody in russia used the calendar. The navy stuck to the gregorian calendar because all their navigation books were in that format, tribal regions stayed with their historic versions, others just ignored the decree)
It was a complete disaster, the idea was to get an extra boost from worker productivity by not allowing weekends or other time off. It had the opposite effect, workers were exhausted after 29 days of continuous work, and productivity fell dramatically.
In 1931, they switched to a 6 day week, with 5 week months, and one day each week was a rest day for everyone. Productivity jumped 50% or more in the first few months of using the new calendar.
This should be a lesson to managers who try to pull too much work out of their employees. People need time off on a regular basis to recover from the effects of working 8+ hours per day for 5 or 6 days. After spending too much time working, the body and mind can't maintain the output.
the AC
The french revolutionary calendar started with year 1, but they made it retroactive a year and called that year 0. Programmers!
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
There's more at Linné Online. He really was a fascinating scientist!
-- Serge K. Keller
I can entirely understand the European way of using the date (D-M-YY) because we all read left to right and that way you get to the day first, which is most likely to be the one you don't know and reason you are checking the date in the first place. The US system has always really confused me having the date buried in the middle, which seems pretty illogical.
Fortunately the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) already solved this problem ages ago.
I use the ISO 8601 for ALL my date's (e.g. cheque books, invoices, legal documents) because it's ambiguity free, the format being:
YYYY-M-D (e.g. 2002-7-5)
It would be much easier if everyone could get used to doing this. I like to rant on bank clerks and anybody who asks me to date a legal document and who don't understand this as all international organisations (e.g. banks) should be using this format (especially ones here in London and in other international cities like New York).
The ISO 8601 date standard also makes sense from a decimal point of view in that it is "biggest to smallest".
Second [s] is the standard time unit. That's why we can say things like millisecond [ms] and microsecond (dunno how to write that on the computer, and I also wonder why americans call them microns (or wait, maybe that's what they call a micrometer - anyway it doesn't make sense)).
So a day would be 86.4 ks. And a year (three times out of four) roughly 31.5 Ms. Now how does that make things better?
Actually speaking from a purly biological sense 25 hours would be the perfect day. This is because if seperated from natural ques like the sun our bodies naturally move to a 25 hour day.
just food for thought.
"We deal in lead" - Roland of Gilead
In fact one of the big reasons for resistance against switching from Imperial to Metric is that the Imperial system has a lot more 12's in it than Metric does. Which makes it easy to do things like cut a foot into thirds.
If you use it a lot, then this operational convenience pays for a lot of stupidity in getting used to it and converting units.
both systems are from the past. How about a nice design I made where there's: ...something/second
1 day/normal day
16 hours/day
64 minutes/hour
64 seconds/minute
1024
Of course, we might want to remap this to replace 365 day/year too, but that might take a bit more work... Oh, and it's all UTC too. no more evil timezones.
At the time of this posting, it is 8:27
Luke-Jr
The big advantage of the current system, at least when it comes to the 60 minutes in an hour, is that it's easily divisible. You can take the 60 minutes and divide them into 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12 or 15 equally and usefully sized timespans without having to use fractions.
With 100 minutes in an hour, you'd be stuck to dividing into 2, 4 or 5, 10 equal parts. That's a big problem with metric time.
Perhaps it was also one of many reasons that Swatch Time (a.k.a. "Internet time", a.k.a. "beats") didn't catch on when it was concieved a number of years ago. It had 1000 beats per day, which is about 1.25 minutes.
The biggest drawbacks, IMO, of most non-metric systems are that they contain a lot of unnecessary in-between units. Time doesn't in most languages, at least not to the same extent. There are seconds, then minutes, then hours, then days. There are ordinarily no extra units that represent e.g. 24 minutes, 20 hours or one-and-three-quarters of a day. Time is one of the cleanest non-metric systems we have.
One point where I feel I would benefit from time metrification is months. Having the same number of days per month (apart from probably one of them) would be a lot simpler than todays braindead (but, of course, historically explainable) system.
Learnt these many years ago:
Volume:
A litre of water's a pint and three-quarter.
Length:
A meter measures three-foot three, its longer than a yard, you see.
Weight:
Two and a quarter pounds of jam, weighs about a kilogram.
- Now somebody write one for metric seconds and hours!
Baz
The SI second is defined as the period of time that it takes a specific number of cesium isotope radiation emissions to occur such that it is as close to a mean ABT second (1/86400 day) as feasible given the variance of the earth's rotation. To redefine the SI second to be equal to a MT second would mean redefining it to be equal to whatever number of cesium-133 emissions are close to 10-5 mean day given variation.
Err, you just can't do this, whatever else you do to time keeping you cannot get rid of the SI second. The amount of science and applied maths that this would affect would be mind blowing, you'd be fiddling around adding constants into equations almost everywhere. The entire concept sends a shiver down my spine...
Al.The Daily ACK - Eclectic posts by yet another hacker
Whad do you think is epoch time?
Hint: Time in seconds from given epoch.
There are different epoch events.
(1/1/1980, 1/1/1970, 1/1/1900, etc. )
Man, I just watched the Simpsons' episode the other day where the local Mensa crowd takes over the town. Principal Skinner moved the town to metric time-I didn't know somebody was serious about this.
12 has more common factors than 10...
12: 1,2,3,4,6,12
10: 1,2,5,10
This cleans up a lot of math. And we're genetically predisposed to have an extra finger on each hand too. So if evolution has its way, by the time we convert, we'll be able to count to twelve on our fingers!
Now all we need is another evil conqueror to take over a large chunk of the world and force the change... and also beat off all the computer people who'd rather go with Base 16.
1) This reminds me of the whole bit the Frantics did, where the Roman soldier is complaining about the move to decimal, Since Vee Eye Eye - Eye Eye Eye = Eye Vee, this new decimal system is too complicated.
2) I'm seeing a pattern here. First the guy who can't figure out rounding (.845), and now someone who doesn't know how many hours are in the day. I think there's a joke here about us going from extremely focused to just plain stupid, but I'm not sure what it is.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
> The previous attempt failed miserably: some
> people just don't want to switch, some people
> honestly just don't have the mental capacity to
> understand the difference between the two systems,
> and relearning a new system just isn't something
> that they can do
You're right: since the introduction of euro half of the population in Europe didn't learn de new system, the economy crumbled and we are again changing cows for wheat and coding html for food.
Oooops. Nope we didn't. That may be because we don't have old people nor dumbasses here. And we sure did't like our older coins, like dracmas, the older coin in the world. Well, used to be.
Why doesn't everybody use UNIX(tm) timestamps in their daily life? I actually do, but nobody else seems to understand what I'm talking about.
Don't know about the salute, but doesn't sound likely to me..
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
West Wing featured, "Organization of Cartographers For Social Equality"
I thought this fictitious society turned things upside down a lot
more logically than "Metric Time" did.
They wanted President Bartlet to pass legislation making the current
map of the world inaccurate since it distorts the size of the countries.
By utilizing a rectangular coordinate system that has parallel lines of
latitude and longitude it does not distort the size of Eurasian and North
American countries. This was first discussed by Dr. Arno Peters. An
example can be found here: http://www.webcom.com/~bright/petermap.html.
This society also wanted to put and end to top and bottom attitudes by
putting the southern hemisphere at the top. An upside down map can be
found here: http://www.flourish.org/upsidedownmap/
The episode went on to combine the two maps, but I cannot find an
example of one.
When you think about it this is much more logical.
Where'd ya get that? First, we need to handle our own system :)
I think we should just dump this arbitrary human-centric base-10 metric system in favor of base-8. Just dump the digits 8 and 9. It'd make it a lot easier for designing computer hardware, and it would be more in harmony with the underlying binary nature of the universe.
--LP
Modern science has uniformly come up with inexact uneven representations that reinforce the importance of the fact that nature gave man 10 fingers to count with and how unimportant any other harmony in nature is. Isn't that the duty of science, reinforce the arbitrary genetic dominance of man?
While we are at it, we really ought to have a metric musical scale. Why insist that useful harmonic divisions come out fairly evenly? If we had really wanted harmony, we would have gone with the 53 note scale or something better, which would surely be too offensive to the good sense of a scientist.
And get rid of those pesky CPU registers that don't do decimal math. COBOL rulez. Of course decimal representations go hand in hand with metric mentality. Working a job shift with a duration that is a repeating decimal is sooo much more satisfying than exact representations.
We have Pythagoras and friends to thank for early obsession with right angles sacrificing nature's preference for more-natural rotations (see R Buckminster Fuller). But we did not go far enough. 360 degrees, fie. Divide the circle into powers of 10, of course. Even gradians cedes too much to natural harmony in the case of the right angle. Instead of a 30-60-90 triangle, insist on a 0.833333 1.666666 2.5 triangle. Don't permit the tell-tale features of the human creature to be displaced from their important place center of the universe.
First of all--*24* hours in a day. It's not THAT hard to keep track of.
Second--if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Other than outdated astronomical measurements, you're right, there's no logical reason why we've got what we do. However, there's no logical reason why Bush is in the White House, either. You play with what you're dealt. And the fact is, the way we measure time *works*. It may be messy, difficult to calculate on-the-fly, but hey, if you can figure out a mortgage, you can figure out how many days you *really* work each week.
Not to mention the fact that it's one of the few systems truly used all over the world. Some countries use 24-hour, some use 12-hour clocks, but it's still the same system. Not everyone uses the metric system, but everyone recognizes there are 24 hours in a day and 7 days in a week. That is, everyone except the person who posted this.
Gifts for Geeks - Stuff that really matters!
2000 estimates. From the CIA "World Factbook" no less. Besides the fact that they themselves admit that those are 2000 estimates, you wouldn't think that they'd be biased or anything, right? Nah. 83% white in the US, no hispanic ethnic group? Give me a break. Find a less biased source with more facts.
A 'third'.
Just like a quarter of an hour is a 'quarter'.
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I'm sure I recall something about Napolean actually metricising the calender. However I don't think the ten day week went down all that well. "I have to work for eight days before the weekend?". As usual the french solution was rioting.
The current clock fits in with nature. It works. Change would be a huge difficulty. And a few lagacy systems make the world a more interesting place. I say leave it be. It would take over a century to kick in worldwide, would create problems when converting old times e.g. from newspaper archives and computer logs.
Sounds to me like a bunch of chronologists have got very little to do.
The american drug trafficing trade has been using the metric system for many years with great success. The exception to this is apparently the hemp trade, which still generally works in pounds and ounces IIRC. :).
Why hasn't the US changed to the metric system? Because we don't have to
and then instead of an hour, we could have an 'Arn'... 100 micron's to an Arn.
Oh, wait... a micron is already taken, isn't it?
Ah, well...
While you can certainly change to a metric timescale for the sake of consistancy, it can't be consistant with itself so it really makes no sense.
Unlike other non-metric measurement systems, time has scientific meaning. We are really more concerned with when the sun comes up, when it is the middle of the day and when the sun goes down again. Metric time could certainly be used to fill in the intervals inbetween, but it will never replace the yearly cycle of the earth in its orbit around the sun.
A better unit of time would simply be the day. Forget hours in the day. Obviously this doesn't have enough granularity for most people, so we need to slice the day up a little.
Well, this slicing is based on where the sun is in the sky -- which makes total sense to me. A metric scale would only confuse things.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
here's the google cache of the website: cache
Here you can read the page in Google's cache
Base 10 is just stupid. Let's change everything to base 12 or even better, 16, including measurements of time, space, weight, etc... Call it the 'Hexametric" system.
I am actually kind of shocked that the prevailing opinion on Slashdot is that everyone should convert to the metic system.
What's going to happen when we convert from traditional to metric measurement? hint: Prices will go up.
You'll get lots of slightly smaller packages selling for the same price. Coca-Cola will replace the 20 oz bottle with a 16.7 oz (0.5 Liter) and milk will come in a 2.5 liter jug but they will cost the same as before.
The metric system doesn't make sense for daily measurement, since the world isn't based on powers of ten. Traditional measures developed the way they did for a reason.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
More important than the sloshing around of the earth's oceans is the motions of the magma in the mantle, and even the plasticy crust. The constant deformation of the earth's parts takes energy out of the rotation in the moonearth system. Also, the moon is receding from the earth (we're pretty sure it's earth debris from a plantery collision), and like an ice skater when they stick their hands out, their rotation slows.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
I've been trying to convince some of my friend's that we should implement a more metric-like time system. However, the system I came up with would be based 100 seconds in a minute, 100 minutes in a hour, but 20 hours in a day. I know the 20 hours in a day is a bit of a cop-out, but I think it would make the transition much easier and would prove to be more user friendly. The reason being is that under my idea, a second would be .432 of an old second, so roughly half. Additionally, under this system, a new hour would be aproximately 72 old minutes long, so it's still somewhat similar. I think if you make the hours too large or too small they lose their ability to compartmentalize usable blocks of time. If you only had 10 hours in a day, they'd have to be over 2 1/2 old hours long. As a unit of measure, that might just be too large to be user friendly.
The day has already been divided into 1000 equal increments. Swatch has been trying to promote this for at least 3 years.
****
"I'd never want to join a club that would have me as a member" - G. Marx
What about a constantly increasing time keeping system. We already have epoch time ( # of seconds since midnight, 1 Jan, 1970 GMT ), which is just a number that keeps growing.
At the risk of sounding completely corny, the Star Trek star date time would actually be a good system. Divorced from natural events, _very_ easy to sort, and easy to plan in. There would be no confusion trying to remember if you ventured off in a search for the Holy Grail ( Neh! ) last June or 2 Junes ago. It would be date 100201.012 ( or something like that ).
Now, what the system actually counts is something else. ( Days ( which would tie the system to earth ), atomic frequency, epoch seconds ( yah! ), what? ).
On a more serious note....
Since I posted the original question - noone - not one person, has been able to give me an adequate answer.
I think that's primarily because you wouldn't be satisfied with one. The fact is several posters have had good responses. You haven't replied to a single one of them. You only reply to those who give flippant or ignorant answers.
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
The "27 hour day" reference is from James P. Hogan's book "Inherit the Stars". A lot of the "science" in the book is so believable written (like in many of his novels) that the 27 hour day bit is often quoted. It's worth noting, though, that in the novel 27 hour biological days are used as a proof for humans having evolved off earth, and the moon only having been captured about 25k years ago.
"Omnia quia sunt, umbra sunt."
http://www.dbeat.com/28/
The story I've heard behind the salute involves raising the visor on your helmet so that your lord/commander/royalty could see your eyes.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
...of the article:M Hgtv93-YC: zapatopi.net/metrictime.html+=en=UTF-8
http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:r9
Video game and other programmers that use 2-d and 3-d tend to express rotations in units where there are 256 degrees in a circle (2 ** 8). This comes out to pi/128 radians. I forget if that unit had a name.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
I'm no right wing nut-job. I'm for gay marriages, drug legalization, and the general chilling out of America. Heck, I'm a registered Libertarian But the mere mention of changing our time system to metric is proof that there is a subversive communist plot to destroy this great nation.
Metric! How could you! On the 4th of July, to boot. For shame. For shame.
--What, you ain't know about them country fried sessions?
They would get to make a small fortune selling the new clocks. :)
What about our Calender? If we had 13 months each with 28 days, we could use the same calender year after year. January 1 would always be a monday. Of course every four years there would be a 'leap day' that would not be a regular day of the week. Everyone could take 'leap day' off. I think Ben Franklin proposed this.
metric time is for muppets who have nothing better to do other than complicate matters... the reason for metric measurements to be introduced was a) for simplicity and b) for convenience and c) to make it universal worldwide (the 100 in one system with only 2 denominations of money (ie dollar and cent, pound and pence)) the thing about time is that it is simple enough, it is universal (more or less everyone uses the 24 hour system and if they dont where are they?) and though it is easier to make calculations if you make time metric youd have to change the length of a second or whatever it was named instead... which wouldnt be the best of ideas... on top of that look at all the historic figures which would have to be recalculated, times become wrong, 11 am on the 11th day of the 11th month would no longer be that... what next? metric years... ok let a year have 100 days a year (isnt a day meant to be the time the world spins once and a year the amount of time it takes the world to orbit the sun? can you change that to suit a metric system? didnt think so...) anyway, time is the one thing that should remain metric, and why dont you like binary, would make things so much easier for computers to calculate if everyone worked with everything in binary huh?
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
And it said:
Service Temporarily Unavailable
The Mclock is temporarily unable to service your request due
to leapyear downtime or internet Swatch time sync problems.
Please try again later.
... for the ancient Babylonians. They had a base-60 numbering system and somehow we ended up with it. Of course with Arabic numerals, and the zero from India, we long since switched to base-10 and it no longer makes sense. It makes a fine hodge-podge with our Latinate language and Abrahamic religions.
Why clean up one unlogical system (time units) but stick with another (base-10) ?
When you go through the trouble of redesigning time units, you might as well try and get it completely right and use a power of two scale.
Most people subdivide the day in 5 minute units, hardly anyone makes an appointment for something smaller than that. As it happens, there are 288 5-minute units in the day, so one could subdivide the day in 256 units, and we'd have the added advantage of just having 1 unit needed for almost all practical purposes instead of 2 (minutes+hours). We could use an additional 256 units for the 256 slices of those 5.625 minutes, each of which lasts about 1.32 seconds, which is close enough to our current seconds. You could continue with 256 units for the new "milliseconds" etc.
You would probably want to use hexadecimal notation for time then (much superior to decimal anyway): "honey, lets have dinner at C4" (20 past 6 pm).
Maybe once this is instantiated we can start working on replacing other measures by power of two scales / hexadecimal as well.
The reason no one talks about second world is due to the collapse of the USSR. I guess China still fits this bill. The majority of its people live in 3rd world conditions, yet clearly it is a world power
The people that don't take full advantage of it. Having all the luxuries afforded to memebers of a 1st world country tends to produce rather lazy people in some instances. We all have the chance to take advantage of the free schooling but many just goof off. I think this has more to do with the parents rather than the system. People that have made it just assume that their kids will too without instilling any sense of the need to work for one's things. Many well off parents just give their kids everything they ask fo and just assume everything will turn out all right in the end.
The metric system doesn't make any sense to me. I think we should all switch to a base 16 hextric system:
FF seconds per minute
FF minutes per hour
FF hours per day
etc
'Phone-jacking: Give someone a ring, they'll have to answer to find out who it is!' - Threni
and the end conclusion was not that we follow a 25 hour cycle. It was stated at a time in the projec that it appeared that way, but later study revealed the true reason for the apparent cycle.. it was the lighting system in the living quarters interfering with things.
There is a great book called "The Promise of Sleep". I forget the author. Highly recommended.
In short: Our sleep cycle is based on a 24 hour day.
We need 8 hours of sleep a night. Period. If you don't get 8 hours, you incur sleep-debt, which gets paid off. Every hour of missed sleep will be recovered at some point, even a month later. Long term studies show this clearly.
Those who claim they live on 4 hours a night may not even realize that they either crash hard a couple days a week, and probably take catnaps/microsleeps during the day.
Time doesn't have arbitrarly chosen units of measurement the way length and volume does. Its defined by day borders and year borders.
Given the need for leap days caused by the mismatch between the boundaries of the day and the year, it would be difficult to define a metric time standard that aligned for day-borders and year-borders.
The whole point of a metric system is that everything ooperates in 10s. What's the value if you align on days but the years and months aren't powers of 10? What's the value if you align on years but the days don't align on powers of 10?
Either way it loses most of its value as a simplifying system. Computers already count based on seconds or days anyway. Why mess with it?
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
I'd rather have a system based on ease of use (being able to make common fractions) than the pure coincidence of how many fingers we have. If you are still using your fingers/toes to count then maybe you should repeat the 1st grade.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
How about this family classic of mine:
(Texan with 2 snowmobiles on the trailer): Hey, where's all the snow around here?
(My dad): About 2000 miles that-a-way.
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
Distance is used to measured accumulation of distance. So, you can decide upon a distance unit, and go from there.
Time is different. People use time to divide up days or years. So, it's not as much of an accumulation as it is the opposite.
The difference therefore is, when you accumulate, you make a resonable base size, and go metric from there. But if the purpose is to disipate, metric is unlikely to fit, especially when there is more than one base item (day, month, year).
Have you read my journal today?
I'm not sure how this system is metric. The metric system is base ten, this system isn't, it just uses units that are base ten. Ex: 1 meter is 10 decameters is 100 centimeters is 1000 millimeters etc. thats really 10^1, 10^2, 10^3 and so on. That's the entire benefit of the metric system. 1 metric week is 10 metric days is 100 metric hours is 10000 metric minutes is 1000000 metric seconds makes no sense, there's no progression between units. You can't call it metric and say it offers the same improvements standard measurement as the rest of the metric system just because all the units are divisible by ten. Is our current system binary because 24, 60 and 60 are divisible by 2?
I don't know about driving sides of specific countries except France, Britain, and India (having visited family in India quite a bit)... but if 5 of the top 10 most densely populated countries drive on the left, how MUST that make it the correct way? Did you ever stop to consider, then, that unless you left some majorly populated countries out, that the OTHER 5 countries you DIDN'T mention would therefore drive on the right? That's like in the lemon tree epsiode of Simpsons where the parents of Shelbyville kids rag on the Springfield parents' lack of discipline with their children. "Ha, I guess that explains why we beat them in little league football about half the time." By that argument (and yours), neither is really better than the other. Using your same resource, link to countries and their driving habits... China, Canada, the US, Denmark, Greenland, Iran, Italy, Germany, Russia, the Ukraine, Switzerland, the Phillipines, both Koreas, etc. all drive on the Right. Neither would seem better than the other from a "number of people currently doing it" standpoint.
The original post claims that the US does not use metric. Actually, the official system of measure in the US is metric -- it has been for YEARS! The funny thing is that the american people refuse to change in their day to day lives :-)
Personally I'd use the zeros and ones the other way around (stretched=1), so my naughty number would be 4 (00100).
:-)
The chinese have these "meanings" for numbers. I can't remember what 4 means, but I think it's the number of death or disgrace something like that. Which could make some sense (1... 2... 3... you're fucked!).
RMN
~~~
whoops sorry for the lack of paragraphs... and the link I meant to post was http://www.ferrari-forsale.com/RightHandDriveCount ries
and look at this page for a graphical map of which countries drive on the left and which on the right. Right side is the vast majority shown on the map.
People don't normally need to count to zero. I think most of the time I would use 00000 to represent 32 (just as a closed hand is sometimes used to represent 10, not 0).
RMN
~~~
Educated stupid I may be, but the adoption of this time measurement method could very well screw with nature's harmonic simultanious 4-day time cube, as the time cube is dependent on the 24 hour day. Well, I'm gonna try to claim that $10000
my 1976 Ford was all metric.
KFG
First of all, there are only 24 (roughly) hours in a day, not 25. Second of all, take your metric time and go to hell.
"Oh excellent, not only are the trains now running on time, they're running on metric time. Remember this time people, 80 past 2 on April 47th, it's the dawn of a new enlightenment."
I totally agree. I wasn't trying suggest that more drove on the right, simply that there are a LOT more people than us Brits which do it. It seems to be taken that we alone are weird for driving on the "wrong" side of the road, when we actually aren't. Goblin
It's all fun and games until a 200' robot dinosaur shows up and trashes Neo-Tokyo... Again
When I went to school I used almost exclusively fractions in maths, and decimals in physics.
Which I think is a good approach (keep numbers more abstract and a bit more "base-independent" in pure maths, and use a more "practical" representation when you're dealing with the physical world).
Also, I learned to convert between different bases way back in 3rd grade (yes, I went to a very strange school), so I never had a big problem with separating the actual amount from the number that represents it. I only remember seeing a couple of kids in that school use their fingers to count, most of us did everything mentally.
RMN
~~~
A bushel is a measurement of crop weight.
7 -4 /S00002.HTM
The fun thing about it is, some bushels are more or less pounds than another one.
http://www.cyberspaceag.com/bushel.html
Corn 1 Bushel = 56 Pounds
Sorghum (Milo)1 Bushel = 56 Pounds
Soybeans1 Bushel = 60 Pounds
Sunflowers1 Bushel = 28 Pounds
Wheat 1 Bushel = 60 Pounds
http://www.rilin.state.ri.us/Statutes/TITLE47/4
A bushel of apples shall weigh forty-eight pounds (48 lbs.).
A bushel of apples, dried, shall weigh twenty-five pounds (25 lbs.).
A bushel of apple seed shall weigh forty pounds (40 lbs.).
A bushel of barley shall weigh forty-eight pounds (48 lbs.).
A bushel of beans shall weigh sixty pounds (60 lbs.).
A bushel of beans, castor, shall weigh forty-six pounds (46 lbs.).
A bushel of beets shall weigh fifty pounds (50 lbs.).
A bushel of bran shall weigh twenty pounds (20 lbs.).
A bushel of buckwheat shall weigh forty-eight pounds (48 lbs.).
A bushel of carrots shall weigh fifty pounds (50 lbs.).
A bushel of charcoal shall weigh twenty pounds (20 lbs.).
A bushel of clover seed shall weigh sixty pounds (60 lbs.).
A bushel of coal shall weigh eighty pounds (80 lbs.).
A bushel of coke shall weigh forty pounds (40 lbs.).
A bushel of corn, shelled, shall weigh fifty-six pounds (56 lbs.).
A bushel of corn, in the ear, shall weigh seventy pounds (70 lbs.).
A bushel of corn meal shall weigh fifty pounds (50 lbs.).
A bushel of cotton seed, upland, shall weigh thirty pounds (30 lbs.).
A bushel of cotton seed, Sea Island, shall weigh forty-four pounds (44 lbs.).
A bushel of flax seed shall weigh fifty-six pounds (56 lbs.).
A bushel of hemp shall weigh forty-four pounds (44 lbs.).
A bushel of Hungarian seed shall weigh fifty pounds (50 lbs.).
A bushel of lime shall weigh seventy pounds (70 lbs.).
A bushel of malt shall weigh thirty-eight pounds (38 lbs.).
A bushel of millet seed shall weigh fifty pounds (50 lbs.).
A bushel of oats shall weigh thirty-two pounds (32 lbs.).
A bushel of onions shall weigh fifty pounds (50 lbs.).
A bushel of parsnips shall weigh fifty pounds (50 lbs.).
A bushel of peaches shall weigh forty-eight pounds (48 lbs.).
A bushel of peaches, dried, shall weigh thirty-three pounds (33 lbs.).
A bushel of peas shall weigh sixty pounds (60 lbs.).
A bushel of peas, split, shall weigh sixty pounds (60 lbs.).
A bushel of potatoes shall weigh sixty pounds (60 lbs.).
A bushel of potatoes, sweet, shall weigh fifty-four pounds (54 lbs.).
A bushel of rye shall weigh fifty-six pounds (56 lbs.).
A bushel of rye meal shall weigh fifty pounds (50 lbs.).
A bushel of salt, fine, shall weigh fifty pounds (50 lbs.).
A bushel of salt, coarse, shall weigh seventy pounds (70 lbs.).
A bushel of timothy seed shall weigh forty-five pounds (45 lbs.).
A bushel of shorts shall weigh twenty pounds (20 lbs.).
A bushel of tomatoes shall weigh fifty-six pounds (56 lbs.).
A bushel of turnips shall weigh fifty pounds (50 lbs.).
A bushel of wheat shall weigh sixty pounds (60 lbs.)
And dropped it, because it was too hard to set you meeting with foreigners.
France: "Let's meet to discuss trade at 50:75 tommorrow."
Germany: "Wha??? Can't we just make it 12:45?"
France: "Not that early!!! I'll still be in bed!"
My karma is in a nose dive
A pinch to grow 2.54cm, and a smile to grow 1.6 km ?
Try to do that under the table while the teacher is waiting for the answer and you'll end up with RSI. :-)
Anyway, counting up to 12 isn't the same as using base-12.
The point is: there is no reason to count on your fingers. As long as you have some basic knowledge of arithmetic, your brain is much more efficient (and sort of base-independent).
I just said base-10 was a legacy from the time when people only knew how to count using their fingers, not that we should find some magical way to use base-12 and still count on our fingers.
Switching to base-12 probably wouldn't be all that hard for people. The problem is all the machines, documents, etc. that were created using 10 digits. Of course, a lot of them could remain unchanged (ex., telephone numbers), because they don't represent amounts, they're just sequences of digits. But can you imagine changing all the keyboards, all the calculators, all the computer codepages, all the books, etc.?
It's not going to happen, even if we suddenly grow two extra fingers.
RMN
~~~
NO!!!
next question.
This is BS. Metric..schmetric. Whoever thought this idea up needs to be shaved, sterilized, and destroyed.
First of all, no one uses metric, metric died long ago. Long live S.I.!
Second of all, SI (System International) has 7 base units from which all other are derived:
1) candella (light intensity)
2) meter (linier distance)
3) mole (quantity)
4) kilogram (mass mass (!) (only base unit that isn't, base (!)))
5) ampare (electric current)
6) kelvim (temperature)
7) second (time)
On Google:
"seven base units of SI" + "I'm feeling lucky"
Everything else can be derived from these units...even CowboyNiel!!
Third of all, as you can see, seconds _ARE_ as you say 'metric'.
Silly Americans...
JLC
Why do we stick to base ten while we're at it? I mean, if we're going to surrender to the French and pick up Systemme Internationale, and surrender to the clock-making industry by changing all our clocks, why not throw out a system based, after all, only on the number of fingers we happen to have.
I'd much rather ping the foundation of my numerical reality to something different, something more pure than our greasy, meaty physical bodies.
So I propose now that we switch our number systems to base 8. It is easy to read, unlike binary, but can be easily changed into binary. This way, we'd have 555 days in the year, and 30 hours in a day. Or then we could go an make a newer, better system of hours, minutes and seconds to measure our moments, instances and durations.
Metric is old hat. We need something new.
According to this site, the original French decimal calendar included days called Eggplant, Manure, Shovel, Gypsum, Billy Goat, Spinach, and Tunny Fish.
Actually, 1 foot = 30.5 cm, so one third of a foot would be (almost exactly) 10 cm.
Metric also makes it much easier to convert between linear measurements (metres, decimetres, centimetres, etc.) and volumes (1 litre = 1 cubic decimetre; 1000 litres = 1 cubic metre). English / imperial measurements are a mess (1 gallon = 231 cubic inches / 0.1337 cubic feet). And then there's the fact that 1000 litres of water (or 1 cubic metre) weigh approximately 1000 kilograms (depending on the temperature), so it's also pretty easy to match volumes to weights.
RMN
~~~
that is why some say that god made a mistake when he gave us 5 fingers per hand. we would have been been much better off with 6.
QED
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
In spaceflight we have a .75:.75 LD cycle (i.e., 45 min. of light followed by 45 min. of dark) and weightlessness. The circadian oscillators are screwed up by this and thus the period retards to approx. 25 hours.
Altering our time system wont change our LD cycle. So unless we want to slow down the Earth's rotation by about 0.8%, we just need to live with it.
BTW, the study that was mentioned before is Alpatov, AM.Circadian rhythms in a long-term duration space flight. Adv Space Res 1992;12(1):249-52. I have included the abstract below:
I was in the US Army for a few years and learned from my Drill Sgt.'s that the Salute evolved from this: When 2 knights passed each other on a road, battlefield, whatever, they would raise the visors of there helms up with there right hands so that they could see eachother's eyes. (I guess this was just a kights way of saying 'sup?')
Any way, thats what I've heard and it souds plauseable. I think 'tipping your hat' has a simuler past.
Mcdonalds's: I'll have the 110 grammer
In the mid 19th centry when napolean began conquering all of the different countries in europe he had his scientists devise a new method for measutment that he could impose on his subjects. The scientists came up with what is currently called the metric system. Because napolean conquered most of europe, most of europe adopted the metric system. Napolean also created a metric time scale. However it didn't catch on in europe.
If it didn't catch on in europe then how could it ever work now.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
Use scientific notation if you find it unwieldy.
http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/marlowe Better a smartass than a dumbass.
Not that anyone will ever see this, but the second is an SI (metric) unit.
This message has been scanned for memes and dangerous content by MindScanner, and is believed to be unclean.
Here's a big fat '4' right back at ya. :)
Any sufficiently well-organized Government is indistinguishable from bullshit.
People may remember that it cost billions of dollars to fix software for the year 2000. That was just the software written by people too stupid to know that years have four digits in them. If the method of keeping time changes, every piece of software in use would have to be modified. The cost of this would probably be trillions of dollars, unless it was phased in over 20 years.
Last I checked there were still only 24 hours in a day... (not counting the small decimal of minutes afterward of course) Maybe that's just in Michigan, but I was pretty sure it was a world wide standard.
This is a backwards place but I don't feel like driving in reverse.
Like any technology innovation, the benefits have to be at least a geometric improvement over the old way of doing things, or the adoption cost is too high.
It's like the QWERTY keyboard. Inefficient, but the cost in training, restandardization, and so on is too great when weighed against the gain accrued by switching to a Dvorak keyboard.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
What about the US start using the metric system for all other measurements first? Then we can talk, OK? :)
How many feet does a mile have again? Geeeez...
Using a watch and 2 sticks, I can tell where I am in the world, what direction i'm facing, how far I have travelled, and if I'm walking in a stright line, or a slight curve(people walk in a slight curve, which can kill you if your lost and don't compensate for it).
None of these things are easily possible with a metric clock.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Currently, all the world uses the Metric System except for the US.
Liberia uses the same system we use.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Yeah, I had my 1 gigasecond "birthday" about 2 years ago. Damned if nobody got me a card or nothin'.
Easy solution.
While we can't change the concepts of days and seasons (because of the natural movement of the Earth around the sun), there's nothing stopping us from redefining the second, minute, hour, week, and month to use a base-10 system. Define a day as having 10 hours. Redefine the hour to have 100 minutes. Then redefine a minute to have 100 seconds, and base the length of a second with regards to this new system, so that a day is still the logical unit that it always was.
3rd world contries don't have 793 trillion stupid laws built up over hundreds of years of case-law by litigious people with too much time on their hands.
Oh, and by the way, South Africa rocks. My race car runs an aftermarket fuel-injection/igniton computer from South Africa. Why? Because it's less expensive than the ones from the US, Australia and Canada - and it's just as good.
-=-=-=-=- osjedi uses Debian GNU/Linux. -=-=-=-=-
I mean, physics equations use the second. The second IS the SI unit of time. Of course my physics professors could just be part of the conspiracy to keep me brainwashed.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
Yes I posted anonymously simply because I get enough Spam as it is and if you readers can't handle an anonymous post then go you can go take a hike!
We already have Americans for Customary Weight & Measure
- http://www.bwmaonline.com/ACWM.htm - now we must hold the line with Americans for Customary Packet Size (anti IPv6), followed by Americans for Pretending Things Are So Simple a Hamster Can Figure Them Out.
Or something.
365 and one quarter days is the key to time, and why "metric time" will not fly....
I presume that the compass is divided into 360 units because it aproximates the 365.25 days of the year...
And of course the base 12-ness of the clock must ultimately be related to the almost base 12 ness of the year too...
The most basic unit of time really is the year, and why should we prefer a system based on the arbitrary biological fact of having 10 digits, over the arbitrary cosmological fact that the periodicity of the earth's rotation about the sun most closely points to a base 12 system?
Ten really can be understand as a reflection of "the world in the image of man" (creature with 10 digits).
12 really can be understood as a reflection of the "natural" frequency of the universe as first experienced by human beings.... 360 days (plus 5.25 that they didn't quite know what to do with... so they threw a midwinter party.)
I say let's add two digits and move the whole planetary culture to base 12... its more ecological, more logical, and less anthropocentric.
Perhaps it is the only hope for human survival.
Peace.
Hispanic is subset of Latin.
The following are Latin (considering that as a language), but not Hispanic:
Italian
Portuguese
Brazilian
Romenian
Some minor cultures in Europe (near the Alps)
French
There may be more. I can't remember everything.
Also, it is not good practice to call Mexicans "hispanic"; after all, they also take pride on being Mexicans.
Did you know English is a Germanic language? Yes, it is. That's why Germans undertsand English quite easily.
So maybe I should call USA and England germanic? Maybe I do that, yes?
The new "de-christianised" calendar started in 1793 and was retroactive to 1792. The year started on September 22nd
They started the year on Frodo's birthday? J.R.R. Tolkien wasn't even born yet!
Will I retire or break 10K?
the number of days in a year is (so far) beyond our control, but at least we could metricize the year: ten months in a year, of 36.5 days each. february starts at noon!
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. -- A.E.
"As for the salute? I've heard it was something to do with the british soldiers shielding their eyes......."
Actually if i remember my military history correctly, which i probably dont the salute dervied from the practice of knight raising their visors to view, show respect or what have you to their enemy
> Actually, one of the cool things about old English liquid measure ...
> 1 pint = 2^4 fl.oz.
Hmm, that's odd since my 'English' pint seems to be 20fl.oz (not 16), I better get my measuring jugs recalibrated ... or maybe I won't - I like getting a man sized pint for my beer :-)
Next you will be saying that there are not 2240lb to a ton or there is not 14lb to 1 stone.
--An Englishman in England
Back when the metric switch was being pushed during the Carter administration, there was a SNL skit about the decaday. 100 hours, each about 15 mins long, and 100 "minutes" in an hour. Hence the following exchange:
"Honey, I'm starved. When's dinner"
"Two hours"
"Great!"
There was also a pitch for a "decbet" of 10 letters instead of the current confusing 26. One big advantage was "LMNO" would have been one letter, as in "honey, would you please lmnopen the door?"
Well that should have read (before opera changed it to HTML ... Hmm and the preview was good too !)
...
... or maybe I won't - I like getting a man sized pint for my beer :-)
> Actually, one of the cool things about old English liquid measure
*snip*
> 1 pint = 2^4 fl.oz.
*snip*
Hmm, that's odd since my 'English' pint seems to be 20fl.oz (not 16), I better get my measuring jugs recalibrated
Next you will be saying that there are not 2240lb to a ton or there is not 14lb to 1 stone.
--An Englishman in England
Ack ! Muppet Opera reset the damn form back to HTML - they really should not allow me near technology in this state.
Please ignore the above aborted effort
Place all three ingredients in a large meteorite crater, mix gently.
Remote-enable the nuke, 30 second timer.
Run away, run away!
Bake at 3500*K for several seconds until golden...uhh...burnt.
Both software and scary-alien-chimp-facelift problems solved!
lets say a cubic foot
is the how it slows everything down. If you are running 88 mph, you're hauling ass. Convert to metric and you do 88 you're piddling along at a pathetic pace. SOUNDS like you're moving, "We're humming along at 100 kph. Should be there in no time." BAH! I'm doing 100 MPH and I'll get there long before you and be sitting in a comfy chair drinking my second beer, all relaxed by the time you arrive.
Now switch to metric time. Hell's bells, think time drags now when you're at work? MUCH worse with metric time. Look at the clock and think how the seconds are DRAGGING out. Will this day EVER end? NO, because you are on metric time when seconds last for-freakin'-ever and the hours...don't get me started on the hours. Tick........wait for it......tock! Over and over, slow as molasses. The suicide rate will go up, alcoholism will skyrocket, people will go mad. The gut-felt mantra going through EVERYONE'S head would become, "I hate this job and the seconds just DRAAAAAAG on by! Please shoot me!"
Didnt some watch maker or other try this ages ago with internet time in be@ts or somthing... I have a vauge recolection of the outsider 99 clock having support for it.
Perhaps we could just alter the rotational speed of the earth to a more convenient value?
That would have some interesting side effects.
Workplaces that used programs like Quickbooks would suddenly have to do the books by hand because employees would be making more per hour and the hour would be a heck of a lot longer. Lyle Zapato was smoking crack when he figured this out.( Probably still is )
If I recall correctly, all dates on documents in inter-EU commerce must adhere to the ISO standard.
The metric unit of time is the second. We use millisecond, microseconds, picoseconds, etc. Base 10 is nice for some things, but for things that need to be aportioned, its stupid ( 2*5). Base 60 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.
... if not base 10?
(I know, I know, it's really binary underneath - but how often do you see it that way?)
The problem is that it ISN'T the same time everywhere in the world. Certainly we have set up a system to determine approx daylihgt and nighttime hours based upon a twenty-four hour clock. And people are active at all times during this twenty four hours, but the FACT is, the earth rotates on its axis. As it does, some of the earth is exposed to the sun's rays, while others lose exposure. It takes the earth 24 hours and 11minutes to do this (right now...). The purpose of the clock is to mark THIS passage, not when we get up for work or eat dinner!!!! I don't know if anyone remembers a rather funny cartoon that won an award on swatch.com when they came out with .beats. Essentially, this cartoon guy lived his life on .beats. Hey dude! Kewl! The problem was, IT WAS THE SAME TIME ALL OVER THE EARTH. SO he was calling people at @210, and saying "Good Morning!" even though someone else was going to bed, another was leaving work, and another was having lunch.
The existing system actually makes sense because it is actually keyed to a natural physical phenomenon -- hte rotation of the earth. On top of that, you can adop the current GMT system, and then it is the same time all over the world, with a + or - for your location.
"Good morning!'
I was wondering -- should we measure years by how long it takes between spring equinoxes, or how long it takes to make one rotation about the sun? Since the earth's pole wobbles, they're different. For that matter, should days be one rotation, or the time between noons?
I tried looking it up. "Sidereal year" is one rotation. "Tropical year" is the time between equinoxes. The official calander year so far isn't either, it's 365 days except 366 every fourth year except 365 every 400th. And days seem to be times between midnights, and those keep getting adjusted with leap seconds as the earth's spin slows down. My guess is they're shooting for the tropical year, but I'm not sure.
This should drive astrologers batty. I tried looking that up too. Most western astrologers use the tropical year, which means it's seasons that really matter, not the stars. I even spotted a definition of the "Age of Aquarius": when the spring equinox starts in Aquarius. Reckoned to start about 100 to 300 years from now. Right now it happens in Pisces.
1) Abolition of Time Zones
Sure, it sucks that I live in Eastern time, my family is in Central, and my sister is in Mountain, but time zones are essential to the way we function. It's a way of transferring a standardized day schedule around the world. It doesn't matter whether I'm in New York or Los Angeles, the typical work day is 9 to 5. If there were no time zones, we would have to come up with some other way to enforce the standard work day (amongst other things) based on your locale. If the work day where I live was considered to be 12 to 8, there would be a point at which 1 to 9 would be preferred, but where is the distinct line? Time zones give a hard and fast point for the change to occur, requiring you to remember only which one you happen to be in.
2) Months and weeks are just as arbitrary as hours and minutes. Why not change them instead. Remembering 60/60/24 is much easier than memorizing the old nursery school rhyme "30 days has September, April, June..." Other than obsoliting my old friend the Doomsday Algorithm, that makes a lot more sense to me.
10 = Number of the beast in base number of the beast.
These "ideograms" are Chinese characters (aka kanji in Japanese).
They mean year, month/moon, day/sun. I've always found Asian names for month more logical. 1 moon is January, 2 moon is February, etc...
September sounds like it's the 7th month of the year but it's really the 9th. But that's a whole different story in itself.
Swatch time may be a good solution for this. http://www.swatch.com/alu_beat/index_section.php Each day has 1000 beats (1.44 minutes) and there are no time zones. Tracking time is much easier.
hmm. Unless you count zero inclusively, you can only count to 31 on one hand, much the same as only getting to 255 not 256 in 8 digits. Why not base 16? Using your thumb as a carry from 15 could be fairly useful since its on the side ...
Canadian: About 0.6 kiloseconds
I am unique, just like you, and you, and you...
(Husband is driving and wife is reading the road map)
Husband: How far is it to the next exit?
Wife: about two centimeters.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
"Research is like sex: sometimes something useful is produced, but that's not why we do it." -- Richard Feynman
You can't change the number of days in a year, so any attempt to re-organize time would fail there.
Sorta like the lame brain idea of making PI equal 3. You can't override GOD with an act of congress.
You could go to months of 28 days each and end up with 13 months, plus a day and a quarter left over. So one month ends up with 29 days, and once every four years or so it gets 30 days. BTW the word month comes from moon since the moons orbit is about a month long.
The fact that a circle is 360 degrees has something to do with 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour. Don't know where that came from but if you want to make decimal time you might end up with decimal angles.
- DecimalTime.org
- Universal-Time.org (one of the oldest that I know of)
are a couple of good places to start. There are a significant number of opponents, as well.In my experience, the difference in the standards are derived from one fundamental opinion: how much are you willing to deviate from how people use time to get universality?
Incidentally, one of the big problems with universal (using the term very loosely), decimal time (and the two do tend to go together) is that with universal time, it is very difficult for people to measure local time. What time do the stores open? What time is lunch? Using technology such as the Yes Watch solves this problem, and puts everything into perspective. The Yes Watch shows where you are in the day -- it is easy to see how far you are from sunrise or sunset; it is extremely convenient, and practical. If this technology were combined with a universal, decimal time format, universal time would become instantly practicaly. You look at the watch for your perspective on the day; you look at the decimal time to schedule your telephone conversation with someone in a different time zone. Very cool.
If you're interested in this, check out YesClock, a software implementation of the Yes Watch. It displays time using the same YesWatch paradigm, and has the option of displaying time in decimal format.
If you want a truely universal time measurement system, you won't get it, because of relativity. Theoretically, any time system we develop is going to fall to pieces fairly rapidly if we start travelling around at even moderately relativistic velocities. So you have to swallow that and pick the next best thing, say, measuring everything in seconds. Only, that sucks. Imagine trying to schedule a meeting for sometime next week. How many seconds is that from now? It doesn't scale very well, either. Plus, the fact of the matter is that people living on this planet live by a 24 hour day, and 'days' are a very useful concept. So you add the concept of a day. Now you're way off universality; as soon as we start living on Mars, the time system will have to be restructured. But you suck it up and continue. Years are really useful too -- most humans on the planet live by a cycle of seasons, and just counting 'days since the eruption of Mt. St. Helens' has scalability problems as well. So you add years -- heck, you're already dependant on the Earth by using days.
So you have years and days; when does a year start? When does a day start? Well, you could put the start of the day at the international date line, since the start point is arbitrary. But since the start point is completely arbitrary, why not start a day at a current standard start-point: UTC, AKA Greenwich Mean Time? It would make conversion easier.
How about the year start date? Do you make conversion easier, and start it with the definately Christian-centric BC/AD dividing line, or try for something less religiously tied, like the year of the eruption of some major volcano?
My point being, that when you really start discussing this issue, you start getting all of these questions that don't have clear answers, and you end up with purists, who support solutions which are -- inconvenient, at best, and a wide swath of people who compromise to some degree on all of the points. The end result is a huge number of proposals.
By the way, Swatch tried this with BMT. They even make metric time watches, that measure time in 1000ths of a day. Being arrogant, they put 000 at midnight, Buel Switzerland (the corporate home of Swatch), which was a mistake; they should have settled for either the IDL or GMT, both of which have reasonably strong arguments. They failed in not defining a metric date measurement to boot.
Personally, I measure all dates in Gregorian Year+Day (IE, today is *2002-186). It is a pretty good compromise.
Let us not forget the English measurements are based on the Holy Cubit as given us by God.
I have no problem with changing to base10, but I fail to see the need to change the base unit? What is the point? The French number is arbitrary and no more precise than the Holy Cubit, plus of course I'm sure God knew what he was doing. I will never use the devil's measures.
Did I say their is no logical reason to change the base unit?
Stupid.
Change time to base 10, fine, but the fundamental base unit should remain the second. Or base it on the actual true time of revolution of the Earth and get rid of leap year.
Think about it: 60 seconds to a minute, 60 minutes to an hour, 25 hours to a day, all the way to 365 days to a year.
What do you do with the mysterious 25th hour?
Swatch basically did metric time with their internet time idea.. I don't think it has really caught on tho..
You can take your 8 day work week and cram it!
I can't believe this article wasn't posted 9.4 dekades ago.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
As I wrote before, and since we normally don't need to count to zero, I would use 00000 to represent 32, just as a closed hand is sometimes used to represent 10 (ten).
RMN
~~~
1 miss 2 miss 3 miss .... 100 miss...
Just doesn't work out. Besides, I'd prefer not to have 10 hours in a day. But living with only 100 days in a year would really freak me out.
Internet time wasa new standard developed by Swatch a few years ago... it splits each 24 hour day into 1000 sections, which I believe are called "beats".
I have an internet clock running here (a prog called TClockEX in Windoze), it's currently 896 - that's 9:30pm to you and me.
The great thing about internet time is that it's universal all over the world. If I fly to Australian now, it'd read the same time on my watch as it would on theirs. Days just start at different times depending on your timezone.
'tis a cool idea, and a pity it hasn't really caught on.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
So then instead of counting to 10 apple before rushing, schoolkids will count to 10 grape?
I know. I've gotten into the habit of saying "ideogram" because when I say "Chinese character" people go "wha? weren't you talking about Japanese?" and when I say "kanji" they go just "wha?" :). The Chinese characters are anyway an ideographic writing system, so there's nothing wrong with calling them ideograms.
Has anyone considered how this would play with time zones. There are currently 24 MAJOR times zones (yes there are more than 24...i said major....
I think we should use epoch time for daily usage.
Me: Hey bob, what time is it?
Bob: About 1 billion.
but it would could an enormous amount of money to change the us to metric. Street signs, school books, teaching aides, rulers... although the companies that sell those items would be makin the big bucks. Personally, I think we should change, but over a very long period of time. people will need to adjust to the change. that's my two girly cents.
see sig. see sig run. run sig run.
Actually darn near everything in the English system was originally supposed to be binary because it made instrumentation easier. Its easy to cut something in half to get smaller units, it is not easy to cut something into perfect tenths.
So the fahrenheit scale was supposed to work that way, but the original measurements the scale was made with were off. Likewise units of volume. It never really caught on with units of length though probably because they predate attempts at instrumentation.
Unless you're going to change the amount of time it takes for the earth to rotate or for the earth to revolve around the sun, you're going to be stuck with approx 365.25 days in a year, assuming you want the terms day and year to be meaningful.
Thus, you'll hear: "How far is it to Crystal City from here?" Answer: "When? Now?"
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
I simply cannot grok that page. Please refuse your children to scribble all over it.
We are missing the most important thing. If we switch over to metric time there will be no way to use the hour and minute hands on a clock to figure out which direction is north. How could we live without that when all the gps birds drop from the sky when we send them instructions using metric time instead of normal time.
We in the US use the old "wine cuts" for liquid measure. A US gallon is also known as a "wine gallon", and is smaller than a British gallon. 1 UK gallon = 1.20095 wine gallons. If you were to go buy a pint of beer (not that they sell beer by pints here) you would think you are being cheated. 1 US pint = 16 fluid ounces.
Best Slashdot comment ever
I read years ago a column by Isaac Asimov in which he proposed such a system. The basic unit would be the day since it's part of human body internal rythms and it's expected to be constant when humans go around the space and find bodies with different rotation periods.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
For those who don't get the know either system, 1 US ton = 2000 pounds and 1 UK ton = 2240 pounds. We in the US never use "stones", but I bet we have them defined differently anyway. Civil engineering courses in the US can be a pain (even more than anywhere else) because we have to learn the US system, the UK system, metric, SI (not exactly the same as metric), naval measurements (1 nautical mile ~= 1.150777 US miles ~= 1.150779 statute miles), and one of my professors that it would be fun (for him, not us) to have us learn the old biblical measurements, too.
Best Slashdot comment ever
I remember Troy McClure from such educational films as Here Comes the Metric System. The world is turning to the US's wacky measurements, not the other way around.
My blog can kick your blog's ass
The 1930s science-fiction silent German film "Metropolis" shows a 10-"hours", 50-"minutes" clock.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Metric measurement is for weenies who are too dumb to divide by anything other than 10..
"Make it idiot proof, and someone will make a better idiot."
I don't know if I count as doing it intuitively since it started as a rather studied affectation, but I've been counting as high as 1023 on my fingers for more than 1_0100 years, possibly 1_1000 years, not just as a joke but sometimes because it's quicker than finding a calculator or piece of paper. I recently startled a colleague's son not only by claiming to count past a thousand on my fingers but starting to do so.
It's a learnable skill; you just ripple the fingers like they were JK-flip-flops in a counter (without the stupid decade logic). Although sometimes I'll ignore the thumbs so the fingers form two nybbles of one byte, but that opens me to finger-biting joes so perhaps I should avoid that. ;-)
As to the 31 v 32 debate, I carry to the other hand, either thumb to thumb (if aiming for 2**10) or index to index register (if aiming for 2**8).
Back in the mid 80's Edmond Scientific catalogs had Metric wall clocks listed for sale. Didn't catch on then, prolly won't now.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
Yes, these things don't happen magically, y'know? The metric system isn't just a "lucky coincidence". It is the way it is because some people spent a couple of minutes thinking about it before declaring it as a "standard". :-)
RMN
~~~
I'm reminded of Vernor Vinge's novel "A Deepness in the Sky", where our distantly descended spacefaring civilization uses only seconds to count time -- kiloseconds (ksec), megaseconds (msec), etc.
The reasoning was that when you're spending lots of time in zero-gravity artificial satellites floating in deep-space (and also to not have to reconcile different dates on planets with different rotational/orbital speeds), using a system of measurement that's bound to a particular planetary body is a bad idea. A work shift was about 30 ksec, sleep time was about that long, if you weren't needed for work for a while, you'd be put into cryosleep for a couple of Msec, etc.
I've wondered what kind of time system we'll use if we ever colonize other planets, or have orbital or free-floating satellite colonies.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
to go along with the new time you would need new
names like tuesdeck and wednesdeck.
At the end of the week you have a holideck.
We could even get rid of those crappy little
days like mondeck and frideck.
For non-slashdot-nerd-geek-wankers, there is a 4th, or rather, 1st universal language, in which we can communicate.
Need hints? It's not:
English
Esperanto
Inter-species telepathic communication
HDF-EOS
Football
Vodka
Well, tell the aerospace companies that millions were spent on sending the little Mars Lander to space, but it crashed and burned.
All because someone put in metric data, when the little 'bot only understood imperial. Doh! Now's the time to change to the mighty metric system!
Yes they did. 100 seconds to a minute, 100 minutes to an hour, 10 hours to a day. There are metric clocks in French museums. It didn't catch on.
I dunno, everytime I ordered a pint in the UK I got a 500ml glass:) Marked as such and everything. And a half-pint was a 333ml glass. So much for the "english" system.
They're different you know, which is one of the silliest things evar ;). A dry gallon is something like 270 oz, while a liquid one is 235 oz.
At over 1000 posts, I believe that this officially qualifies as an endless rash of shit for a typo.
Our time system is based on geometry, and geometry on our time system. When ancient peoples observed that there were about 360 days in a year they decided to make that the number of degrees in a circle. There are twelve months because it divides evenly into 360 and that's about the number of lunar cycles we see here on earth. The metric system would throw that off completely. Plus imagine all the trig we'd have to relearn.
I've thought about this before.
One reason for public rejection was hiding price gouging behind the metric units at the gas stations. This was shortly after the oil crunch and folks werre rather sensitive to gas prices since many had cars getting well under 20 mpg. Once a few people did the math they began to associate it with the metric system rather than dishonest merchants. The latter is still a problem. Ever notice that the prices go up towards the end of the week and stay up until Monday or Tuesday?
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
When would some kind of refactoring of time make sense?
"man 2 time" gives me: (although it does have a little problem with leap seconds:) Anyway, if you want metric time, use seconds, not days, as the starting point.
- 1 mminute = 100 seconds,
- 1 mhour = 100 mminutes (almost 3 hours)
- 1 mday = 10 mhours (about 28 hours).
- 1 mweek = 10 mdays (about 11.5 days),
- 1 mmonth = 10 mweeks (115 days)
- 1 myear = 10 mmonths (3.2 years)
Earth's current year ends up about geometrically midway between the mmonth and myear. I wouldn't mind getting the 28 hours in a mday to work in though...!Energy: time to change the picture.
Metric time?:
http://www.universal-time.org/
$ expr $(date +%s) - $(date -d "0:00" +%s)
62347
My favorite author, Daniel Keys Moran deals with the idea of a 10-hour day in his book "The Long Run", a book about a Player (hacker) who is pursued by the Unification (world government) in 2069.
An excellent read, I must add.
Jory
w00zor watch as we push closer to the hof limit everyday
4 to hof
Christ. It's really not that hard to remember any system once you've learned it. Americans are on the US system for day to day life, and it seems to work just fine.
Besides, I"ve always thought that the metric system was only for people bad at math. Only sissies need to move decimal points.
I like dividing by 12.
How can we possibly consider taking the world to metric time when the U.S. won't even switch to metric measurements like most of the world. Metric is easier though, no doubt.
... how many hours in a day? 100 would mean one damn fast clock! 10 hours would be crazy sounding to the laymen, although when considering the 100sec.-minute/100min.-hour, might work. And we certainly cannot change the number of days in a year!!! Although, we may be able to change days per month; maybe just use day-of-year instead, cutting out months altogether. But what about weeks? .... what a mess!
I think the first step in the time conversion would be switching the world to military time; doing about with AM/PM.
But how do we set the metric clock?: 100 seconds in a minute; 100 minutes in an hour
so nice to see so many folks chewing up and down the notion of decimal time. -- wow, what a comunity! please consider these two offerings:
http://sleepbot.com/WRLDtime
a self-explanatory decimal time site with java-script downloadable decimal clockfaces for your desktop or website
and the soon to be online
http://X-time.org
a more complete decimal time system based in part on the original French Republican Metric time effort of the 1780's, but updated and upgraded into full SI compliance, and 100% backwards compatable with the decimal fraction of the Julian Date system used by astronomers for the last 150 years.
As such, X-time is a non-local time system where individual time-zones are transended (as is also the case with Swatch), but unlike the navel-gaze-ing Swatch marketeers who center their 'internet' time at their Swiss corporate headquarters, X-time equally de-centers all the world and by 'zero-ing out' at midnight on the international date line, displays the percentage of the world allready 'in tomorrow' or the more forward of the two dates simultaneously in effect. Rather than get bogged down in local time zones, X-time is a global time system designed to synchronise coordinated activities that span multiple timezones for those who wish to make a break from the imperial time standards of the former British naval empire. The 'zero moment' of the global day begins and ends at the cutting edge of the 'global now' -- midnight on the International Date Line East (IDLE time), this being concurrent with local London noon and the striking of Big Ben 12 times at mid day... (when the UK is not on daylight savings time!).
X-time is built upon the French Revolutionary metric second, 10^-5 of the mean solar day, which is 864 milliseconds long, and gives an ~ADAGIO-like~ tempo to the ticking of X-time -- roughly 70 chi per minute -- very close to the anglo/babilonian sexigesimal fraction of the minute we are more familiar with. This duration of only a little bit less than 1 second is called 'chi' (a hard 'k' sound with a long 'i' -- rhymes with pi, symbol 'x') after the first letter of the greek word 'chronos' meaning time. 1,000 x is equal to 1 kilo-chi (kx) which is 864 seconds in duration or 14.4 minutes (.24 hours) -- equal to exactly 1% of the mean solar day.
For all you Slashdot-sters (as well as the more advanced folks at NASA who can calculate the difference betweeen slugs and Newtons), the new X-time compliant unit of force is provisionally termed the Lagrange (after Joseph Lagrange, the mathmatical pioneer of 2 body orbital mechanics) and is defined as 1L= kg*m/x^2 This is roughly equal to ~1.34 Newtons or roughly ~6 footpounds. Anyone seriously interested in decimal time would do well to check out http://decimaltime.org There you can crawl and compare all the links to differing decimal time designs across the web and join in the threaded discussions on differing aspects of global decimal time design. And of course feel free to send me any comments of insites you wish to share.
I am looking for a group of beta testers willing to immerse in X-time, so don't be shy!
You try doing 1/5 of 12 vs 10 quickly in your head. Your point was? Is 3 much better than 5? Perhaps we should use base15 (3*5), base105 (3*5*7) or base1155 (3*5*7*11)?
:-)
Clearly, base 120 is the answer.
120/12 = 10
120/10 = 12
120/8 = 15
120/6 = 20
120/5 = 24
120/4 = 30
120/3 = 40
120/2 = 60
3rds, 4ths, 5ths, 6ths, 8ths, 10ths, 12ths all work out smoothly.
This is nice because it gives us tenths (which is friendly to our ten-fingured counters), 3rds and 4ths (good for navigation), and numbers in general require less digits to write, reducing writer's cramp. I toyed with base pi and base e, but if we use planck units, base e comes out of it anyway, and base pi just made me hungry. [ok, I'm only partly joking. As I joke about this I find myself actually growing to like base 120 more and more, so that by the end of this post I suspect I'll have myself half conviced of something I'd started out mocking. But then again, maybe it's just the beer.]
Of course, coming up with 120 unique, immediately recognizable and sufficiently different characters to make numbers quickly readable won't be quite as much fun as coming up with 1155 of 'em, but it does yield a pretty elegant numbering system that would be fairly managable, and would map nicely to a 12 hour, 120 minute, 120 second clock.
Of course, the ideal would be to use planck units in a base 120 system instead of a base 10 system, but lets come up with 120 unique numerical digits before we get too carried away.
As for it being too much trouble to change numbering systems, I say what the hell? Every comp sci major had to learn binary anyway, which as you'll not maps to base 120 rather nicely, either as binary or octal (sorry, hex advocates, your mapping is a little less elegant. It's an imperfect universe, but should we ever move to balanced trinary, that'll map out nicely as well).
Time for the uneducated masses to get educated, or left behind, I say. Flexible minds should not be held back by their society's calcified least-common-demoninators.
In all seriousness, planck units in a base 120 numerical system would absolutely rock. Enough counting on our fingers already.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
So how do you divide 356 by 10? Or is a year now 1000 days
I personally like the planck units approach, which would result in the day being 1602720 ticks long, or about 1.6 Mticks, though as I pondered in another post, it might be kind of cool to refine this into a base 120 system (actually, base 60 would probably be better and have all, or nearly all, the same advantages of base 120, with half as many characters to learn).
In any event, even if we go decimal, we could easilly measure time in terms of days, dekadays, hectodays, kilodays, decidays (hours-m), millidays (minutes-m) and microdays (seconds-m) and let the farmer's alminac tell the farmers when the earthly seasons change, which will be very different from when the martian seasons change anyway (assuming we'd like a system that will be usable in space and on other worlds, rather than limited to this one rather insignificant planet).
It would be a time system usable on any planet, convertable to local calendars as needed, and reasonably elegant (though I still think the planck units are cooler).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
what's half of ten?
what's half of that?
what's half of that?
thank you very much.
Would you make windows that only went from 1 inch to 10 inches Even NeXT was force to concede on that.