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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?"
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?
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'd mod this post up, but I can't. Can't even metamod. When I ask why, the people at /. just ignore me. Funny, ain't it?
MikeAtIF*ckStuffedAnimalsDotCom
Obviously if we can't master 24 hours in a day, then me thinks we'd have a hard time switching to something new.
I think you'd see a lot of resistence to this idea, since everyone in the world (AFAIN) uses the current time system. The same can't be said about weights and measures.
Also, think of all the s/w that would have to be rewritten.... flight control systems, databases, operating systems, the list is endless! Yikes!
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?
I've heard it's actually 27 hours. I remember hearing something about a sensory-depravation test, where some scientists deprived their subjects of any and all indicators of the present time, and after something like a month they reverted to a 27-hour day... I dunno.
I almost wish I could do that... Block off the windows, hide the clock on my taskbar and just code. I'd at least feel more productive.
Matthew G P Coe
http://mgpcoe.blogspot.com/
The conclusion seemed to be "Yep, the body has 25 (or maybe 27?) hour biorhythms," while the evidence given almost made it look like it varies significantly from person to person. Now I really want to track this information down, because I'm more curious than ever. I almost think it was mentioned in the discussions of an old Slashdot poll about sleep. *goes off to research*
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suwain_2
In my lifetime, Australia switched its currency from pounds-shillings-pence to dollars-cents (1966-68), and switched from imperial to metric (more recently, can't remember the exact dates).
Proportionate to our population we managed the cost and the re-learning exercise both times. Would the US cost per head to make just one of these changes be that much worse than the cost to Australia?
Just think. No more lost spacecraft because of confusion over meters and feet. I've found a saving for you already! More to the point, it would reduce many incompatibilities with other countries, and so reduce costs.
I am anarch of all I survey.
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.
Exactly what I thought of, too. I think it was a NASA study done years ago to figure out how to best structure work schedules for long stays in space.
I remember this particular study involved moving people into a house a la Big Brother, but actually having that house built completely within a set, kindof like the Truman Show, but more like just limited to controlling the light coming in through the windows to give the residents a sense of sunrise, daylight, sunset and nighttime. They may have even cycled the light every, what, 45 minutes(?) to simulate orbiting the earth.
I don't remember anything about specially controlled clocks that run a little slower to add the extra hour a day. If there are 3,600 seconds in an hour and 86,400 seconds in a day, then each move of the second hand on each clock actually needs to take 1 + 3600/86400 or 1.041666 seconds.. barely noticeable. Don't worry, you're not nuts. I most definitely remember the 25 hours too, not 27 like another poster mentioned, but I think we're remembering a 20 year old study, too.
Intelligent Life on Earth
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!
(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.
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
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]
Actually, one of the cool things about old English liquid measure (and dry measure too, but it took me long enough to exosomatically remember the liquid measures) is that it is base-2 instead of base-10. Unfortunately, we forgot most of the units. For example, I can't recall what goes between ounces and gills, and I can't seem find it on the internet.
2 fluid ounces = 1 ??? = 2^1 fl.oz.
2 ???s = 1 gill = 2^2 fl.oz.
2 gills = 1 chopin (cup) = 2^3 fl.oz.
2 chopins (cups) = 1 pint = 2^4 fl.oz.
2 pints = 1 quart = 2^5 fl.oz.
2 quarts = 1 pottle = 2^6 fl.oz.
2 pottles = 1 gallon = 2^7 fl.oz.
2 gallons = 1 peck = 2^8 fl.oz.
2 pecks = 1 demibushel = 2^9 fl.oz.
2 demibushels = 1 bushel or firken = 2^10 fl.oz.
2 firkens = 1 kinderkin = 2^11 fl.oz.
2 kinderkins = 1 barrel = 2^12 fl.oz.
2 barrels = 1 hogshead = 2^13 fl.oz.
2 hogsheads = 1 pipe = 2^14 fl.oz.
2 pipes = 1 tun = 2^15 fl.oz.
The gas tank on my Dad's old Chevy Suburban holds a barrel and a firken. A full tank of gas costs about $60.
Best Slashdot comment ever
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.
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
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".
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