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?"
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...
"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)
...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.
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 /.
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
Americans.....
Disclaimer: I too am an American, calm down.
ummmm.... ?
i think we found who stole the crack from the space shuttle...
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 link appears to be slashdotted.. 2 minutes after the story was posted.
Don't you mean 0.12 kiloseconds?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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.
...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.
I agree. The metric system is great being base 10 and all but sometimes I wish we had evolved with 12 fingers just for this reason.
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.
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.
Then use the good old google cache - http://216.239.33.100/search?q=cache:r9MHgtv93-YC: zapatopi.net/metrictime.html+=en=UTF-8
or will metric time make dates/timestamps become almost like dates/timestamps in Star Trek?
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
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?
Unlike measurement of distance, or weight, on Earth whatever unit of measurement we use is going to be based around a day, and there are going to be 365.something of those. There's no way time can be elegant so we may as well give up trying.
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
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
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.
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.
Agreed...that's the reason why these ancient cultures used base 60. It's so much easier to represent 1/3 1/6 etc...Base 10 is overrated. And actually, I think the Babylonians used a floating point representation too..(Knuth has a good couple of pages on number systems in one of the volumes of Art of Computer Programming)
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
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
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
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.
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
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!
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.
Already posted like 10 times... -10, Redundant plz.
But still more than a Ford Explorer.
Err... maybe I mean 12 and 60 are two such numbers. Anyway, here's a link to what the hell I'm talking about.
-10, Redundant.
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
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.
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
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 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 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
Or AEST. At least the important parts of the world would have correct time. Who *cares* if the Americans work from midnight to 8 am?
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
Thoe 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.
.1, .2, .3, .4, .5, .6, .7, .8, .9. Those increments are easy to relate to (you point out the fingers and toes thing), and VERY easy to do arithmetic with. Classic example: I read that a particular movie is "212 minutes" long and it starts at "9:45pm". I need to be home by "midnight", the trip takes "half and hour", and buses run "on the quarter hour". YOU do the math. Sure, it can be done, but yuck. SHOW ME THE DECIMALS! ;-)
10 can be divided into a VERY important number of subdivisions. Namely, TEN! Sure, you can have quarters and halves and twelfths (?!) of an hour. But with a base-10 hour, you could easily write, express, and print
The characteristic is so useful but most people don't realize.
I'd argue that characteristic is primarily useful for numbers that aren't based on TEN itself. We go searching for more divisions because we can't express it well in the number system we typically use: base-10.
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).
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!
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.
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
~~~
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!
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.)
(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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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!
First, you don't have to cut them off. It's fairly easy to ignore them. Still, you're left with 8 which is divisible by 1,2,4 and 8. It's better than 10 but with 12 you get integers when splitting into thirds. Try that with dollars. It's a mess.
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.
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
A quarter *to* ten is three-quarters *past* nine which would be 9.75.
dave
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?
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.
One major reason why the French Revolutionary Calendar never caught on for a couple of reasons, all revolving around the 10-day week. The principle problem was that it contained only one day off every 10 days, instead of 1 day off every 7. Aside from the Biblical implications (God made the Earth in 6 days, not 9, and a religious population isn't about to alter a fundamental aspect of their faith just to suit political reality), no-one wanted to have to work an extra three days before getting one off!
Oddly enough, the French Revolutionary Calendar was advocated as superior precisely because it contained fewer days off--which would be "good for the hard-working people." (Undoubtedly something advocated by a non-working aristocracy... *grin*)
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...
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.)
Yep, and it would have the 5th highest national debt too, with the US remaining No 1. :)
Cedric Balthazar Rotherwood
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java Platform +
System Admin. for Solaris
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.
First thing I thought when I saw "Isn't it Time for Metric Time", I thought about HEX Time. Which although makes sense in a technological sense, it's about as easy to convert as binary time and metric time. Yah, you can count on your fingers up to thirty five in HEX... or up to 1,023 in Binary but it's just annoying to switch.
.beat or @time? I will give Swatch Time one big kudo, during the Dot-Com era, I did see it on CNN and MSNBC once or twice, it went a bit futher than any other time went.
Honestly, what else are you going to get out of switching to Base-2 or Base-6 or even Base-10 for time? Easier coding? Not really, instead of the computer doing the conversion, you will be for the next couple years until it makes sense.
Think of this, how long does it take you to quit writing checks for the previous year in January? Or when we switched over to 2000, how long did you write 1900? Things like this have been proposed, anyone remember Internet Time, ie:
None of the current ideas are "intuitive" to humans, not enough studying has been done, and no one big enough has adopted it and kept it.
Best of luck, good article though.
-M
I cannot confirm nor deny the allegation or allegations you may or may not have just made
I think that perhaps, he underestimates the difficulty involved in slowing the planet down to 100 revolutions per orbit.
Andrew
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]
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?
That's called military time. 0 - 24 no am or pm.. just hours in the day.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Why would the weekend have to be contiguous.
Because otherwise it could no longer be called a weekEND.
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.
The US does the SI system in certain, limited areas. All my engineering classes use both SI & imperial units, which is easy enough to learn.
I've lived in Europe & Asia besides the US, so I've used the SI system on a daily basis before. However, I see absolutely no reason for the US to change, ever.
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.
Asimov discussed this idea decades ago...
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.
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.
One cool thing about the US GNP is that California could break away, and by itself it would the the worlds No 5 economy by GNP/GDP
;-)
Don't even think about it!
You already had your civil war.
Are you slow learners or something?
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
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.
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?
Michael Jackson. Nukes. Microsoft. The ability to explot the third world in order to have cheaper Nikes. God bless America.
Error: PANTS NOT FOUND. Press <F1> to continue.
Well the guys over at Swatch already tried this with the Swatch time and now Internet time idea
hardly caught on has it???
No problem how about Money?
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
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).
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/
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.
Alright, replace "1st world country" with "decent place to actually live in and be proud of."
In what way? Why do you feel it's a better place to live than anywhere else in the world? Have you been anywhere else in the world?
Oh yeah, that pretty much rules out the rest of the fucking world.
Maybe you should visit the rest of the world before saying this.
So we can, logically, break the world up into USA and not-USA.
Yes, you could. I don't know what difference it would make, though.
The difference: we have more money, bigger guns, actual rights, better looking and hornier women, and if we don't fucking own you now, it's just a matter of time.
More money - true, but also higher debts and more volatile markets.
Bigger guns - well, that may be true, but it's yet to be seen how effective they really are, and what this has to do with the topic at hand - which is, what do 1st world countries have that 3rd world countries do not. You haven't mentioned a single thing so far. Sorry.
Better looking and hornier women. That's a statement that's difficult to back up. There are bound to be some ugly women in every country, some pretty women in every country, as well as some horny and not so horny.
Actual rights - what "actual rights" do you have in the U.S that I don't have here?
Cedric Balthazar Rotherwood
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java Platform +
System Admin. for Solaris
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/
WOW... is this ever offtopic?
However, I can't resist saying this much:
South Africa isn't exactly your run-of-the-mill third world country. The material and economical standard of whites (and today also a percentage of the black/coloured community) is that of a 1st world country, while the rest of the people under 3rd world circumstances. Also, you have a lot of infra structure and other neat stuff constructed by the apartheid regime, since they had no problem making the life of the whites as comfy as possible while not minding problems and poverty among the rest of the citizens.
As it comes to 1st vs 3rd world countries in general. I guess everyone sees the differences between the European Union and African nations such as Zambia, Mocambique or the Dem. Rep. of Congo. Or between South- and North-Korea.
sj 3
$!
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
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".
Why do you have this burning need to feel validated? In general, third world countries have less economic and political influence. They have less bathrooms and telephones per capita. Whatever. Sure, you may have one telephone in whatever backwater asspimple country you're in, but a defining factor of the 3rd world is having less... they are developing, not developed. Nobody's saying third world countries don't have televisions, they just don't have one in every hut.
The chip on your shoulder is some sort of need to prove that third world as just as important as the first world... and your blindness to seeing past that "point". Its a ludicrous position, probably based on personal feelings of inadequacy, but it doesn't matter. You can change this. Political and economic influence moves primarily based on how nations act. What truly matters is what you do with what you have.
What you're doing right now, on the international stage of Slashdot, is showing all of us just how smart South Africans are. I may be showing everyone how pompous Americans are, but they already knew that. :)
Error: PANTS NOT FOUND. Press <F1> to continue.
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
Why do you have this burning need to feel validated?
I don't. All of my arguments are simply refuting the myth that 1st world countries have something that 3rd world countries don't. Since I posted the original question - noone - not one person, has been able to give me an adequate answer.
In general, third world countries have less economic and political influence
I'll grant you that, but that answer is not good enough given the original question. If 3rd world countries had no political or economic influence at all, it would have been an acceptable answer. As it stands, it is not acceptable.
Sure, you may have one telephone in whatever backwater asspimple country you're in
2 land lines, one digital leased line, and 2 cellular phones. And that's just me, not the whole country. Most of the telephone exchanges in South Africa are digital, and the cellular networks (GSM) are extensive and cover most of the country, and there are multiple cellular providers.
Nobody's saying third world countries don't have televisions, they just don't have one in every hut.
Comparitively few people in South Africa live in huts. Yes, there is poverty, poorly built houses, etc but you get that in a lot of countries. To all the naysayers who say whites are the only people in South Africa with money, take note that in 2000 the number of blacks earning middle to upper class salaries exceeded the number of whites earning the same.
The chip on your shoulder is some sort of need to prove that third world as just as important as the first world
This is floating off topic. I asked what the 1st world has that the 3rd world doesn't. Sidetracking and throwing out personal insults is just wasting time.
probably based on personal feelings of inadequacy
Not at all. I asked what the 1st world has that the 3rd world doesn't, and you've been sidetracking, name-calling and time-wasting ever since.
What you're doing right now, on the international stage of Slashdot, is showing all of us just how smart South Africans are. I may be showing everyone how pompous Americans are, but they already knew that. :)
I don't think all Americans are pompous. I actually like most Americans I've met, especially those from the south. I don't even think you're pompous. Ignorant, but not pompous. Everyone raves about how great the US is. Sure, it's great. But when I've been there, I've looked past the greatness. All I see is the wasted potential of what the US could have been. In that respect, the US is similar to a lot of other countries, including South Africa.
Cedric Balthazar Rotherwood
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java Platform +
System Admin. for Solaris
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
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
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
The US switched to the metric system as the underpinning of all measurement in 1866 (though AFAIK the only practical result is that the imperial units are defined by their metric counterparts), and in 1875 US was an original signatory to the International Treaty of the Meter.
Then i 1975 congress approved the Metric Conversion Act, intended to speed the application of the metric system in commerce and everyday use. See the Metric Program at NIST for more info.
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
The first chapter of Genesis argument is the best, I'm not even sure why you put forth others. BTW, I heard that when the dinosaurs heard that they were not in the Bible, which is the official record of how everything was and should be, they all committed suicide.
Please subscribe to see the more insightful version of th
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
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
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.
The units of time also correspond to the system of degrees in a circle (or did they develop the other way around?). This makes sense when one considers that early time keeping was based on solar clocks (i.e. sundials).
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
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
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
~~~
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
~~~
my 1976 Ford was all metric.
KFG
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
~~~
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
~~~
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
~~~
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:
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
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!
Yea, but gloves would cost a fortune.
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.
> 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
lets say a cubic foot
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 basically did metric time with their internet time idea.. I don't think it has really caught on tho..
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
~~~
I think we should use epoch time for daily usage.
Me: Hey bob, what time is it?
Bob: About 1 billion.
Thus, you'll hear: "How far is it to Crystal City from here?" Answer: "When? Now?"
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
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
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
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
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.
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