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Isn't it Time for Metric Time?
xenocytekron writes: "Sure, our time system is ok, but does it make sense? Is it easy? Think about it: 60 seconds to a minute, 60 minutes to an hour, 25 hours to a day, all the way to 365 days to a year. Currently, all the world uses the Metric System except for the US. But what about Time? The solution is Metric Time, that is, a time system which uses Base-10 and Metric Standards. So what do you think: Is it Time, for Metric Time?"
When 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?
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
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
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
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.
Exactly. Considering the times are based on natural events it should stay that way.
"Well... it's been only one day but my watch says 1.2314. I'm glad we switched to this new version of time!"
Don't go screwing with a good thing. The time system we have now is somewhat an average of what ancient astronomy has come up with... it's worked pretty good so far.
Get your Unix fortune now!
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?
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!
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.
But still more than a Ford Explorer.
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.
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
~~~
(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.
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
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
I think that perhaps, he underestimates the difficulty involved in slowing the planet down to 100 revolutions per orbit.
Andrew
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.
After the revolution, from 1923 to 1931, the russians used a 5 day week, with 6 weeks in each month, and 12 months in each year. The extra 5 days were specially named holidays related to revolutionary dates. Each worker got 1 day in 30 off, staggered throughout the community so no more than 1/30th of the workers were off each day. (Not everybody in russia used the calendar. The navy stuck to the gregorian calendar because all their navigation books were in that format, tribal regions stayed with their historic versions, others just ignored the decree)
It was a complete disaster, the idea was to get an extra boost from worker productivity by not allowing weekends or other time off. It had the opposite effect, workers were exhausted after 29 days of continuous work, and productivity fell dramatically.
In 1931, they switched to a 6 day week, with 5 week months, and one day each week was a rest day for everyone. Productivity jumped 50% or more in the first few months of using the new calendar.
This should be a lesson to managers who try to pull too much work out of their employees. People need time off on a regular basis to recover from the effects of working 8+ hours per day for 5 or 6 days. After spending too much time working, the body and mind can't maintain the output.
the AC
The french revolutionary calendar started with year 1, but they made it retroactive a year and called that year 0. Programmers!
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
I can entirely understand the European way of using the date (D-M-YY) because we all read left to right and that way you get to the day first, which is most likely to be the one you don't know and reason you are checking the date in the first place. The US system has always really confused me having the date buried in the middle, which seems pretty illogical.
Fortunately the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) already solved this problem ages ago.
I use the ISO 8601 for ALL my date's (e.g. cheque books, invoices, legal documents) because it's ambiguity free, the format being:
YYYY-M-D (e.g. 2002-7-5)
It would be much easier if everyone could get used to doing this. I like to rant on bank clerks and anybody who asks me to date a legal document and who don't understand this as all international organisations (e.g. banks) should be using this format (especially ones here in London and in other international cities like New York).
The ISO 8601 date standard also makes sense from a decimal point of view in that it is "biggest to smallest".
Video game and other programmers that use 2-d and 3-d tend to express rotations in units where there are 256 degrees in a circle (2 ** 8). This comes out to pi/128 radians. I forget if that unit had a name.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
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: