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Comment by eutropia | Hacker News Reader

Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" has the space marines using "kiloseconds" and "megaseconds" conversationally, and it was always tricky for me to convert those to hours and minutes in my head accurately.

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I'm sure measuring "days" becomes silly when you're not spending a significant amount of time on a rotating spheroid orbiting a single star.

Rounding up to 4Ks is a reasonable substitute for an hour. Also gives you the convenient 15min ~ 1Ks or "a quarter of a metric hour."

And in Dukaj's "Perfect Imperfection" [1] occasionally multiples of Planck time are used (with metric prefixes), as the post-humans and "out-of-space computers" can operate on very small time scales.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Imperfection

Also in the book "A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge. In the beginning of the book there was a convenient chart for converting to our customary earthly time units.

Odd choices... since 1000 seconds is ~17 minutes and 1M seconds is 4.6 hours.

> 1M seconds is 4.6 hours.

Really? :)

I think the parent meant 4+6i.

  $ units --verbose
  Currency exchange rates from FloatRates (USD base) on 2018-10-25 
  3070 units, 109 prefixes, 109 nonlinear units

  You have: 1 megasecond
  You want: 1 day
          1 megasecond = 11.574074 * 1 day
          1 megasecond = (1 / 0.0864) * 1 day

Gee, I never knew about units, thank you. Very cool. It can convert meters/s to furlongs/fortnight, cm^3 to gallons.. Write fractions like '1|2'. And you can add your own units to the units file.

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