It seems a whole lot easier to change our time format just once and get used to it... instead of half of us changing the clocks twice a year, the other not, drawing all these weird lines all over (grumble India grumble), and keeping track of it all.
(If you don't get it, think about it longer.)
Instead of changing our clocks, we could just change our numbering system. Having 50 (that's 5 x 12) seconds per minute, 50 minutes per hour, and 20 hours per day seems perfectly reasonable.
There is a currency based on it (with the provably least number of coins necessary to make any kind of change), ternary logic, balanced ternary is especially cool, etc.
Having base b for number n, you need log_b n digits where each digit is an element of (0..b-1). So working on those representations takes something like f(log_b n, b) operations. Where the function f depends on the operation you are looking at.
A good base should keep f small in relation to all n.
One very natural choice for f, I can't remember which at the moment, leads to e being the best base in theory---so 3 being good in practice.
If you are working with something like trees on disk (yes, data structures are very intimately related to numbering systems---read Okasaki's Purely Functional Data Structures for more information) a very big b, i.e. branching factor in this case, like 1024 is useful: Loading a new digit/node from disk into memory takes a long time, but once it's in memory, your operations will be fast.
Though actually, you are not really arguing for a large base, but for unary. (Or a mixed unary-large base system.)
I've tried to explain it to people before, but we never manage to count past four without someone laughing.
There's a few ways to do it: as you can see, I like to use the 1/100 as the base unit (it's a little under 15 minutes in current reckoning) and go decimal beyond that since you have a neat percentage as a result, and you can drop off precision as needed.
"See you in the conference room in 2 ksecs..."
Put a bunch of geeks together too long and this is what happens.
http://www.google.com/search?q=fortnight+/+1000
1 fortnight / 1000 = 20.16 minutes
And loads of date parsing / string emitting libraries already handle it :)
Time is a pain in the ass.
Second, timezones are used for globally-recognizable time of a day. No matter where you are on Earth, 08:00 (by 24-hour scale) is certainly in the morning, and 20:00 is evening.
i think it might be slightly worse in that "solar noon"-zones would stick to straight bands.
When I think about it, I find it quite depressing how many nice things are out there, we just can't have because of overall human inertia and reluctance to accept any major changes.
Ürümqi Time (UTC+6), two hours behind Beijing. Although this is not officially recognized, it is the time observed locally by most residents.
Oh, and then you also have to convince every other government to implement, too.