Metric Time
metric-time.com
metric-time.com
My version also removes timezones. The numeric time is the same whereever you are in the world, but the display changes based on your location so that local solar midday is straight up on the clock face and local solar midnight is straight down on the clock face. Day and night hours are drawn on the face.
I used to have it attach to your google calendar and draw meetings onto the clock face too, but I think in the last 11 years the google calendar api has changed and I haven't updated it.
Obviously once you have metric time, you need a metric week too, so I have new week days: nullday, unday, duoday, triday, quadday, hexday heptday, octday and nonday. There's no need for months anymore, I just number the weeks. Of course 28th Quadday is the 285th day in the year, as the first day is 0th Nullday. Fixing the number of weeks in a year to a round number is left as an exercise for the reader.
Time and date maths becomes very simple.
This is reasonable and not unsafe at all, particularly when it comes to timing things like exposure time with patients receiving radiation therapy.
However, we will be left wondering why treatment in the summer is more effective that treatment in the winter. Must be the nice weather.
I recommend using as little as date/day mechanics as you can get away with. Instead using a monotonic durations as much as you can [1].
If you continue to program with date/day mechanics you'll run into plenty of issues when users cross timezones or just set the time on their phone to a different one.
All the people pointing out the (genuine) problems with decimal time seem to be weirdly tolerant of the problems with our current system, which has much worse problems.
If you imagine the reverse situation, where society uses a decimal time, and some people are arguing we should switch to this system because despite all the things it makes worse and harder, it divides better and the numbers map somewhat (although imperfectly) to the actual time-of-day in various locales and (even less perfectly) to the kinds of things people might be doing at that time, everyone would think they were crazy.
If you want to prioritise ease of moving between the two systems, I'd suggest a normalised version of the new second. If you want to prioritise science, then something that makes a nice round number when giving the speed of light would be nice. If you want to prioritise ease of adoption, just keep the current SI second, just stop using it to measure times of day.
Either way the symbol for writing it should be different.
Even if those problems were harder to solve its far more valuable to have a single time for your meeting than multiple times (depending on the time zones and savings time of the participants). The pain of organising international meetings was one of the reasons I did this.
For more on the philosophy of this, I highly recommend Jenny Odell's Book, Saving Time. Note that she doesn't talk about the revolutionary calendar in it (to my memory) but touches on a lot of the realities of time and clocks themselves.
However, if using the calendar in day to day life, the Revised System is much easier.
To quote Wikipedia:
leap years being every year divisible by 4, except years divisible by 100 and not by 400. Years divisible by 4000 would also be ordinary years. This calendar also has the benefit that every year in the third century of the Republican Era (1992–2091) begins on 22 September.
(The article is still relevant with metric time/weeks)
> Does that mean I can call him? I don't know.
About the non timezone version but skates over the fact that he doesn't know the answer in the timezone version either. He says "Google tells me..." well sure, if you're allowed to use Google you could just have easily have asked "what are typical daylight/waking hours in x location?" This is much better anyway since in some countries culturally you siesta in the early afternoon (don't call please) and stay up later.
Anyway there is something of a genuine problem here (although I don't consider it serious) and I'd solve it by drawing the world on the side of the clock and allowing you to rotate the face by selecting a place on the map.
You sleep 3.33… metric hours.
You fall asleep 9:50 metric time.
You'd think we can just interchange the . and : so you should wake up 12:83…, or 2:83… the next day.
But no, it's apparently 2:75 metric time. Why?
Also nice how they IMMEDIATELY ran into a continuing fraction 1/3, which is exactly the point of the 60-minute hour, 24-hour day, or 360-degree circle: lots of factors.
Tau is not a good unit for angles in general, unless you have circles, or you need lengths of circumferences somewhere. (You want to paint your clock and calculate the amount of paint, or something.) Turn is the natural angle unit. And since the earth rotates 1 turn/day, the amount of turns is the same as the amount of days.
You get similar problems converting between Freedom degrees and Celsius. Its just what people have built an understanding of.
Here seconds are just 1/(24*60*60) of a day as expected, but the base 2 fixed point part, where a tick "is roughly equal to 233 picoseconds" makes you want to pull your hairs out if you just want to accurately express milliseconds. (Similarly for other timescales frequently used in media processing, like 90kHz, 25, 60 or 29.97)
The answer to all this is of course: hand waving — "you don't need that". Your time can be perfectly accurate in itself (ie. an accurate discrete sample of continuous time), even if no accurate conversion exists to some other time system.
Just out of curiosity: is it just a joke, or is there an idiocy behind, such as Sovereign Citizen or similar?
While I agree in principle, this example is not evidence of it. It's not like we measured the amount of sleep needed and it's precisely 8 hours. A more reasonable thing to say would be: You need to sleep for 3.5 metric hours.
Edit: I mean, you're right that nearly every number is irrational. But I think averages are going to be some of the tiny fraction of numbers that aren't.
> I'd guess that you're using rational numbers in the actual calculation anyways.
Well, actually one uses floating point arithmetic, which isn't rational numbers either (as shown by the classic example a = 1/3, b = 3*a, then b != a)
The rotation of a hand of the clock, expressed as the arc length of the curve of its endpoint :)
A sleeping time of 0 is always a problem, though.
We sleep for 2/3 pi radians of the day in that case.
"How long is a day? 1 day."
"I slept for .37 days."
This nicely unifies things with the tao manifesto[1] people since 1 day = 1 turn = 1 tau = 2 * pi radians and reinforces the periodic nature of these things.
base 60 is 5-smooth, so any number with 2,3,5 as a factor has a terminating expansion.
Just as SI has to add in deg min sec for fields like astronomy.
As the practical numbers are quite dense up to 60, they could divide by multiplication of the reciprocal for many more numbers.
Floating point is more complicated than just the base as the radix also matters. C(++) finally got decimal radix support this year in the standards and IBM has had decimal floats for a long time.
FFT and encryption often use mixed radix despite being a binary base too.
It is a far more complicated subject than it appears on the surface.
But there are problems that aren't easily solvable in base 10. The degrees of a circle are an example and why navigation uses the nautical mile, where 1 nautical mile= 1 minute of latitude is an example.
12,60,360 are Superior highly composite numbers and 12 is the smallest 3-smooth and 60 is the smallest 5-smooth.
This also means that with using 360 degrees one can divide a circle or semicircle in 12 sections with just a square, 345 triangle and equalatrral triangle. Where decimal or even radians requires the square root of 2, pi, etc...
I am a fan of universal units of measurement, but had they been base 12 it would have been better IMHO. SI could be more broadly adopted if it has been base 12.
Quartiles and hand counting would be my argument for 12 but am probably biased based on familiarity.
The set of rational number is a “null set”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_set
It only takes a single irrational input to make the average irrational.
Also it is invalid to compare infinite series like you do in your paracentesis argument, there are infinitely many irrational numbers and infinitely many rational ones. If you do it, you run in to contradictions. (Something which is related to Cantor's paradox)
You're not being clever by being pedantic.
Try again, sweaty.
Just because the best current theory suggests a smallest observable time span does not mean as a consequence that time is discrete.
Mabye... To me it seams like nothing is truly continuous i nature. But mabye there is such a thing somewere out there somewere.
But irrational numbers require definitions that contain or require recursion. Mabye physical time is built with such a recursive definition?
> irrational numbers require definitions that contain or require recursion
The computable reals are also known as the recursive reals, but almost every real number is not computable.
Was it just a "out of context comment" on something that poped up in your mind as you read the text?
Either one talks about the underlying physics or about the measurements of it. If one talks about the underlying physics all bets are of, it is unmeasurable by definition. Anything is possible bellow the measurement threshold(including irrational numbers).
If one talks about the measurements you will always get finite rational values.
I have some terrible news for you about statistical mechanics.
In decimal time the closest time before midnight you can conveniently represent would be .9:99:99 which is noticeably closer (0.163 of a second closer) to midnight and uses only 5 symbols.
This should not be surprising - our current system is very inefficient in its use of digits.
Try converting something like 45 minutes into this convenient time system and let us know how efficient it is
Or maybe you are referring to three quarters of the way through the major division. That's actually pretty natural too :75 like a percentage. Now dividing the major division into thirds is a little less convenient but I do that far less than I need to add and subtract times which this system makes much more convenient.
.5:10 is 12:14 and 24 seconds. That's pretty close and uses only 2 sig figs - even fewer than the four you needed to represent 12:15.
But also, why would you obsess about these specific times? If we were using the proposed system and someone made the argument to switch, you'd be saying 'How well does your system represent the time .5:1 ? It's only 2 sig figs, but you need to go down to seconds to accurately represent it - 12:14:24.
It can get worse too - .5:01 is 3 significant figures, but to represent that time in the current system requires that you go down to tenths of a second with 7 significant figures - 12:01:26.4. Or if I go down to second equivalents, you sometimes need to go down to milliseconds - .5:09:01 is 12:12:58.464
"Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight hours for what you will."
Similarly, people buy 50 cm x 70 cm frames in metric countries and 20" x 30" frames in the USA. Nobody thinks about that except frame factories in China, that have to cut them in two sizes.
Presently, we use 24-hour time (AM/PM or otherwise), so the loss in precision is enormous going from 24 to 10.
Think about it.
A tenth of a standard hour is 6 standard minutes.
A tenth of a metric hour is 144 standard minutes, more than two standard hours.
A hundredth of a standard hour is 36 standard seconds, or half a minute. It is in the context of hours a negligible amount of time.
A hundredth of a metric hour is 14.4 standard minutes! Imagine being 0.01 metric hours late for a meeting.
So everywhere you now have to specify time to two decimal places /at least/, three to have sub-standard-minute precision.
Layer on top of this the fact that the new system has significantly fewer distinct prime factors, so you quickly run into continuing fractions. Disaster.
A tenth of a metric hour is 14.4 standard minutes. A hundredth of a standard hour is 1.44 minutes. Being 0.01 metric hours late, or 1 metric minute late, is not too much more than being 1 standard limit late.
And current time is specified to 6 digits for second precision - hours, minutes, and seconds.
That is, arbitrary number is arbitrary, at large. Most of the "benefits" of any system won't actually be realized by most people that are using it. Consistency, on the other hand, is hugely important.
Sure, and one shouldn’t do that either. Fahrenheit’s range (0 being the freezing point of brine, almost but not quite intolerable to a human, and 100 being roughly body temperate and also almost but not quite intolerable to a human) is far more human than Celsius’s freezing-to-boiling range.
Having grown up in metric, the values dont feel 'inhuman' just a scale that i'm familiar with. I know that my body is usually at 37, I know that water boils at 100, i know that I don't like anything below 8c or above 40c.
That’s a bit funny: 8° C is roughly 50° F (46.4), and 40° C is roughly 100° F (104). Almost like Fahrenheit might be scaled to a human!
>Think about it.
No, YOU think about it. When do you use hour-only precision today ?
When you say "I have meeting at 8" that never means "any time period between 8 and 9", that means "it starts at eight". That doesn't change with change of the length of the hour.
You'd still use hours on their own only if you mean "an hour and close to zero minutes around that hour". You'd still add minutes for anything else.
> A hundredth of a metric hour is 14.4 standard minutes! Imagine being 0.01 metric hours late for a meeting.
...no ? it's 100 seconds so ~1.66 of standard minute
Imagine being 1.66 minutes late instead of one!!! Such horror!
One nice feature is that the day-time would be different on other planets. There would Mars-day and Mars-hour. But the second would be the same.
> But no, it's apparently 2:75 metric time. Why?
You can, they just messed up the example by unnecessarily rounding off the times. The night from 9:50 till 2:75 metric time only lasts 3.25 metric hours, or 7h48m in standard time; less than the 8 standard hours they started with.
I would think a bigger benefit is that you can drop up and down without any math depending on the precision you need. Or use decimals, no math involved either, since it's the same thing.
And now that we use computers for a lot of measurement, those infinite decimals aren't as big of a deal. (Well, most of the time, anyway. Representation of infinite fractions famously creates some programming problems. But I mean for the user making the measurement.)
Base-10 is easy to learn since it's the same we use for counting, but I think there's an interesting argument to be made that purely from a science/engineering/making perspective it would be better to use a consistent base-12 measurement system.
I'm a twelve maximalist. Let's convert SI to duodecimal prefixes. One kilometer should be 1728 meters (of course that's 1000 in duodecimal). One centimeter should be 1/144 of a meter.
I keep hoping for a chance to welcome some highly composite overlords.
Lawyers bill their time in tenths of an hour - exactly 6 minute increments.
We should do something about that.
For a fun, a more justified usage of metric time, check out Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" (also IMO one of the best sci-fi novels of all time). A spacefaring humanity that stretches their life across journeys and projects that span centuries, and which has to artificially produce their own daily cycles, gets a lot more value out of metric time.
A while since I read it, but in short I disliked the characters which I could not symphatize with.
The dog story (which started out great) and the humor wasn't me either.
Structurally, though, it's pretty different. The characters have much more opportunity to develop, and it's purely hard sci-fi where Fire used its setting to veer into fantasy ideas. So my biased advice remains: give it a shot :)
The problem with this approach is it attempts to "redefine" hours and minutes... part of what I liked in Vinge's/Deepness' approach was, it ignored all that and just talked about seconds in standard exponential scientific notation... it makes a lot more sense in space though, where there's no need/logic to connecting or synchronize to a specific solar cycle, so they just think/talk in kilo-seconds (about 40 mins) and mega-seconds (about 11.6 days)... or at least those are the two I recall them using enough that I got semi-used to thinking in them while reading the book... I had to convert, but I didn't have to redefine any existing unit or remember/remind myself which meaning of hour/minute they're using, because nothing changed.
It's not metric. It's the imperial system. Halves, thirds, quarters are all neat numbers. It does get a little weird because we only use feet, yards, and miles today, but there is a progression from inch to mile that all make sense to some degree.
Similarly with volumes. You can get from teaspoon to gallon without having to worry about any weird decimals.
The only thing metric really has going for it is uniformity of conversion.
People shit on it, but the imperial system is not actually that horrible.
Another similar thought experiment is binary clocks which I remember using to get use to read in base 2. [1]
Weekly clocks are also a good way to change perspective on time. [2]
Both are fun to use, especially with other people if you manage to get them to experiment with you. Both have the avantage of avoiding any confusion with SI time.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_clock [2]: https://dayclocks.com/products/classic-oak
The only country I know of offhand that uses "imperial units" is the UK.
There's a different, but similar (and sometimes overlapping) system called "US Customary Units" that's used in the US. Imperial pints and gallons are NOT the same as US pints and gallons.
Maybe we need a cron for an hour or a day? 1,000 crons for an hour sounds better than millicrons by breaking up a day if it was 1 cron.
"Centi" is an SI prefix just as much as "kilo" is, and has been part of the metric system since 1795 just like "kilo". I don't see how it's "not in the spirit" of the metric system. It also fits in neatly in that 1cm^3 of water is roughly 1 gram (the original provisional definition of gram was 1cm^3 of water at the melting point of ice; the current definition is more precise), and so 10cm^3 of water is roughly 1 liter.
The SI system has prefixes going up and down one power of 10 up to 10^3 and down to 10^-3, and then in steps of 10^3. They're all equally part of the system; some are just more common in some contexts that others (e.g. we use hectograms but rarely hectolitres, and decilitres but rarely decimetres, and centimetres and centilitres but rarely centigrams) depending on what happens to be convenient.
E.g. kilo(10^3), hecto(10^2), deca(10^1), deci(10^-1), centi(10^-2), milli(10^3), but then mega (10^6) and micro(10^-6) are the next steps.
Seconds are also part of the metric system, but one of the few not based on decimal/base-10.
Again, I’m just speculating that the author used “metric” because it often represents decimal/base-10 measurements. Not really arguing whether they were technically correct in doing so.
https://www.bipm.org/en/si-base-units/kelvin
Anyway, TIL.
For volume this is obvious nonsense since the metric system expresses volumes in … cubic meter! And even weight, a kilogram is “the weight of a liter of water” (that is a thousands of a cubic meter of water).
The SI units are supposed to be related like that.
(But not really; that was originally considered as a way to standardize the meter, IIRC, but the period of a pendulum varies too much even over the area of France to be used as a concrete standard. But the relationship is remarkably close for a coincidence, like the way a rod is almost exactly five meters.)
The second is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the cesium
frequency ∆ν, the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of
the cesium 133 atom, to be 9 192 631 770 when expressed in the unit Hz, which
is equal to s−1.
Watch face has 4 hands, one for each pair of characters in the hex representation of the current unix time.
Being hex, it kinda makes it easier to understand for me in that the "minute" is 255 seconds. The next chunk of time is 65,025 seconds or about 18 hours. Then comes 16,581,375 seconds, which is almost 192 days.
> A standard hour is broken into 60 minutes. There are 2.4 standard hours in 1 metric hour.
> A metric minute is broken into 100 seconds.
> A standard minute has 60 seconds. There are 2.4 standard minutes in 1 metric minute.
No, a standard minute is 1/1440 of a day, and a metric minute is 1/1000 of a day. There are 1.44 standard minutes in a metric minute.
I flunked 10th grade math and later dropped out, my brain is having a stroke just reading those graphs.
I reverted back to seconds, which is how I used to use Unix timestamps when I first started with computers. But one day would have 100000 seconds, compared to 86400 seconds in standard time, so how can they both measure a day?
It's not, hence leap second corrections to our current earth based imprecise observed solar time based on mean solar days (which are not apparent solar days).
Of course even if it were regular there's that pesky difference in rotation relative to what now??
Sidereal rotation time isn't equal to solar rotation time (mean or apparent).
Time .. less straightforward than most imagine.
I think it's more trying to make things which vary fit in a "you shall not vary" square box that is the problem. Technically, this metric/decimal method makes more sense for what we're trying to do, but it's less of a "time" thing than it is a "let's have the same numbers every day so we can agree on when synchronous events need to happen." To _measure_ elapsed time, using a fixed unit such as a second is perfectly fine.
> There are 2.4 standard hours in 1 metric hour > Therefore there are 240 standard minutes in 1 metric hour > Then divide by 100 to get 2.4 standard minutes per metric minute
Except there aren't 240 standard minutes in 1 metric hour. There's 2.4 * 60 = 144. That the author of the page couldn't keep the conversions straight does not bode well if we were to switch as a society...
Each milliday is about 90 seconds.
And a microday is slightly shorter than a second.
But, sadly, this revolution won't occur until after I'm elected God-Emperor of Mars, so it is all rather academic.
You have my vote!
And you'll have to make all your intervals slightly longer, due to Mars' solar day being 24h39m35s by standard Earth time.
When following SI, a microday would be 0.0864 (or approximately 0.1 second) which doesn't seem to be a very practical unit.
Dividing one day into just 1000 units is way less precise unless one uses decimals, in which case it's just plain inconvenient.
If you absolutely need more precision (accurate timestamping) then decimals are available.
Of course to your actual point and everybody else that brings that same one up. You do not need to wake up at 8am every day ... If the sun actually rises at 1400 then feel free to start your day at 1500. I'm not sure what why people keep arguing as-if they can't figure out a time besides 8am to wake up; look at the world around you, so many people wake up at wildly different times in a timezone.
> would make all the mental math we have to do when adding and subtracting time so much easier—especially when it comes to different timezones
First off: the time zones argument is BS. And the people I know have no problem subtracting or adding (quarter, half or whole) hours to a given time. It's a skill we picked up at primary school, so it really can't be that hard. The people who can't do that, probably also will have problems with decimal time. The only thing that takes more mental effort is something like "193.8 minutes after 17:03", but how often that does happen?
The argumentations following the rationale are also BS: there's no AM/PM in a 24 hour clock (as mentioned in other comments), and there's no advantage to 3.33 vs 8 hours of sleep.
IMO there are no advantages, and the page doesn't discuss overcoming the disadvantages and how to overcome them, so frankly is irrational. There's no reason to discuss this.
As someone who’s implemented a date and time library, the real pain is in dates, leap seconds and time zone transitions. 86,400 seconds in a day is a relative piece of cake.
The AM/PM thing is a solved problem. Many countries (not the one I live in) already use a 24 hour clock, in which 11pm is 23:00. Because many countries use it, most devices that keep time can be set to 12 or 24 hour clock. That includes almost every clock I own, including the oven in the kitchen, my car, all the HVAC units, and of course phones and computers. An exception is the irrigation system – the old one (designed in the USA) supports 24 hour time, but its replacement (designed in Australia) does not. I don’t think anyone, seeing all my clocks, has ever commented on them being in 24 hour mode. Most people have seen it before.
I wonder how we would settle that matter if we'll ever be able to travel fast between planets. Each city had its own time zone before trains required us to sync them because of conflicting railroad timetables. So we ended up with the current timezones. With planets, each one would have its day length and number of days in the year, maybe even inconstant seasons in the case of precession of perihelion or double star systems. I'd say we'd settle on local time and a common space time but who knows.
Western sundials started with 12 hours as they worked only during the day [1] and people that were not measuring time eventually measured it with a 24 hours system.
I could not find many sources about Chinese sundials but from the pictures at [2] you can see that they had 12 hours in all the day. A hour on the second sundial is divided in 8 parts. The one in the first picture seems to have the same 8 characters as the other one but each hour is divided into 2 parts, each divided in 4 parts.
I'm not surprised that everybody settled around some small and convenient number. 12 has more factors than 10 and dividing by 2 is more convenient than dividing by 3. I would be surprised to find a 9 or a 15.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sundials
[2] https://sonofchina.com/what-is-a-sundial-and-how-does-it-wor...
The actual word is "second minute" (as opposed to the "first minute").
Most languages have by now elided "first" from "first minute" resulting in the "minute" as we know it today, and elided "minute" from "second minute" resulting in the "second" as we know it today.
i.e. "second" literally means "the one that comes after the first", but is implied to be about the subdivision of the small unit of time.
Part of the point is the "second" definition based on a subdivision is no longer the SI second. You are right about the elision, but in the context of the time most people are now eliding System International ("SI") from the beginning rather than "minute" at the end.
"Seconds were once derived by dividing astronomical events into smaller parts, with the International System of Units (SI) at one time defining the second as a fraction of the mean solar day and later relating it to the tropical year. This changed in 1967, when the second was redefined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 energy transitions of the cesium atom."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-time-divi...
A while "prime minute" generally contains "61" "second minutes" it sometimes can contain 61 "second minutes"; so clearly the "second minute" is the true unit here :-)
Kelvin is the base unit of temperature; Celsius is a derived unit.
Base 10 is not good. 10 just does not have enough factors, so we are left to deal with complex fractions. Let's instead use base-12 numerals and keep time unchanged!
In base 12, 1 year is 10 months (or 265 days), 1 day is 20 hours, 1 hour is 50 minutes and a minute is 50 seconds.
Easy enough!
Edit: wait! I just realized this is still not ambitious enough!!!
What we need is to halve seconds in two. So, in base 12: 1 day = 10 hours, 1 hour = 100 minutes, 1 minute = 100 new seconds.
"Ten", "eleven" and "twelve" can stay the same. "Thirteen" to "nineteen" are more problematic since "*teen" refers to "ten". We would like something meaning twelve-one, twelve-two and so on. Then "two-twelve" intead of "twenty" ? Feels heavy. Maybe stick to "twenty" then ?
Oh, and what about retro-compatibility ?
Edit: or we could go back to Imperial units. Wow
Edit2: the wikipedia page about dozenal systems is pretty interesting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal
For instance, scales have 12 notes, with seven common words for the notes (do, re, me, fa, so, la, ti). Add five more similar but distinct phonemes (go, ki, za, we, je) to insert at the position of the half notes skipped, shift la to position 1 since l looks conveniently like 1, and add nul for zero: nul, la, go, ti, do, ki, re, za, mi, fa, we, so, je.
Add in some rules for forming larger numbers (laj, goj, tij..., soj, jel, jel-la, jel-go..., jes-so, la-gross, la-gross-la, ...) and begin learning your addition tables over again (la plus la is go; go plus go is do; do plus do is mi; mi plus mi is doj).
That makes 1 metric hour equal 144 standard minutes. Since 1 metric hour is 100 metric minutes, that means 1 metric minute is 1.44 standard minutes. But the site says:
> A standard minute has 60 seconds. There are 2.4 standard minutes in 1 metric minute.
Even without doing any calculations those scale comparisons for the hour and minute can’t be the same as shown. Standard is going down by a factor of 60 and ‘metric’ by a factor of 100 so they can’t keep the same ratio.
Maybe once we have left the Earth and spread out into the solar system and beyond, there will be no reason to keep Earth time, and we'll just use Unix time, and stick to seconds, kiloseconds, and megaseconds. (Hopefully in the next few gigaseconds.)
> To get a good night sleep (8 standard hours) you'd sleep for 3.33 metric hours.
Quote 2 seems to clearly contradict quote 1. 60 is great as it divides into 2,3,4 and 5. That's a feature not a bug
Because the rest of circles are so logical, π is such a nice round number.
Time is weird because its units are so necessarily arbitrary. We don't control (yet at least) the relationship between the rotation and revolution times of the planet, and both of those values are so very much essential
It's also interesting that you almost never will need to convert between time units. In normal life you will maybe convert minutes to hours and days or months (which aren't even of uniform length) into weeks and years. But scientists or engineers will always work in "metric" units of seconds and astronomers / archaeologists will always work in "metric" units of years
Compare this to mass and length/volume units, where a normal person will frequently need to traverse multiple orders of magnitude even just to bake a cake (grams to kilograms and milliliters to liters) and will have frequent experiences involving much higher orders (meters to kilometers every time they are following directions on their phones, or tons if they are loading a truck or buying a car)
>> Working with base-10 numbers is so much easier
I mean, every base is base 10.
Very few people I know actually sleep exactly 8 hours, so the recommendation will just adapt to another memorable number.
Also 1/4 of a day is 6 hours, another nice round number! 10/4 is 2.5 which is not as bad as 10/3 but still not a round number.
> There is no AM or PM with metric time.
It isn't there in standard time either. It seems to be another uniquely American thing. The only time I'm exposed to AM/PM is when reading an analog clock. Or when talking to an American.
Heck, even in US, there's "military time" that is 24-hour.
"Das Konzert beginnt um 16:00" should not become "The concert starts at 4 PM"
Although the metric system originated at the same time, it's important to note that the French Republican decimal second isn't the same as the one used by international metric system (SI) that we ended up with. So calling this "metric time" is quite misleading.
The decimal second is shorter than the standard one because there are 100,000 decimal seconds in a day vs. 86,400 SI seconds in a day.
(If you're a rich antiques collector, a late 18th century French decimal clock might be a very interesting object. My understanding is that they are rare because their active use was so short and most clocks were repurposed to standard ones.)
In some ways, sure. If you're doing precise mathematical things. Otherwise, if you're doing simple mental math, base-12, -24, and -60 have some advantages.
60 can be evenly divided into 1/2 (halves) or 30 min, 1/3 (thirds) or 20 min, /4 or 15 min, /5 or 12 min, /6 or 10 min, and by 12, 15, 20, 30, and 60.
24 can be divided by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, and so on for 12. I always assumed this was the reason for the "imperial" unit measures and for time and length. Dividing things into thirds is a common use-case and it's nice to be able to do that evenly.
I’ve spent most of my life in countries where the metric system is used for distance, weight, temperature etc.
This year I’ve had to travel a lot to the US for work and found the constant mental conversions a PITA. I kept wondering why people keep holding out against such an obviously easier system.
Then I read this article about 8 hours of sleep would be 3.33 metric hours. How you wake up at 9:50 after sleeping at 2:75 and I notice real-time at the absolute recoil I feel reading this. Maybe I’m getting older , but I completely get how familiarity to numbers being represented a certain way is hard to let go of.
Am I correct in assuming 9:50 and 2:75 should be the other way around?
The transition is also unlikely to have many benefits. Unlike most of the other units of measure, the everyday conversions are fuzzy. The only exception I've seen is when payroll bean counters expect minute precision converted to decimal hours, which is a pain! Everything in science and engineering tends to be maintained in seconds, which is decimalized anyway so there is no benefit there.
I don't see "metric time" making any headway, particularly since something like universal time would be much more beneficial yet hasn't gained traction.
personally, I'd prefer we drop all base-10 conventions (units, numbers, etc) and switch to base-12 and base-60 for everything (dozenal or duodecimal)
Unfortunately, things turned out differently.
12 is divisible into whole halves, thirds, and quarters.
Some of the dozenal measurement systems try to replace the second or meter, for example, which I don't think would be necessary. And some also try to redefine the clock, but honestly 2 sections of 10d hours is more than dozenal enough. And I like the blended base-60/base-12.
What's really interesting is trying to extend the calendar to base-12. Depending on whether you want to keep the 7-day week or switch to 6-day week or abolish the week altogether[1], you can come up with several different interesting concepts.
[1] Even though it had 7-day weeks, intercalary days outside of the week is what shot down the closest we've got to calendar reform since Gregory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Calendar
Leave metric time (c = 1m) to Minkowski space.
We should have 13 months, all 28 days long, exactly 4 weeks. Whenever there's a leap year we get an extra day for free.
:-)
Is paying monthly an American thing? In Australia most things seem to revolve around n weeks.
- I get paid on Thu every second week (2 weeks)
- My pre-paid phone auto-recharged is every 28 days (4 weeks).
- House rentals are listed as weekly rates, paid at whatever n weeks you negotiate.
- Mortgages are monthly by default, but most let you opt for n weeks, so most people pick the day after they are paid. Interest is still added monthly though.
The only things I can think of that I'm charged monthly for are online subscriptions, which I suspect got influenced by America.
> We should have 13 months, all 28 days long, exactly 4 weeks. Whenever there's a leap year we get an extra day for free.
Same length months would be cool... but as above, months don't mean practical month to me except for having to remember which one we are in.
So… getting payed weekly is something australian, I guess?
Like pretty much everything else, it depends. On the income side, being paid biweekly is the norm in my experience, but some jobs pay semimonthly (my current job does and I kind of hate it). Recurring bills tend to be monthly, but I've had some which were weekly or biweekly. So it all kind of varies.
Wouldn't this actually be confusing, because things would have to be happening at different local times depending on where you are in the time zone?
In Europe and China you have timezones spanning over 3 "sun" timezones. In practice that means the sun rising and setting at different times. People are used to have the sun setting late or rising early depending where they live.
Or if your system works with 2 rotations per day use a regular clock.
What I do hate is the need to make a day ten hours. I'd actually prefer we keep a day 24 hours, it makes the transition a lot easier, and all the other mental math still simplifies.
There is no AM or PM with 24-hour time, either. I don't think the AM/PM fans care much whether the range they are messing up has 24 or 10 units.
Author has committed the classic blunder of ignoring the utility of a base that can be divided evenly into halves, thirds, quarters, sixths, and twelfths. Turns out the ancients knew something about head math because they had to.
Which means that 40 metric seconds is about 46.3 regular seconds - I.E. something is wrong with the charts on this website.
It also means a metric minute which is 100 seconds would be 115.7 regular seconds so a bit less than two minutes, not 2.4 minutes as claimed.
No. We humans have additional demands.
1. We want a part of the number to be the same for the time of day.
2. We want a part of the number to be the same for the day of year.
This is fundamentally impossible, because:
1. The year does not have an integer number of days, so we use lap years.
2. The day is the duration of a complete turn of Earth around itself, but the duration is slowly changing, this means the duration of the day won't stay the same, so we use lap seconds.
3. Year and day lose their meaning if we leave the Earth.
4. The time of the day is different for different parts of the Earth (solved by timezones).
We should use an epoch-based time for points in time, i. e. just a number, and convert it to the date-time whenever neccessary. The exact form of the date-time is not important, only that we already understand it.
Switching to decimal time does not help: it does not solve the fundamental problem, however we would need to relearn the time of day. It is similar to switching to Dvorak.
While we’re at it, the Gregorian calendar could be made celestial as well. Date could be based on the solstice/equinox and moon. Apparently this is called a lunisolar calendar and repeats on the Metonic cycle every 19 years. Though it’s off by a couple hours. That means if I recorded a message with lunisolar date and local time, a historian could probably infer the exact year it was recorded.
I think having a clock that depends on the position of the earth with respect to the center of our galaxy is an interesting idea.
On the likelihood something like this might be considered, dont hold you breath. Our continuing use of Babylonian time is probably the most pervasive and enduring network effect known to humanity.
In the end they ended up not adopting the Greenwich meridian for quite some time afterwards.
thought as, a 10x10 clock, metric because 10 hr dial, has 100 mins every hour. it is sort of ok, but number of hours reduced from 12 to 10, that is counting 4 less hours everyday, means trouble and 100 mins every hr though --- in total a 10x10 clock is 'difficulty'.
a 20 hr dial, on the other hand --- dose it solve?
somewhere i though of a 16 hr display too.
Faisal
The point was to be able to divide the day into nicely sized bites for getting stuff done. I chose 10 minutes in an hour for that reason: you can get a small task done in one "minute."
I think it was sometime between 10 and 20 years ago, I was curious to see what a clock that shows fractional time in years would look like: https://dmitri.shuralyov.com/projects/shuryear-clock/. I found looking at it occasionally reminds how even a year worth of time can pass fairly quickly.
Base unit: hour
Submultiples: dh (5 minutes), ch (25 seconds), mh (~2 seconds), ssecond (shorthand for half a mh)
Multiples: dah (12 hours), day (shorthand for 2 dah)
08:20:14 can be written as 08.411 or 08.41:2
Pros:
* Easy pseudo-metric conversions
* Easily divided by 2/3/4/6/12
* Clock is read as is, quarter past 8 is 8.3h , half past 8 is 8.6h
Cons:
* Sseconds are slightly longer than seconds (1 ss = 1.041666... s)
* No clean way to refer to minute-like units (2 ch or 3 ch?)
* Requires two more symbols (X and E)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_tensor_(general_relativ...
I'd rather start redoing the calendar. It doesn't need to be metric but the different lengths of the months (and the naming Oct. should be 8 not 10?) could be reworked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_reform
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Calendar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetry454
and ideas for time keeping on other planets like
See: https://sunclock.net
Anyway given the U.S. is still hanging on to measurements like Fahrenheit and inches, we're not going to see more sensible ways to measure and indicate time until most of humanity is living on a different planet.
Unix timestamp is the real metric time because it only uses seconds which is a metric unit of time.
> A standard minute has 60 seconds. There are 2.4 standard minutes in 1 metric minute.
Surely it should be 1.(6). I hope they didn’t change the definition of a second. It’s an SI unit.
There is really nothing scientific about time as we mortals use it.
As soon as you bind the definition of time to the rotation of the earth, all bets are off about being "scientific".
A day has x hours. An hour has y minutes. A minute has z seconds.
Therefore, you have now defined a second as 1 / (x times y times z) What happens when the earth speeds up by a fraction of a second? Does the definition of a second change?
We can't define time with a day has x hours, an hour has y minutes, and a minute has z seconds.
If we define time outside of the rotation of the earth, metric is meaningless. We should be able to adjust. Let's say earth sped up. We should be able to say a day has more seconds now.
My guess is you define a second as the following?
A more precise definition of a second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.
Ok that's good. In practice, we aren't very scientific. It will matter whether a minute has 60 seconds or 61 seconds or 100 seconds. I'm guessing we will have bigger problems if earth rotation spend up or slowed down considerably anyway.
The resting heart rate of a healthy adult is approximately 60 BPM. So 1 second is 1 heart beat, which makes it extraordinarily intuitive since it's literally pulsing through your body.
Making a metric second take longer by 40% is the opposite of what you want since average resting heartbeat of the population is higher than 60 BPM.
PS: Anyone downvoting is someone who feels offended having significantly higher BPM due to lifestyle. For normal people, the intuitive measure of a second is very useful.
64 minutes in an hour
64 seconds in a minute
This would make seconds 1.31835 times longer then what they are now.
Shouldn't it be "There are 1.44 standard minutes in 1 metric minute" ?
There is no compelling reason to adopt decimal time.
With metric hours, I'd hope 1-classical-hour meetings wouldn't become 1-metric-hour meetings because that's what we did in the past ;)