Metric Time

The point of the article is:

> aimed to eliminate both minutes and hours

The author is simply trying to track their day using nothing but seconds. The current definition of the second. The author uses the "myria" prefix to mean 10,000 (instead of kilo or hecto) but it's otherwise simply using seconds.

Why use the second? Because it is the SI unit for time. It is the unit that all scientific measurements use but we rarely use it to schedule our lives. It's an experiment, nothing more.

The thing about time is, there are two important 'natural' units that aren't going away: the day and the year. Whatever system you devise has to include them somehow. And unfortunately, the conversion factor between them (365) isn't a multiple of 10.

That said, we can do a lot better than the status quo. Since we've already given up on the idea of having a single base unit for everything, why not express time in fractions of days instead of multiples of seconds? Counting time up to 1.0 days is a lot more intuitive than counting up to 8.64 myriaseconds. The second is a unit of time which isn't tied to anything intuitive (actually, it's entirely arbitrary). If we're going to shake things up, let's at least use days instead, yeah?

I think the beat was better in that it was easier to reason relative to the day: a day was 1000 beat, and a beat was a little over 1 minute. There would be no daylight savings time, and no timezones. The entire world would run on the same beat.

As a software engineer, the idea fascinates me. The complexity of time is a constant struggle for computers. Every time DST comes around, things have a tendency to crash. Not to mention Y2K.

But then again, this can easily be solved by standardizing on 64-bit UTC unix timestamps.

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

And everything else followed from there - even volume measurements like a liter was based on this, because one mL was defined as a cubic cm.

...So to do the same thing with time, it probably makes sense to base things around a day or year (so it's based on the Earth going around the Sun) and just divide that amount of time by some nice base 10 number (1000, 10000, whatever).

A day currently contains 86400 seconds.. why not just shorten how long a second is until there are 100000 of them in a day... Of course then there will be 36500000 in a year, which is not so fantasic.

There is no reason we couldn't re-define hour and minute to be base 10 divisions of this "100000 per day second"

Leap days and seconds are still an interesting problem.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre#Meridional_definition

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Has anyone considered making months and years non-interlocking the way weeks and months are today?

A day is the obvious time period based on the most salient object in our skies.

A lunar month is the next most obvious time period based on the second-most salient object in our skies.

A year has immediate value in helping keep track of seasons.

So my proposal is to replace the existing two parallel hierarchies:

    1 week = 7 days;
    1 year = 12 months = ?? days

    1 year = 365/366 days;
    1 month = 4 weeks = 28 days

Wolfram Alpha does support myriaseconds, and abbreviates as "mas" which isn't bad.

I actually find 1 killosecond to be a great basis for a fairly human time measure, since it's just over 15 minutes, and that's a granularity that feels very natural to me.

Also, I may be wrong, but it looks like you haven't read about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time

The people that are objecting on the grounds that it doesn't fit the "natural" unit of the day (or month, or year) are missing the point: metric is all about picking units regardless of any convenient lineup to anything, and then applying them to everything anyway. As a matter of usage, most people take this concept even further and always count from the next smaller unit even if the larger one is closer: thus you rarely hear of "half litre" but rather "500 mL", not "quarter metre" but "25 cm" or "250 mm". Basing metric time on seconds makes vastly more sense from this perspective.

(Of course, this ignores the fact that the day length is not constant, but we have that problem with the present system, too.)

The myriasecond would be the new, lower-resolution hour, much as the Celsius degree is lower-resolution than the Fahrenheit. This would be mitigated by writing decimal times (e.g., 3.75 myriaseconds on the clock would correspond to 9 am).

You'd also need to come up with less clunky names than myriasecond, I would think.

Edit: Why it'll never happen: Redefining the second would screw up too many things other than time of day references. E.g., frequencies and other physical measurements based on the second.

http://www.total-knowledge.com/~ilya/mips/ugt.html

I wish money were at least base 12.

fail