You could call this lots of things, but you shouldn’t call it “metric” because its second is not a metric second. In the SI (metric) system, the second is one of the fundamental units. The world does not need a conflicting definition for the second.
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.
You are right of course but also keep in mind that, and that is just my thoughts after reading, is that the French tried to implement decimal time along with the rest of what we call the metric system in the 18th century. And it was the only system people rejected. So I think the author named everything metric to make the point that if it would be part of the system a metric second would be … long. But again I could be wrong. In any case the page would also work by naming everything decimal-something. Maybe not as catchy.
I don’t know the exact history, but the rest of the metric system is designed with a base unit and decimal derivatives. Assuming we want to keep the day length consistent (I can’t imagine a system being practically useful otherwise), we’d have decidays, centidays, etc. and not have hours, minutes, and seconds in the system at all. A system with days, decidays (2.4 hours), millidays (1.44 minutes), and microdays (0.0864 seconds) doesn’t seem bad to me at all, I’m sure people would come up with a good name for 10 microdays for daily use (0.864 seconds).
I never thought about this. And actually never bothered to read up on the proposed terminology. Only thing I always assumed was that the first draft of all terms is not 100% what we use today. Especially because it comes from France. But that’s only assumptions. But yes I think you are right with the naming convention.
kDay, MDay, etc could work in space but they don't fit well with the length of the year. As long as we live on Earth we cannot escape from our planet taking about 365 days to orbit the Sun. History proved that it's convenient to have the same event (let's say start of spring) falling at the same date every year. Hence all the refactoring of calendars and leap years.
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.
Time was the same for the people that were measuring it with the same tools.
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.
There is no conflicting definition. Minutes, seconds, thirds, and fourths etc. are sexagesimal subdivisions, as tenths, hundreds, thousandths, ten thiusandths etc. are for decimal.
I know what you mean, and you are correct in that this is why we have minutes and seconds of arc, but the linked page is literally suggesting a different definition.
there is no multiple definitions going on: what happened is an _elision_.
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."
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 :-)
I was going to say: time is based on degrees of a circle, and 10 doesn’t work great for it. I’m not a fan of non-metric length measurement, but time seems to be a rather sensical usage of it.
Nothing about time is based on degrees of a circle, other than one specific way to visualise it - which many people don't use anymore and consider antiquated :)
Sundial; our notion of time is inextricably linked to the observed 180 degree arc path of the sun. The modern notion of time descends from that, and fails to stand on its own, despite silly attempts to define SI units via ad hoc correspondances.
The important aspect of the metric system is consistency, not the actual base. The base is 10 because it makes math easier in almost all modern languages
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)
Metric time is a better name, since it states that this time comes naturally from our common metric system, and something is very very off that we don't use it.
I don't think it is misleading. Although there is a name-collision with the SI time system that some people call metric time [0] already. I don't know how many people, or how official it is. I'll probably keep calling decimal time metric time, and we'll see if there is a real collision/confusion/misleading.
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, it's called the metric system because the values were derived from the meter. Decimal time has nothing to do with the meter, and "decimal" refers to it being base 10.
Yes, a very confusing error.
The metric time is the SI time (24h 60m 60s).
The decimal time is base 10.
French tried to get it used during the revolution and it did not work. Its the only unit that resisted decimalization, with a couple others ones in a handful of countries still using something called « imperial units ».
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.
>with a couple others ones in a handful of countries still using something called « imperial units ».
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.
The now relatively uncommon UK gallon is the volume occupied by ten lbs of water in the same way a litre of water weighs a kilogram. Not only are the pints bigger there’s also twenty ounces (also rarely used now) in them which means a fluid ounce of water weighs by definition an ounce in the imperial system.
Thanks !
Sorry I overlooked this.
Did a little research and I think the most confusing in this is the ton. At least, pints, gallons and miles have a different name than the metric unit and are way different than their SI equivalent. Not close by around 10%, one more (the long ton) and one less (the short ton). A perfect way to get the wrong quantity of a thing without noticing it at first.
And if that’s not confusing enough, using « long » and « short » for a mass unit..
And based on a 1,000 (kilo) of something so 1 metre 1,000g (kilometre), 1 gram 1,000g (kilogram). You can have centimetres but that not in the spirit of the metric system really.
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.
> You can have centimetres but that not in the spirit of the metric system really.
"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.
Technically, yes. But measurements of weight, volume, and temperature are also part of the metric system, and those didn’t derive from the meter.
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.
Weight and volume were defined based on the meter. Volume is just expressed in m³ or litre, which is just 1/1000 of 1 m³. Mass was originally defined such that 1 kg of water is the mass of one litre of pure water at sea level.
This isn't totally true. Mass and volume measurements were indeed derived from the meter. A gram is a cubic centimeter of water. A liter is 1/1000 of a cubic meter. Apparently Celsius is derived from Kelvin (really just translated so 0 is the freezing point of water), which is derived using metric units in a formula that is a bit beyond me but available here:
> But measurements of weight, volume, […] are also part of the metric system, and those didn’t derive from the meter.
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).
A second is the period of a pendulum with a length of one meter. :-)
(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 calculation of a second has been updated in 2019
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.
The conference where this was made official was quite a beautiful, upbeat demonstration of people from around the world coming together to agree upon a change:
I love how this mentions "decimal is as easy as money, assuming US dollars" when the US is basically the only country still using non-decimal units for most things, and money was wildly non-decimal in other places (cough UK cough).
base-10 time only makes sense because we use a base-10 number system. the Babylonians didn't use a base-10 number system so the current time system was more intuitive. however, the French already tried this a couple hundred years ago. it didn't stick around.
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)
The problem is base 10 is a terrible base for any unit that needs to be divided. It’s an arbitrary base with no positives based on our fingers. No reasonable species would have picked base 12 when base 12 is so much better and so close. 10 can’t be evenly divided into 3 or 4 parts. 60 minutes in 3 parts is 20 minutes. 100 minutes in 3 parts is 33.3333 minutes
True. And having 7 days per week is majorly impractical, also for reasons of divisibility. With 7 being prime, it's impossible to do things every other day or every three days without being left with a remainder.
It's a shame the internet has pinned this on bodybuilders just because of the URL. TheJosh has a progress photo on his profile - he must be very deep into an offseason. bodybuilding.com is a general exercise forum and is infamous for the trolling on its misc board.
Wouldn't that make sense in a context where the useful number of 6 counts the days reserved for the affairs of mankind, and the seventh was an extra day reserved for rest or worship? I.e. the background of our 7 day week
I'm sure that's religious revisionism (just like the Christmas holiday). Like so many time-based things, the 7-day week comes from the cycles of the Moon, and goes back at least as far as the Babylonians.
Right, religious zealots have been ever revising the story of human history, which has been mostly secular peoples that practiced empiricism and appreciated astronomical phenomena as interesting but did not take them as divine.
Just as bad as having 31 days a month, for randomly chosen months.
If any periods of time need to fixed it's surely weeks and months. How about 5 day weeks (3 working, 2 not - and yes, therefore 10-day "fort"nights) and scrap months altogether...
12 hours / 9 = 80 mins. 12 mins / 9 = 80 secs. That's the point. And yes, Base 12 is superior to Base10 for this specific reason. But only for this use case.
> A standard hour is broken into 60 minutes. There are 2.4 standard hours in 1 metric hour.
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.
I still don't understand how a metric day matches up with a standard day.
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?
That must be it. I kept watching the two clocks to try and figure out if the second was equal but couldn't. This is the key and should be the first thing you read, seconds not being the same length is a huge detail.
Strange the page does not describe the "metric second" then, since it is not the same as the SI second. I thought that the second was the unit which was the same as in SI (=metric). But then it is not the same as the SI second, so not metric at all. Very confusing.
I feel it's an error to use the same names in the two systems. The values are different, it would be much less confusing to use names that are clearly different too.
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).
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.
I was very confused by this too and finally realized the mistake. The chain of logic went like this:
> 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...
I'm really fascinated by such ideas. However, it's just academic as time is so much baked into physical devices (watches, clocks, ...) so this will most probably never happen.
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.
Yes. Decimal time almost happened in France during the revolution, but fixing all the clocks was impossible so people kept their standard clocks, so they kept the old habit...
> Working with base-10 numbers is so much easier than trying to think in base-60, base-12, and base-24.
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.
This was a fascinating read for a totally unexpected reason.
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.
8 hours comes from the worker's movement anyway. 8 hours work, 8 hours recreation, 8 hours rest. It's clearly only chosen to make a nice slogan. In reality 7-9 appears to be optimal. If you were using decimal time you'd just say 3-3.5 hours and be done with it. Convenient enough.
Yeah, too much of our society is based upon 24 hour time.
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.
I still remember reading about Swatch time years ago in some pc magazine. Back then it felt like a cool idea that surely will be adopted as standard unit of time for the Internet era, making communication across the globe much easier and sadly... reality was quite different.
I fondly remember Swatch Internet Time and .beats. Back then (around 1998), I used to have a watch that displayed Internet Time and I genuinely believed that this was going to the future way of how we keep track of time and synchronise with each other.
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.
Decimal time doesn’t seem as useful to me as localized time. With GPS coordinates, we don’t need a timezone system, everybody could have noon at solar noon. When setting up meetings, one only needs to include the longitude and everybody could easily join at the correct time. It would be cool if airplane rides showed a real local time while in flight. Might be a cool app.
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.
Apart from history and (dis)advantages, nobody seems to address the site's rationale for this (rather impactful) idea:
> 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.
10 hr dial will certainly create problems for human systems, because, time counting is getting relatively more coarse that way. instead a 20 hr dial is better facilitating, but can it be called matric time?
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?
I like imagining how the life would look like if you change what is essentially a convention. Set the week to 6 weekdays and a 3-day weekend, have 6-hour workdays, or 80% company work / 20% service to your community. I'm very curious about the societal change a universal basic income could bring.
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 ;)
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.
Time is never going to be easy to decimalise, since days, months, and years are all natural periods and not so easy to change.
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.)
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] threadAs 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.
> 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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_(unit)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonne
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.)
https://www.youtube.com/live/qA67T7FPBME?t=498
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.
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)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal
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.
> 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...
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darian_calendar
https://ops-alaska.com/time/gangale_mst/abstract.htm
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
Unfortunately, things turned out differently.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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 ;)
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.
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.)