4 ms·

100 ksecs works out to roughly 27 hours. That's a bit long for a day, but probably not too infeasible to adapt to.

krick 4y ago
It's not about the length. It might be a perfect day for them, it's not the point. It's about the fact that you have to use 100 ksec instead of a "day". "Each day" is not the same thing as "each 100 ksecs", since the latter has much more implicit precision. So, practically speaking, your either have a concept of 1-day cycle (because of sleep, sun, or whatever — doesn't matter why they need it and how long must it be for their purposes), or you are stuck with thinking in Unix-time. And if it isn't bad enough for you to fill your calendar in unix-time without "days" or "months" (I can actually believe you might get used to it, somewhat) it makes organisation-level planning and communication hell, if not impossible. Heck, let's even assume their comfortable "day" cycle is 1ks (after all, they had to chose the length of their second based on something". It still means that their next comfortable MUST be EXACTLY 1 Ms (in their numeric system) to be able to use it as a cycle. If it's off even by 0.1 s, it still will get unusable for thinking and planning sooner or later. So, yeah, long story short: just think about having all your schedules (like work shifts, payday, train schedules, everything) in Unix-time. I guess this is enough of a clue to arrive by yourself to the conclusion, that calendars (any calendar, that is — not necessarily Gregorian one) are not some "silly tradition of ours", but a really, really useful invention, which is almost for sure a necessity for any civilization, even if it isn't bound to an earth with yearly weather-cycles. The only way this could work out is if ALL their cycles happen to fit PERFECTLY to orders (degrees) of some number — then they could choose the length of 1 second and their numeric system base accordingly, and I can imagine it being somewhat usable without introducing explicit cycles. But to happen it must be one Math-Wonderland of a Universe they live in. I don't even dare to say it's "implausible". It's... ridiculous.
- db48x 4y ago
  It’s so ridiculous that you have invented something completely unlike what is in the book. They don’t try to force anything to line up to powers of ten, they haven’t changed the length of the second, and they have wearable computers to eliminate any and all annoyances associated with communicating long timestamps. Although the book only hints at how things are implemented, the result is apparently really flexible. They regularly schedule things that will happen far in the future. Since they make liberal use of suspended animation, their plans need to cover very long periods of time at varying levels of precision. Most of the events of the book take place over approximately a gigasecond (with the average character being awake less than a quarter of that), but the prolog takes place several centuries earlier, and the backstory of one of the main characters covers at least several millenia.
  - krick 4y ago
    I had to invent it to imagine some (however far-fetched) conditions under which it would be usable. But it isn't, because these conditions are not practically possible. It's just stupid (as it often happens to be with sci-fi). It is just living without the calendar, that's all that it is. And calendar is a useful invention, basically a necessity for any society out of stone age. Sure, you can just set up a timer which would alert you at some arbitrary moment in the future that it is time to do something. It's how computers do it (if we forget about leap seconds and such). But the point of the calendar and the clock with sane time units (like a minute and an hour) is to keep the frequency and time of your dentist appointments, train schedules and vacations somewhat workable in your head. Which would be much less fun to do in Unix-time.
    - db48x 4y ago
      I don’t find it hard to imagine living without a calendar, or with an arbitrary calendar whose divisions are entirely within my control. In fact, while it might be a strain to keep everything straight in my head without a traditional calendar, it wouldn’t be difficult using pen and paper. One use for a paper calendar is to record distant future events such as dentist appointments, and I don’t see how that would be harder on a linear timeline instead of a grid of days. Naturally I have used scheduling software to arrange meetings, and I can imagine how it would work when you don’t have a fixed calendar. But perhaps I have an unfair advantage. Due to a minor sleep disorder, I have a 25–hour day; I sleep for 8 hours and remain awake for 17. This means that my sleep cycle is never in sync with anyone else, and the limitations of our calendaring software have always been pretty obvious to me. You can imagine the annoyance that dentist appointments cause me, since I never know if I’ll be awake during the day when I am scheduling one. Paper calendars have very limited utility for me.
      - Bakary 4y ago
        What about adding a recurring 8 hour calendar block that comes every 17 hours? Then you have a graphical representation of your sleep across time that allows you to fit appointments in. If you can't program it, and the software makes this hard to do, you can use Amazon Turk or something.

It's not about the length. It might be a perfect day for them, it's not the point. It's about the fact that you have to use 100 ksec instead of a "day". "Each day" is not the same thing as "each 100 ksecs", since the latter has much more implicit precision. So, practically speaking, your either have a concept of 1-day cycle (because of sleep, sun, or whatever — doesn't matter why they need it and how long must it be for their purposes), or you are stuck with thinking in Unix-time. And if it isn't bad enough for you to fill your calendar in unix-time without "days" or "months" (I can actually believe you might get used to it, somewhat) it makes organisation-level planning and communication hell, if not impossible. Heck, let's even assume their comfortable "day" cycle is 1ks (after all, they had to chose the length of their second based on something". It still means that their next comfortable MUST be EXACTLY 1 Ms (in their numeric system) to be able to use it as a cycle. If it's off even by 0.1 s, it still will get unusable for thinking and planning sooner or later. So, yeah, long story short: just think about having all your schedules (like work shifts, payday, train schedules, everything) in Unix-time. I guess this is enough of a clue to arrive by yourself to the conclusion, that calendars (any calendar, that is — not necessarily Gregorian one) are not some "silly tradition of ours", but a really, really useful invention, which is almost for sure a necessity for any civilization, even if it isn't bound to an earth with yearly weather-cycles. The only way this could work out is if ALL their cycles happen to fit PERFECTLY to orders (degrees) of some number — then they could choose the length of 1 second and their numeric system base accordingly, and I can imagine it being somewhat usable without introducing explicit cycles. But to happen it must be one Math-Wonderland of a Universe they live in. I don't even dare to say it's "implausible". It's... ridiculous.

db48x 4y ago
It’s so ridiculous that you have invented something completely unlike what is in the book. They don’t try to force anything to line up to powers of ten, they haven’t changed the length of the second, and they have wearable computers to eliminate any and all annoyances associated with communicating long timestamps. Although the book only hints at how things are implemented, the result is apparently really flexible. They regularly schedule things that will happen far in the future. Since they make liberal use of suspended animation, their plans need to cover very long periods of time at varying levels of precision. Most of the events of the book take place over approximately a gigasecond (with the average character being awake less than a quarter of that), but the prolog takes place several centuries earlier, and the backstory of one of the main characters covers at least several millenia.
- krick 4y ago
  I had to invent it to imagine some (however far-fetched) conditions under which it would be usable. But it isn't, because these conditions are not practically possible. It's just stupid (as it often happens to be with sci-fi). It is just living without the calendar, that's all that it is. And calendar is a useful invention, basically a necessity for any society out of stone age. Sure, you can just set up a timer which would alert you at some arbitrary moment in the future that it is time to do something. It's how computers do it (if we forget about leap seconds and such). But the point of the calendar and the clock with sane time units (like a minute and an hour) is to keep the frequency and time of your dentist appointments, train schedules and vacations somewhat workable in your head. Which would be much less fun to do in Unix-time.
  - db48x 4y ago
    I don’t find it hard to imagine living without a calendar, or with an arbitrary calendar whose divisions are entirely within my control. In fact, while it might be a strain to keep everything straight in my head without a traditional calendar, it wouldn’t be difficult using pen and paper. One use for a paper calendar is to record distant future events such as dentist appointments, and I don’t see how that would be harder on a linear timeline instead of a grid of days. Naturally I have used scheduling software to arrange meetings, and I can imagine how it would work when you don’t have a fixed calendar. But perhaps I have an unfair advantage. Due to a minor sleep disorder, I have a 25–hour day; I sleep for 8 hours and remain awake for 17. This means that my sleep cycle is never in sync with anyone else, and the limitations of our calendaring software have always been pretty obvious to me. You can imagine the annoyance that dentist appointments cause me, since I never know if I’ll be awake during the day when I am scheduling one. Paper calendars have very limited utility for me.
    - Bakary 4y ago
      What about adding a recurring 8 hour calendar block that comes every 17 hours? Then you have a graphical representation of your sleep across time that allows you to fit appointments in. If you can't program it, and the software makes this hard to do, you can use Amazon Turk or something.