22 ms·
Metric Time
- SulphurCrested 3y agoYou 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.
- larusso 3y agoYou 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.
- NegativeLatency 3y agoThe gradian is similarly obscure, turns out 360 and 60 are nice round numbers with many handy common divisors
- uranusjr 3y agoI 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).
- larusso 3y agoI 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.
- ithkuil 3y ago10 microdays -> a decamicroday -> a demiday -> a dem
- pmontra 3y agokDay, 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.
- mjan22640 3y agoEvery area had a mile that was a different lenght from the others. Time was the same everywhere already.
- pmontra 3y agoTime 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sundials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sundials [2] https://sonofchina.com/what-is-a-sundial-and-how-does-it-work/ https://sonofchina.com/what-is-a-sundial-and-how-does-it-wor...
- downvotetruth 3y agoFTFY: English does not need a second conflicting definition for the second.
- xanathar 3y agoI second that statement.
- oh_sigh 3y agoI'll be the second second.
- mistercheph 3y agoThere is no conflicting definition. Minutes, seconds, thirds, and fourths etc. are sexagesimal subdivisions, as tenths, hundreds, thousandths, ten thiusandths etc. are for decimal.
- simonh 3y agoI 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.
- mistercheph 3y agoI was referring to GP's suggestion that a conflict already exists.
- ithkuil 3y agothere 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.
- NullPrefix 3y agoIs celsius metric?
- perilunar 3y agoIt's part of SI. Kelvin is the base unit of temperature; Celsius is a derived unit.
- twelvechairs 3y ago> Working with base-10 numbers is so much easier than trying to think in base-60, base-12, and base-24. > 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
- simonh 3y agoAnd 12 divides into 2, 3, 4 and 6. Base 12 is far superior to base 10. Those Babylonians weren’t stupid.
- dclowd9901 3y agoI 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.
- quicklime 3y agoNothing 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 :)
- mistercheph 3y agoSundial; 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.
- happymellon 3y ago> 10 doesn’t work great for it. Because the rest of circles are so logical, π is such a nice round number.
- arlort 3y ago
- stereoabuse 3y agoUsually known as decimal time[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time
- mongol 3y agoDefinitely a better name
- bmacho 3y agoMetric 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.
- mongol 3y agoYes but it doesn't since it does not use the same second. So it is misleading
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- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bmacho 3y agoI 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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time
- anbende 3y agoAs 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.
- xnx 3y agoThis site says "Metric Time", but I think they mean "Decimal Time" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time). There is a https://www.decimal-time.com/ https://www.decimal-time.com/ site that has working Decimal Time clocks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time
- 0wis 3y agoYes, 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. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_clock https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_clock [2]: https://dayclocks.com/products/classic-oak https://dayclocks.com/products/classic-oak
- shiroiuma 3y ago>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.
- have_faith 3y agoWe use a mix of everything in the UK, although metric is common in many areas where it matters.
- js2 3y ago
- riffraff 3y agoI 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).
- edent 3y agoPersonally, I prefer 100 metric hours in a day. Each centiday is about 15 minutes. 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.
- vanviegen 3y agoCentidays seem like a very convenient unit to plan your day with. Meetings are already at the 15min boundaries. You have my vote!
- Karellen 3y ago> this revolution won't occur until after I'm elected God-Emperor of Mars, And you'll have to make all your intervals slightly longer, due to Mars' solar day being 24h39m35s by standard Earth time.
- phist_mcgee 3y agoThe Adeptus Mechanicus might have something to say about that...
- roelschroeven 3y agoSo a microday is 1/100 of a milliday? That clashes with the SI prefixes, where micro is 1/1000 of milli. When following SI, a microday would be 0.0864 (or approximately 0.1 second) which doesn't seem to be a very practical unit.
- contact9879 3y agobase-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)
- simonh 3y ago> 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.
- jawerty 3y agoI love the pitch however my brain would hurt after a day of this. Maybe it's simply because no one is metric time woke.
- kristopolous 3y agoThe French briefly went all in on metric time after the revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar
- donatj 3y agoThe 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal
- skummetmaelk 3y agoI need to divide my 12 into 9 parts. What do I do now?
- feldrim 3y ago12 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.
- tcmb 3y agoTrue. 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.
- w-ll 3y agoUnless you are a bodybuilder. https://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=107926751 https://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=107926751
- brettermeier 3y agoWhat a great conversation. How did you find those posts from 15 years ago? XD
- offices 3y agoIt'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.
- abeppu 3y agoDoes this short page describing a base-10 way of dividing time actually fail to be internally consistent for the few sentences of text describing it? > 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.
- bfdm 3y agoYea that tripped me up reading too. Something felt like it didn't add up.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- INTPenis 3y agoI 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?
- simonh 3y agoSeconds, minutes and hours in this system are not the same length as the standard versions.
- mo_42 3y agoI'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.
- julienpalard 3y agoYes. 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...
- pndy 3y agoThere are ideas of redesigning calendar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_reform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_reform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetry454 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetry454 and ideas for time keeping on other planets like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darian_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darian_calendar https://ops-alaska.com/time/gangale_mst/abstract.htm https://ops-alaska.com/time/gangale_mst/abstract.htm
- SulphurCrested 3y agoOctober used to be the 8th month (and September, November and December the 7th, 9th and 10th) because March was the first month of the year.
- bloopernova 3y agoHave you seen this unix time clock? https://retr0.id/stuff/2038/ https://retr0.id/stuff/2038/
- Pyxl101 3y ago> 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.
- shrumm 3y agoThis 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.
- skummetmaelk 3y ago8 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.
- vanviegen 3y agoAt least the 3.33 makes intuitive sense to me: a third of a 10 hour day. Am I correct in assuming 9:50 and 2:75 should be the other way around?
- II2II 3y agoYeah, 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.
- mistercheph 3y agoSexagesimal mental math (especially wrt fractions) is easier than decimal math, which is why we represent time and circles with them.
- qingcharles 3y agoI always preferred Internet Time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
- pndy 3y agoI 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.
- BjoernKW 3y agoI 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. Unfortunately, things turned out differently.
- tcmb 3y agoI could be interested in a mechanical watch showing decimal time, just for the novelty and fun of it.
- elromulous 3y agoI don't completely hate it. 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.
- robsh 3y agoDecimal 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.
- tgv 3y agoApart 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.
- vortex-trap 3y ago10 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? somewhere i though of a 16 hr display too. Faisal
- cranium 3y agoI 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 ;)
- nologic01 3y agoNice visual presentation of the concept. 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.
- perilunar 3y agoTime 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.)
- gerikson 3y agoI'm confused by this page, the standard clock is in my timezone (CEST, UTC+2). Is the metric clock also set to this standard, i.e does 00:00:00 in that clock occur at 22:00:00 UTC?
- looping8 3y agoIt seems to be, yes, at least according to my calculations. For me it is almost 11, so the metric clock is past 4, close to the middle.
- billpg 3y agoThere's a parallel universe where the French chose to base their new system around twelve instead of ten. Divide the day into twelve twelfths and each twelfth into twelve parts again. (They'd have to coin prefixes for each.)
- michaelhoney 3y agoAnd hopefully we use a base-12 numbering system. It would make division into thirds, quarters and even sixths much easier. Sign me up!
- uoaei 3y agoThere is some evidence our bodies have split up the day into 16 parts: consider the 90-minute REM cycle. This suggests it would make more sense to try to use base-2. 4 bits of depth required to specify the 90-minute "hour". 16 bits of depth corresponds to a resolution of about 1.32 seconds. Then following the obvious pattern however "minutes" would probably be 8 bits of depth, corresponding to 5.625 standard minutes, so this is the most jarring difference. Of course then you wouldn't have clean divisions into 3, 5, etc. but it would be simple to calculate, notate, and reason about.
- toxik 3y agoI love how the example is super confusing. 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.
- mirekrusin 3y agoWe need tau-rational-time! We sleep for τ/3, noon is at π.
- femto 3y agoSpreadsheets already use "τ time", in that a day is a single unit, which could easily be defined to be "τ".
- bmacho 3y agoAn hour is just an another name for a deciturn, or a deciday. 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.
- bmacho 3y agoI meant radian, not tau.
- tomjakubowski 3y agoYou can start the movement by announcing "it's pie o'clock" at lunch time every day
- Entalpi 3y agoIts like we have built our entire lives around another time system! /s You get similar problems converting between Freedom degrees and Celsius. Its just what people have built an understanding of.
- waingake 3y agoSpeaking of different clocks. Here is the year on a clock face. 12pm is summer solstice, 12am is winter solstice. https://clock.mohiohio.com https://clock.mohiohio.com ( I'm in the southern hemisphere so it might be the wrong way around if you aren't. I need to fix that.)
- alluro2 3y agoIt fails on a crucial aspect, of defining an alternative to Mississippis.
- ianbooker 3y agoI just realized that the standard time watch face feels like it will follow the sun rising from left to set on the right side. But since the sun is rising in the east, it should be horizontally reversed. Or you should always look to the south / to the sun. Or it feels right because of my western idea of writing from left to right?
- Mashimo 3y agoWhen you are in the northern hemisphere just look south and the sun will follow the clock from left to right :)
- tomviner 3y agoClock faces were inspired by sun dials. The hour hand traces a version of the path the sun's shadow makes. At least in the northern hemisphere.
- perilunar 3y agoA 24 hour clock with midnight at the bottom tracks the motion of the sun if you are in the Northern Hemisphere looking South. If you are in the Southern Hemisphere looking North you need a clock that goes anti-clockwise. See: https://sunclock.net https://sunclock.net
- lvncelot 3y agoI feel like every developer/technically inclined person goes through a phase of trying to fix timekeeping. I know I did. I think it's a good exercise in recognizing that we (largerly) make tools and standards that fit existing social constructs, not the other way around, and that there are some things that are just inherently messy.
- joshu 3y agoswatch beats or gtfo
- chucknthem 3y agohonestly, the mental math around metric time demonstrated in this post makes me think we should go the opposite way and make everything else base 12 instead of making time base 10. Being divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6 makes a lot of mental math easier.
- mjd 3y ago“fuck the sun” https://www.plover.com/swatch.html https://www.plover.com/swatch.html
- pavlov 3y agoThis is exactly the decimal time system used in France during the brief period of the post-revolutionary established First Republic, 1794 to 1800. 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.)
- trivialanalog 3y agoLove it! I built something similar where the current day, week and year is displayed as elapsed percentages [0]. [0] https://trivialanalog.de/zeitfortschritt/ https://trivialanalog.de/zeitfortschritt/
- avinash 3y agoCool. I would suggest to make it multilingual as the T, M and J labels are not easy to understand by those who don't speak German.
- trivialanalog 3y agoYes, it's on the list.
- vaughan 3y ago.beat time or Swatch Internet Time is way better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
- eps 3y agoNo, it's not. Dividing one day into just 1000 units is way less precise unless one uses decimals, in which case it's just plain inconvenient.
- xyzzy123 3y agoI think the idea is that for most human uses of time we don't specify start or end times to a precision of more than about 5 minutes. Stuff like train timetables you might want to go down to about a minute. So one could argue that we have at least 60 times the resolution we really need for day-to-day use. If you absolutely need more precision (accurate timestamping) then decimals are available.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y agoI take it you haven't used a microwave recently. Or done any other cooking.
- xyzzy123 3y agoYep tho most ppl use microwaves by pressing the "30s" button (I guess it would be labelled 1/2 or 1/3) n times. Other cooking seldom requires time precision < 1 minute, for finicky precise things you usually watch the process and manage it by eye, rather than relying on absolute time.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- y04nn 3y ago"way less precise" ? There are only 1440 minutes in a day, so a beat is 1 minute and 26.4 seconds, precise enough. And then, if you you want more precision, like we use seconds for minutes, you can divide a beat by 100 (@500.12), not less inconvenient than using seconds.
- eterevsky 3y agoThis metric time goes only part of the way. "Day" shouldn't be a metric unit, since it changes over time and only makes sense on Earth. Unix timestamp is the real metric time because it only uses seconds which is a metric unit of time.
- xpointer 3y agoPreviously done as an art project: http://metriclock.com/ http://metriclock.com/
- pmontra 3y agoTo the author: the font is so thin that it exposes subpixel color artifacts on a 1080p 15" screen. I'd remove all the font-weight statements from CSS or set them to normal, except maybe for the one for H3.
- dan-robertson 3y agoFun metric time fact is that France conceded to Greenwich becoming the international prime meridian on the condition that the conference on the meridian also expressed a hope for a decimalised system of time (and angles). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Meridian_Conference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Meridian_Confere... In the end they ended up not adopting the Greenwich meridian for quite some time afterwards.
- s0teri0s 3y agoLol, this was EXACTLY my high school sr. year social studies project in 1980, with roughly the same effort (sadly, I didn't create a working clock). I won first place, with just this. The only difference is I named the metric units 'mints.'
- s0teri0s 3y agoAlso, no mention of the need for only 10 big-ass time zones instead of 24 relatively narrow time zones. The continental US might have only 2 time zones instead of 4.
- JR1427 3y agoWhy is having fewer time zones a good thing? 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?
- eloisant 3y agoThis is already the case, timezones have weird shapes and some of them are huge. 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.
- s0teri0s 3y agoI wasn't really advocating for it, I just think if we were crazy enough to adopt this time system, 10 time zones would also be a necessary adjustment.
- JR1427 3y agoAh, I see. That makes sense! Although not all timezones are +/- an integer number of hours.
- ulkis 3y ago
- wizofaus 3y agoBut how would daylight savings work? Or perhaps more seriously, time zones... 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.
- JR1427 3y agoThis is a classic "clever but stupid" idea. There is no compelling reason to adopt decimal time.
- michellezzz 3y agoAlthough confused by the conversion between standard time and metric time, I LOVE your description of Time is Money.
- reportgunner 3y agoFor this to work you would also need weeks to have 10 days, months have 100 days and years have 1000 days.
- josefrichter 3y agoWell, the nice thing with decimal time is that it also gives you a better indication what portion of the day is over. at 6 o'clock you know 60% of the day is gone. With 2pm you don't make that calculation. Not that it's important, but it's one of the nice benefits.
- kybernetikos 3y agoI'm a big fan of decimal time (or French Revolutionary Time as it's sometimes called). I made my own version a few years back: https://kybernetikos.github.io/UIT/ https://kybernetikos.github.io/UIT/ 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.
- paulryanrogers 3y agoIs there a quarter day at the end of the year?
- kybernetikos 3y agoNo because its a humane rather than scientific system. Day lengths in a scientific time vary, but in this system the hours are defined to be 10ths of a solar day so they vary as the day varies. Scientific measurement should be done with a different system. I'd suggest something based on the speed of light.
- xattt 3y ago> … but in this system the hours are defined to be 10ths of a solar day so they vary as the day varies. 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.
- bmacho 3y agoI always had the feeling that I'd love decimal time, but seeing it on a clock, I absolutely love it. Especially that it is called metric time, since it is not just decimal, but it is the natural time system in our metric system, which we doesn't use bc of inertia, but that can and should change.
- jonwinstanley 3y agoThis is cool. However, for me, it's the months that are the weirdest issue. Why do we all get paid the same each month, pay the same rent/mortgage but some months have 4 weekends, some have 5. 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. :-)
- pelario 3y agoExcept 13×28 = 364, so you get the "free day" every year, and two of them on leap ones
- Humphrey 3y ago> Why do we all get paid the same each month, pay the same rent/mortgage but some months have 4 weekends, some have 5. 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.
- MrGilbert 3y agoIn defense of americans, that is exactly how most of the salary in europe works. But then, rent is also payed monthly. So… getting payed weekly is something australian, I guess?
- bigstrat2003 3y ago> Is paying monthly an American thing? In Australia most things seem to revolve around n weeks. 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.
- kunley 3y agoThis is what happens when a group of people values intellectual wisdom over intuitive wisdom.
- zombot 3y ago> There is no AM or PM with metric time. 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.
- sdeframond 3y agoWhile metric time has some appeal, I think it is not ambitious enough. 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.
- sdeframond 3y agoSo, how would we call those numbers after 10 ? "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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal
- saalweachter 3y agoIf you're going to coexist with decimal, you're best off starting over with a distinct set of words. 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).
- Polygator 3y agoPersonally I think decimal time fails to recognize the cyclical nature of days. Decimal time is like switching from 360 degrees to gradians. A far superior better system would be to adopt radial time and have 2pi hours in a day. We could extend this to the whole year and have 2 pi months in a year, finally divorcing the counting of rotations from the counting of revolutions.
- benkaiser 3y agoAlso relevant, from 10 years ago, Simple Universal Time. Takes it one step further and eradicates timezones. https://www.nico.schottelius.org/docs/sut/ https://www.nico.schottelius.org/docs/sut/
- bloopernova 3y agoAnother excuse to share the wonderful Unix epoch clock: https://retr0.id/stuff/2038/ https://retr0.id/stuff/2038/ 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.
- bxparks 3y agoActually the minute is 256 seconds (2^8). The next chunk of time is 65536 (2^16). Then comes 16777216 (2^24). The whole clock rolls over at 4294967296 (2^32).
- bloopernova 3y agoThank you for the correction, I was going by FF not 100, whoops, sorry about that.
- yakubin 3y ago> A metric minute is broken into 100 seconds. > 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.
- mcny 3y ago> 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?
- yakubin 3y agoSecond is not bound to the rotation of the Earth. It’s bound to the speed of light (indirectly).
- mcny 3y agoYou see the problem though, don't you? 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.
- elashri 3y agoThe first thing that came into my mind seeing this title is the time component in the metric tensor [1]. Which I was asking why it is on HN front page :) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_tensor_(general_relativity) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_tensor_(general_relativ...
- gumby 3y agoBase 10 is a step backwards. 12 & 60 give you lots of useful rational fractions. Leave metric time (c = 1m) to Minkowski space.
- ilyt 3y agosadly few centuries too late.
- data_ders 3y agoI'd pay good money for an analog wall clock that has 10 hour days and 100 minute hours! AFAICT, this product does not exist. Closest thing I could find was this blog [1] [1]: https://raywinstead.com/BobWemerMetricClock.shtml https://raywinstead.com/BobWemerMetricClock.shtml
- bugeats 3y agoI see your Metric Time and I raise you a Dozenal Society of America. 12 is divisible into whole halves, thirds, and quarters. https://dozenal.org https://dozenal.org
- contact9879 3y agoI went into a pretty deep dive into dozenal systems a few years ago. I really like the dozenal unit systems that people have came up with and even designed my own. I don't exactly remember what I had but I think I tried keeping all of the metric base units and then multiples of 12 from there. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Calendar
- dmitshur 3y agoNeat. 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/ 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.
- mib32 3y agoFor some reason, the left clock is going faster than right for me.
- fjfaase 3y agoI once (around 1983) met someone who had an astrological (astronomical) watch, that showed 'time' depending on the position of the earth with respect to the zodiac. He believed that periods when a sign would appear on the horizon (and another disappear) were periods that you beter could not start another activity. I am not sure if it was one made by Jaap Venker. Jaap Venker made 1500 of these watchs which now sell for hunderds of Euro/USD. 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.
- grishka 3y agoWhat I don't like about this is the redefinition of the second. The length of a second and its subdivisions is so fundamental to so much of everything in our society. Other physical quantities like speed or frequency or power all depend on it. You would have to redefine everything. Kilometers per "metric hour", "metric hertz", "metric watts-hours", you get the idea. > 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.
- NeoTar 3y agoOne of my pet-peeves is when automated translation software translates between the 24h and AM/PM representations. "Das Konzert beginnt um 16:00" should not become "The concert starts at 4 PM"
- btbuildem 3y agoThat to me is the key point: measures of time are so intervowen with everything else, this would be an absolute nightmare to enact without seven years of fallout and random "bugs"
- grishka 3y agoEspecially when you call the new units the same names as the old ones!
- Synaesthesia 3y agoMetric seconds are quite close to regular seconds since there are 100,000 metric seconds in a full day compared to 86400 regular seconds. 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.
- majestic5762 3y agoI'm angry how useless this is
- mensetmanusman 3y agoBase 12 is superior because it is easily fractioned so many ways.
- throwaway569996 3y agoDuodecimal time units 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)
- earthboundkid 3y ago"Metric time" should mean the time it takes for light to go 10e8m, which is ~3 seconds. If that's 1 chrono, then 1 kilochrono is 55 minutes and there are around 25 kilochronos / day. 1 megachrono is 386 days. It would be a very good measurement unit for a solar system based space faring society.
- gigel82 3y agoConsidering it would take 3-4 generations to adopt a new time standard, I'd opt for some kind of "universal time" instead - not tied to one random planet (Earth) rotation speed. Think stardates, but real :)
- gmiller123456 3y agoAlready exists: "barrycentric coordinate time" (there's also some variations on it). It's generally used in computation of solar system orbits.
- Ygg2 3y agoWouldn't this require redefining seconds? That's a no go in my book.
- shadowgovt 3y agoImmediately after, in rationale, how much easier the math is... "There is no AM or PM with metric time. Just 10 hours in the day. To get a good night sleep (8 standard hours) you'd sleep for 3.33 metric hours." 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.
- hgomersall 3y agoNooo, we should not lose the one place where duodecimal actually has a footing, even jokingly! We need to replace more things, including our counting, with duodecimal.
- PankajGhosh 3y agoHow would I divide a day in metric time into 3 shifts?
- levzettelin 3y agoIf this is called "decimal time", what about "binary time"? You could convert between days and seconds using bit-shift, haha.
- levzettelin 3y ago16 hours in a day 64 minutes in an hour 64 seconds in a minute This would make seconds 1.31835 times longer then what they are now.
- javier_e06 3y agoThe major flaw of metric is that half of 10 is 5 and half of 5 is 2 and 1/2 . A good measuring system should not yield fractions when dividing by 2 until you reach 1. I will fully support the octal system. Long live Octal. Off with the pinky fingers.
- aydyn 3y agoI can't believe no one has pointed out the one huge fatal flaw in metric time yet. 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.
- steven_noble 3y agoThe film Metropolis is the first thing this brings to mind https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q030WNZvXrA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q030WNZvXrA
- zeitgeistcowboy 3y agoLots of people are pointing out inconveniences with this decimal time system which are the same inconveniences I find with other metric systems. You can’t divide by 3, 4, 6, or 8 easily in this case.
- EmilioMartinez 3y ago>There are 2.4 standard minutes in 1 metric minute Shouldn't it be "There are 1.44 standard minutes in 1 metric minute" ?
- SUPERCILEX 3y agoI made something similar a while back where you can set your own start and end time for the "day": https://alexsaveau.dev/10hrday https://alexsaveau.dev/10hrday 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."
- _nalply 3y agoMeasuring time is simple. It is just a linearly increasing number, right? 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.
- MagicMoonlight 3y agoEach unit is way too big. Imagine wanting to schedule an appointment and you have to book 0.38 hours because hours are too big to be practical.