Happy New Kiloday!
If metric time had been introduced as I suggested, today would be the beginning of kiloday 80.
So Happy New Year (or should that be Happy New Kiloday?)!
It’s a very special day, of course. The beginning of kiloday 70 took place on the 19th of May 1984, so quite a lot has happened in the past myriaday (metric decade), and I guess the celebrations last night would have rivalled the millennium parties if only this calendar had been adopted already.
I actually wonder whether myriadays would be a better way of remembering history than either decades or centuries – have a look at this:
| First day | Old calendar | |
|---|---|---|
| 70,000 | 19 May 1984 | Collapse of communism, rise of Islamist terrorism and globalisation |
| 60,000 | 1 January 1957 | The Cold War, building the welfare state, oil crisis |
| 50,000 | 16 August 1929 | The Depression and WWII |
| 40,000 | 31 March 1902 | The build-up to WWI, the war itself, and the boom afterwards |
| 30,000 | 12 November 1874 | The second industrial revolution |
| 20,000 | 27 June 1847 | Revolutions and civil war |
It’ll be interesting to find out what will happen in this metric decade, which will end on the 19th of February 2039 (by which time I’ll be 67 years, or rather 24 kilodays old).
Maybe I haven’t read the blog entries closely enough – but I can’t find the reason for the start date, which seems to be somewhere in the late 1700’s(?) Is there any particular reason it’s not at the “old calendars” year 0, or at unix time 0, or something like that?
The answer is here: “To honour the people who introduced the metric system in the first place, I think kilodays should be counted from the start of the French revolution, that is, day 0 would be 22nd September 1792.”
Oh, and apart from honouring Napoléon and his mates, there’s also the practical aspect that it makes the figures we have to juggle somewhat shorter — e.g., today is 80/0/00 rather than 734/4/15.
You can also check out when your own kilodays are on kiloday.com.
Hopefully you don’t mind the linkage, as it is relevant. 🙂