Metric time
Am I the only one who’s annoyed metric time was never introduced together with the metre, the gramme and the other metric units?
I think the basic unit should be the day, so that we’d have some nice units such as deciday (slight less than 2.5 hours), centiday (almost 15 minutes) and milliday (almost a minute and a half). Just a shame there’s no SI prefix for 1/100,000, because this fraction of a day is the closest one would get to a second (0.864s, to be precise). I guess people would just say “second” in everyday speech and mean 10µday, just as “minute” would be a sloppy way of saying milliday.
Looking at longer time scales, the decaday could replace the week, the hectoday the month, and the kiloday the year. It would of course have the slight drawback that holidays wouldn’t fall on the same point in each kiloday (because it wouldn’t be aligned with the solar year), but moslems already have a similar problem with their calendar, so I’m sure we’d get used to that quickly. A ten-day week would lead to different working patterns, I guess – seven days at work and a three-day weekend, perhaps?
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. That would make today day 78,524 (kday 78, hectoday 5, decaday 2, day 4).
It would be really practical! Given that I was born on day 516, kday 65, it’s so simple to calculate my age as 78,524 – 65,516 = 13,008 – in other words, I could have celebrated my 13th kiloday birthday eight days ago.
There’s more information about the metric day here, by the way.
hahaha – you are barking mad – truly insane! (This is gonna blow dad’s mind you know!)
Please get out of my beloved daughter’s life ,, right now ,,
You are an INSANE person ,,,
However,yes, you were right ,,
You ARE the only one to want this system of time ,,, in fact you must be the only one on our planet ( obviously not your home planet )to have thought or even considered such a nonsense!
You are truly BARKING !! Wuff wuff .,,. and btw the Muslims have far more than calander problems as far as I’m concerned !
See MY blog if you want to see a sensible change for the better
The future, according to some scientists,( and me ) will be exactly like the past, only far more expensive.
– John Sladek
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But the second is a perfectly good invariant unit – sometimes days have leap seconds, so they’re not always the same length.
Also, don’t forget how well some of the ideas of the French Revolution ended …
The problem with basing everything on the second is that people wouldn’t want to get up at a different time every day, just because a day had to be exactly 100,000 seconds long.
Much better to use the day. Having your birthday move to a different part of the solar year every time would just be refreshing.
I haven’t yet worked out exactly what to do with leap seconds. Perhaps best to keep the SI second, but to use the metric day = 86,400 SI seconds as the “normal” derived SI unit?
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Astronomers have been using such a metric calendar for quite a while now. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day and http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/JulianDate.php
Day 0 = 12h Jan 1, 4713 BC.
We usually leave off the lakhday (“modified julian day” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakh ), so today is 56649, which means kiloday 56 day 649.
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This is very cool!