Decimal Time?

[rochvelleth]

I also had a random mad thought: why don't they decimalise time? It seems to me that these are the only units that made using calculaters awkward any more (well, apart from kilobytes et al, I suppose).

In fact, this was attempted in the French Revolutionary Calendar, but it never caught on. There were various shortcomings (though it was amazingly

Comments

[ladyshrew]

I think we've had the 60 min/24 hrs thing too long. They'd literally have to change every aspect of life as we know it. The minute would change, and it would be really hard to calculate things that are already standardized. It would change a lot of our math systems too.

And after the bloodshed of the Fr Rev, nobody wanted that association. Also, the entire world would have to want to change over. And it would mess up work weeks. Who wanted to have two days off only after eight days of working?! ;-)

But seriously, literally everything we measure in time would be affected, and that is a *lot* of energy for conversion. How and when would we implement this? And I think most people doing the calculations involving time would rather stick the the formula they have now rather than relearning them--even if the calculations would be easier in the end.

BUT writing a book set in the future with that feature would be very, very cool. ;-)

[cartesiandaemon]

I was going to say "the french tried that" :) I don't think it'd be *that* impossible, something like the millennium bug. But probably more trouble than it's worth.

And you're still stuck with a non-decimal day-to-year factor, so you have to mess around *anyway*.

Basically, it's cool, but between them revolutionary France and Battlestar Galactica made it never cool again.

OTOH, some geeks I know *do* do that, use kiloseconds and megaseconds to measure computer time in an ironic way.

[cjwatson]

The millennium bug was trivial by comparison, because it was just that - a bug that you could avoid in advance by correct programming. Converting to a different system of time requires a flag day and/or a configuration system to select how to display and parse time, and is thus a good deal more work.

[ewx]

Modest proposal for calendar reform

[atreic]

I did that when I was 12.

I even wrote a BBC basic program that just ran a clock in my decimal time (10 hours in a day, 100 minutes in an hour, 100 seconds in a minute).

No-one else seemed to care. Or perhaps just didn't like waking up at 3.