

Metric Time - yefim
http://blog.yef.im/post/55681508772/metric-time

======
gilgoomesh
Everyone in these comments appear to be missing the point of the article. The
author is not trying to redefine the second or use different units.

The point of the article is:

> aimed to eliminate both minutes and hours

The author is simply trying to track their day using nothing but seconds. The
current definition of the second. The author uses the "myria" prefix to mean
10,000 (instead of kilo or hecto) but it's otherwise simply using seconds.

Why use the second? Because it is the SI unit for time. It is the unit that
all scientific measurements use but we rarely use it to schedule our lives.
It's an experiment, nothing more.

~~~
yefim
That's exactly my point! Thank you for reading and understanding!

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igul222
What makes the metric system appealing is that each physical quantity has
exactly one "base" unit, and you can make easy conversions– just multiply or
divide by 10.

The thing about time is, there are two important 'natural' units that aren't
going away: the day and the year. Whatever system you devise has to include
them somehow. And unfortunately, the conversion factor between them (365)
isn't a multiple of 10.

That said, we can do a lot better than the status quo. Since we've already
given up on the idea of having a single base unit for everything, why not
express time in fractions of days instead of multiples of seconds? Counting
time up to 1.0 days is a lot more intuitive than counting up to 8.64
myriaseconds. The second is a unit of time which isn't tied to anything
intuitive (actually, it's entirely arbitrary). If we're going to shake things
up, let's at least use days instead, yeah?

~~~
modeless
The problem with days and years is that they change as the Earth's velocity
varies over time. You can't use days and years for scientific work unless you
define a specific unchanging length for them, but if you do that they will
soon get out of sync with the Earth's rotation.

~~~
anywhichway
You could come at it in a similar way to how the real second was developed.
Initially the second was defined as 1/86,400th of a day, later narrowed to a
mean solar day, but that still wasn't specific enough so they switched it to
the current caesium atom definition.

If we wanted to subdivide the day into 100,000 new units instead of 86,400
seconds, we could simply take the current caesium atom definition * 864,000 /
100,000 and you would get a precise, scientifically acceptable unit that would
be about 1/100,000 of a day, but still have the need for the occasional leap
units.

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SeoxyS
Swatch already tried this with the Swatch Beat ("Swatch Internet Time")[1]. I
actually owned a beat-capable watch for a while.

I think the beat was better in that it was easier to reason relative to the
day: a day was 1000 beat, and a beat was a little over 1 minute. There would
be no daylight savings time, and no timezones. The entire world would run on
the same beat.

As a software engineer, the idea fascinates me. The complexity of time is a
constant struggle for computers. Every time DST comes around, things have a
tendency to crash. Not to mention Y2K.

But then again, this can easily be solved by standardizing on 64-bit UTC unix
timestamps.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Beat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Beat)

~~~
dangerscarf
The French actually beat Swatch by a a couple centuries - during the French
Revolution they spent about twenty years fooling around with metric/decimal
time. Ten hours a day, 100 minutes an hour, and 100 seconds per minute (each
second ended up about 14% shorter than a "normal" second). They real fun is in
the calendar, with 12 months of 30 days each, and rules like "every tenth day
is named after a mineral."
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar#Deci...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar#Decimal_time)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar#Ten_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar#Ten_days_of_the_week)

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grecy
A Meter was defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the Equator to
the North Pole. [1]

And everything else followed from there - even volume measurements like a
liter was based on this, because one mL was defined as a cubic cm.

...So to do the same thing with time, it probably makes sense to base things
around a day or year (so it's based on the Earth going around the Sun) and
just divide that amount of time by some nice base 10 number (1000, 10000,
whatever).

A day currently contains 86400 seconds.. why not just shorten how long a
second is until there are 100000 of them in a day... Of course then there will
be 36500000 in a year, which is not so fantasic.

There is no reason we couldn't re-define hour and minute to be base 10
divisions of this "100000 per day second"

Leap days and seconds are still an interesting problem.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre#Meridional_definition](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre#Meridional_definition)

~~~
Osmium
Exactly. 100,000 "seconds", 20 "hours" (each hour = 5000 seconds), 50
"minutes" (each minute = 100 seconds). If you're gonna do it, something like
that seems sensible. Easily divisible, neat, etc.

That said, I don't think the current system is too onerous, 60 is a nice
number (thanks Sumerians), and when you bring leap seconds into it it has to
be messy anyway, so what's the point? So it's more a thought experiment than
anything.

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akkartik
Jumping off from this story, I found
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Week](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Week) to be
a mind-broadening read.

\---

Has anyone considered making months and years non-interlocking the way weeks
and months are today?

A day is the obvious time period based on the most salient object in our
skies.

A lunar month is the next most obvious time period based on the second-most
salient object in our skies.

A year has immediate value in helping keep track of seasons.

So my proposal is to replace the existing two parallel hierarchies:

    
    
        1 week = 7 days;
        1 year = 12 months = ?? days
    

with the following parallel hierarchies:

    
    
        1 year = 365/366 days;
        1 month = 4 weeks = 28 days
    

I wonder if this has been tried.

~~~
pygy_
IIRC, the 28 day month was the norm before the introduction of the Gregorian
calendar, and it is still used, for example in the Islamic calendar (that's
the reason why the fasting month of Ramadan drifts from one year to the next).

------
anateus
Frankly I find refering "30 kay secs" (for 30 killoseconds) easier and more
convenient than "3 myriasecs".

Wolfram Alpha does support myriaseconds, and abbreviates as "mas" which isn't
bad.

I actually find 1 killosecond to be a great basis for a fairly human time
measure, since it's just over 15 minutes, and that's a granularity that feels
very natural to me.

~~~
yefim
I've put some thought towards kiloseconds before deciding on myriaseconds. I
find that the main advantage to myrias (as I call them) is that you can break
your day up into them very easily. Currently, I believe that most people break
their days up by hours (e.g., wake up at 8, work 9 to 5, dinner at 7).

I tried to make the same exact concept apply to myrias. I wake up at 3 (~9am).
Work from 3 to 7 (9 to 4). Read and relax around 8 (~10pm).

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christophe971
Sounds vaguely similar to this:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time)

Also, I may be wrong, but it looks like you haven't read about this:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time)

~~~
yefim
Whoa! Thanks for linking that! I like how they use the day as the base unit.

~~~
jjindev
Related: K-sec LCD watch for star travellers

[http://blog.tokyoflash.com/2012/11/k-sec-lcd-watch-for-
star-...](http://blog.tokyoflash.com/2012/11/k-sec-lcd-watch-for-star-
travellers/)

------
cynwoody
It seems to me, you'd need to redefine the second such that there is a nice
round number of them in a day. Say 100,000 to the day. They you could
subdivide into hectoseconds (new minute, 86.4 old seconds), kiloseconds (14.4
old minutes), myriaseconds (tenth of a day, 8640 old seconds). Noon would fall
on a nice even boundary.

(Of course, this ignores the fact that the day length is not constant, but we
have that problem with the present system, too.)

The myriasecond would be the new, lower-resolution hour, much as the Celsius
degree is lower-resolution than the Fahrenheit. This would be mitigated by
writing decimal times (e.g., 3.75 myriaseconds on the clock would correspond
to 9 am).

You'd also need to come up with less clunky names than myriasecond, I would
think.

Edit: Why it'll never happen: Redefining the second would screw up too many
things other than time of day references. E.g., frequencies and other physical
measurements based on the second.

------
blahedo
I've read enough science fiction based on this principle that I'm semi-
comfortable with kiloseconds, megaseconds, and gigaseconds (roughly a quarter
hour, a tenday, and a third of a century, respectively). I'm not sure what the
"myria-" prefix really adds to the mix.

The people that are objecting on the grounds that it doesn't fit the "natural"
unit of the day (or month, or year) are missing the point: metric is all about
picking units regardless of any convenient lineup to anything, and then
applying them to everything anyway. As a matter of usage, most people take
this concept even further and always count from the next smaller unit even if
the larger one is closer: thus you rarely hear of "half litre" but rather "500
mL", not "quarter metre" but "25 cm" or "250 mm". Basing metric time on
seconds makes vastly more sense from this perspective.

~~~
whiddershins
See my comment above, but , frankly, if you are going to do what you
described, it would have been a lot more clever to use base 12 or 60.

------
ISL
Why not just switch to seconds? Our lab works with signals in the millihertz.
After a few months, 3600 seconds is as intuitive as an hour.

~~~
yefim
It's essentially the same as switching to seconds. It's much easier to say
"It's 4.3" (with myriaseconds assumed) when referring to midday than it is to
say "It's 43000."

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slyall
Remember this time people, 80 past 2 on April 47th, it's the dawn of a new
enlightenment.

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Zash
UGT is way better, and works regardless of timezones and many other time
issues.

[http://www.total-knowledge.com/~ilya/mips/ugt.html](http://www.total-
knowledge.com/~ilya/mips/ugt.html)

------
rjvir
Why are you basing things off of seconds? The day is a constant defined by
nature, I would much prefer a system based around the day. A second is
actually pretty arbitrary.

~~~
adestefan
The length of a day is not constant.

~~~
rjvir
Close enough

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teddyh
This is a silly and possibly stupid idea, and calling it "Metric" does
metricification a huge disservice by associating it with these kinds of
foolish notions.

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whiddershins
yeah but there is an extremely good reason for using base 12/60 for time and
just in general. I wish people had thought this through before adopting the
metric system. Frankly, I don't think they were as smart as they thought they
were.

I wish money were at least base 12.

~~~
yefim
Could you please elaborate? What is the good reason?

~~~
Mindless2112
60 is highly composite (divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6). 12 is a highly
composite (divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6). This is a nice property for a numbers
used for unit quantities because a common operation on unit quantities is
division by small numbers.

So it's actually kind of unfortunate that we don't all have 6-fingered hands.

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calroc
Vernor Vinge wrote a Sci-Fi book where space-dwelling traders used a metric
time system like this.

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ggoodwin37
[...] 14 hours ago

fail

