

Metriclock - rottytooth
http://metriclock.com/

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hjlklhj
This is, as far as I can tell, telling time in decimal.

The metric (si) unit of time is the second. To "tell time in metric" one would
use si prefixes, as is done in e.g. Vernor Vinges A Deepness in the Sky.

One hectosecond would be approximately one minute, a kilosecond ~15 minutes,
100 kiloseconds ~1day, 1 megasecond ~2 weeks, 31.54 megaseconds in a year, ...

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kepano
Fun fact: decimal time was the official timekeeping system of France for about
6 months during the revolution, but was abolished because it never caught on.
However, there are still some decimal watches and clocks in existence from
that time.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time)

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tjradcliffe
Time-keeping in 12's and 60's dates back to the Sumerians, whose basic unit of
time was the "beru", which is usually translated as "double hour". There were
12 of them in the day, related to the 12 zodiacal divisions of the sky,
related to the lunar cycle (presumably).

So unlike our measures of distance, weight, etc, our divisions of time have
been fixed (mod a factor of two) for over five thousand years. On that basis
I'd say anyone attempting to shift to decimal time is more than a little
optimistic (much like people who think that even though every single variant
of gender-neutral pronouns has been tried and has failed to catch on in the
past century, their new one just might work!)

Reform of time-keeping, reform of spelling, reform of language... all great
ideas, but their history is a painful illustration of how challenging it is to
shift habitual norms. Inclusive language has been moderately successful, but
it is basically conservative: the notion of the "gender-neutral masculine
pronoun" was bolted on to English in the late 1800's as a legal convenience so
laws wouldn't have to be re-written to explicitly apply to women, who were
slowly gaining meaningful legal rights. "They" was the preferred gender-
indefinite pronoun prior to that, and it is slowly becoming so again.

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wtbob
> So unlike our measures of distance, weight, etc, our divisions of time have
> been fixed (mod a factor of two) for over five thousand years.

Our measures of distance were more-or-less fixed too. Decimilisation of time
is as bad an idea as decimilisation of distance, weight and volume.

Really, we should convert to a different default base. I suggest twelve: it
has more factors and more repeating decimals are non-repeating duodecimals.

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cookrn
Here's a little blog post from a while back that I wrote about a software bug,
time zones, and alternate time systems. It's got a list of HN mention links of
decimal time and .beat among other things.

[http://cookrn.tumblr.com/post/74190761055/cant-we-all-
just-g...](http://cookrn.tumblr.com/post/74190761055/cant-we-all-just-gmt)

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nodata
Interesting how similar the number of "seconds" is: 100'000 seconds in metric
versus 86'400.

~~~
bilalhusain
I guess the idea is to make the duration of "second" \- of the order of blink,
snapping fingers, ... basically to provide a granularity which is neither too
fast nor painfully slow compared to what we are used to.

This makes me wonder if instead of splitting in 3 (10:100:100), if it were
split equally but in 5 parts (10:10:10:10:10) would it make tracking 5 needles
tough.

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iNate2000
Why, oh why, Earth, must you rotate 365.242 times per year? Why couldn't it be
100 or 1000?

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cormullion
There's a cool iOS app called TI:ME which has decimal, octal, hexadecimal,
swatch, and the trigonometry clock.

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fsiefken
Timw should be measured in base-12

