With one exception, I have been exploring measurements and sizes lately. I still have a couple of ideas to share with you. For one thing, the whole world seems to like the metric system, but I have never come to grips with it. I have looked at a few conversion tables but they just confused me more. However, I was thinking that the idea of metric time sounds interesting.
It all starts out okay. A millennium is a thousand years. Yep, that sounds like a nice metric-type number.
Then we have a century. Ten of those make up a millennium. So far, so good.
Next, there are ten decades in a century. No problem.
And everybody knows there are ten years in a decade. Maybe this is going to work out. Let’s keep going.
The next measure requires a little adjustment. Instead of having 12 months, which will never do, we are going to have to chop up the metric year into 10 equal months of 36.525 days each. But we can’t have bizarre numbers like that.
So we have to break the month into 10 metric weeks. Now let me see, each metric week would have 3.6525 days in it; but, that has to change to a more metric like number:
Therefore, we will have 10 metric days in every metric week, each metric day will consist of 8.766 of today’s hours. But we’ll have to round that off to 10 hours.
Let’s see now, each of the new metric hours will have 52.956 minutes in them. But that too needs converted.
Each of the new metric minute will last exactly 33.56 seconds. But wait, seconds must also be broken down. The new seconds will flash by in nearly one-third of the time it takes them now.
Good grief, no wonder we never converted to metric time.
By the way, I mentioned the wacky idea of metric time to my son, Justin, and he tells me that Hitler really did try to implement such a system.
By now you might think Hitler and I are nuts, but we have plenty of company. As it works out, the idea of metric times has been explored by several other people and governments. The Republic of Cascadia (what ever that is) has thought it out. The writer speaks in terms of decidays, centidays, milidays and microdays. He discusses the base system of 10 vs. base-sixty as we use now. He also examines a base-twenty system, but notes it would be a bit cumbersome to convert. Well “deciduh” to him. Isn’t that the base-point?
Another site, which appears to be Dutch (I cannot be certain because the heading is vague) seems to take my approach, but lays it out in a nice visual way. He refers to it all as “decimal time”. He also includes a version of binary time. It was exactly 110:101100:101101 o’clock (?) when I checked in. He has about 10 other ways to measure time, including “percentage” clocks. This fellow has some other fascinating ideas, like giving everybody new names using combinations of letters and names; a lot like those characters in Star Wars: R2D2 and C3PO. I visited this site at 5:30 this morning (or was it 17.6255% before breakfast) and burned so many brain cells I thought I was back at my hippie days in college.
Dr. Winstead has combined metric and percentage times together and actually posted functioning “clocks” to illustrate what time it is in those formats. He also lists Greenwich Mean Universal time which is the most accurate time in the sense that we think of it.
More on metrics next time, but I don’t know if it will be metric time or not.
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3 comments:
So if we use metric time instead of the system we currently use, then would the theory of some sort of apocalypse happening on the Winter Solstice 2012 not hold water (not that is necessarily does now, but I'm sure the Mayans did not use metric time).
I've had this conversation 100's of times, since our entire curriculum in Aerospace Engineering at CU is taught in metric units. The metric system does have many distinct advantages, but it fails in one respect: everyday math. It is quite easy for the human mind to think in whole numbers (integers), rather than decimal representations. We constantly think things like one-half, one-third, one-quarter. The metric system does not provide an easy, off-the-top-of-your-head method to deal with these common-sense everyday fractional conventions. We have 60 minutes in an hour, and 60 is divisible by 2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20, and 30. So we can have a half-hour (30 mins), a third-hour (20 mins), a quarter-hour (15 mins), and so on. A quarter of 10 is 2.5, and a third is 3.3333333 repeating forever. Not so intuitive. Cooking is similar. Three teaspoons makes a tablespoon. 16 tablespoons makes a cup. So you can have 1/3, 1/4, 1/2 a cup and measure in whole numbers of tablespoons. For certain things like cooking, time, and thinking without computer aids, the English system is clearly superior. I can be persuaded that the metric system wins in other areas, such as measurement, calculation, and moving between orders of magnitude, but the English system is still useful. On top of international pressure to convert to the metric system, we also have the degradation of math-and-science knowledge in the average American mind. If people would put their calculators and i-phone's away for simple everyday calculations like (if a candy bar is two-for-one, how much does one cost), more people might see the benefit of the English system.
When all else fails, how 'bout good old-fashioned American pride? Screw the rest of the world, we like things just the way they are!
I can't remember what year they tried to force the metric system down people's throats, and I'm too lazy to wikipedia it, but I think it was sometime in the 70s. They had this massive campaign to educate school children on the metric system and were planning to convert all of the road signs and such, but it wouldn't fly. Americans just don't want to change, and I agree. Scientists can go ahead and have their debates about the superiority of the metric system, but let's be realistic here; most Americans don't care to utilize the knowledge they have of the English system, so I don't see a campaign educating people on the metric system as having much success. I am one of those unscientific people, and I certainly don't want to exert even the minimal effort it would take to learn to speak in km instead of mph, for example. I agree with Matt, leave it the way it is.
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