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I'm curious, are there any other notable time measurement systems other than the ones listed here?
Swatch Internet Time was almost kind of a thing in the late 90s.
- deciday (2.4 hrs)
- centiday (~0.24 hrs, ~14.4 minutes)
- milliday (~1.44 minutes, ~86.4 seconds)
- microday (~86.4 milliseconds)
But, to really get into the decimal clock, we want to also extend this into culturally useful multi-day units.
- decaday is somewhat akin to weeks
- hectoday is somewhat akin to months or quarters
- kiloday is somewhat akin to years
So we need to do some hard thinking and invent some insane tech to adjust planetary mechanics so that we can have decimal relationships between diurnal, lunar, and annual cycles. ;-)
One solution is local seconds and SI seconds. Another is use metric seconds for stopwatches and local minutes for scheduling, and accept there is uneven number of seconds in minute.
Once you get the hang of it, it feels more intuitive than the traditional analog displays and has become my favorite way to display analog time.
I'm curious, are there any other notable time measurement systems other than the ones listed here?
You used to look at the sun or stars to make an estimate, then we had sundials. For larger time scales, there are tons of archaelogical sites around the world which tracked the solstice, equinox, etc and there's evidence that a few cultures even tracked the full period of the moon's orbit (18.6y). ~250BCE, there was a comedy by Plautus which had in it a poem lamenting the proliferation of sundials, which may or may n…
> “what time is it” you ask, i pull out my 2.7 metric ton granite sundial and immediately crush both of your feet, I loudly announce “it is cloudy”
One thing that annoys me about am/pm is that the clocks have a 12 at the top and not a 0. So it goes 11:59 am to 12:00 pm and not 11:59 am to 00:00 pm. Even as a kid I was confused as to why 12 belonged to PM but 11 was still AM, but I never thought about it much until recently, decades after I had learned and was using the system. Which I guess is why it is still like this.
Nice. Related, I also love exploring different ways to visualize time, so a few months back I came up with twelve variations arranged in the form of an actual clock that you can click through to see each one. Each one presents a different type of visualization (from sand, where each falling grain represents a second to a 3D-modeled set of water wheels) https://clocks.specr.net
My favorite retirement gift is a seven segment clock that points to the day of the week. It usually gets a laugh, followed up months later with an honest thank you and an anecdote about how it saved them from going to the bank on a Sunday or the like. https://dayclocks.com/