41–50 of 119 posts
A causal wristwatch that purely lets me label my self relative increments. I'd allow cesium oscillations on my person as well I guess.
We can all then crdt ourselves together for group interactions or I can just live on my own branch.
On the Moon or even Mars it's a bit irrelevant because you're not following the Sun anyway. But let's talk sci-fi: what if there is a habitable colony where the day is 26h30m. What do you actually do?
So... not time 'zones', per se, but time 'frames'.
On the Moon or even Mars it's a bit irrelevant because you're not following the Sun anyway. But let's talk sci-fi: what if there is a habitable colony where the day is 26h30m. What do you actually do?
But seriously, the ‘second’ becomes a purely technical unit, and you have some other suitable local units.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I almost think that one was a bit too early. Having a "universal" way to share time that's not timezone ambiguous would be pretty handy these days.
Why not use UTC?
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/
These are particularly interesting because they isolate the one part of time that is completely made up: the week. Days, months, years have natural markers - but weeks and particularly days of the week are a totally arbitrary coordination function.
I can imagine in prehistorical times keeping track of midrange time by the phase of the moon, if months were kept synced to the moon we would probably name weeks as such, waxing gibbous, waning crescent...
On the subject of keeping months in sync, I can imagine having a fun festival season around the weird 13th month(all months being 29.5 days long) that bisects the new year.
I think the day needs time units which are factors of 10x or 1000x to match SI prefixes. I give translations assuming current solar day length and current normal units: - 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. - decada…
Planetarily, we only need to slow the Earth's rotation by 1.46%, so that the year becomes 360 days (1 day = 1° of revolution) and I can sleep an extra 21 minutes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
These are particularly interesting because they isolate the one part of time that is completely made up: the week. Days, months, years have natural markers - but weeks and particularly days of the week are a totally arbitrary coordination function.
Well, seconds, minutes, and hours are also arbitrary.
One advantage of our 24 hours a day, 60 minutes an hour clock is that it's easy to divide up days and hours into various equal parts since 24 and 60 are highly composite numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_composite_number
Based on the number of base 12 systems it was a near thing. Don't get me wrong using base 12 units in a base 10 number world is several sorts of cursed. but if we had went with base 12 numbers and cleaned up some of the stupider unit variants into a SI I could see it working well.
And before someone brings up the 10 fingers thing, I don't buy it. One. we have 8 fingers. and Two. for the most part the people who actually needed to count(the shepherds counting their sheep) did it in base 12, thus why it was so common. The method as I understand it is to count on your finger bones using your thumb as a marker, this gets you to a dozen, then use the other hand to keep your twelves place to get to a gross. There is the normal off by one error when counting, but nobody wants base 13 so do the standard thing and ignore it.
But really it is just fun fantasy, There is nothing wrong with base 10 (but the lack of divisors sort of sucks) and the way effectively the whole world regardless of language uses the exact same arabic derived numbering system is pretty neat.
My favorite base 10 clock is Neralie: http://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/time.html > The Neralie clock has two groups of 3 digits, called the beat & the pulse. A beat contains 1000 pulses, and equivalent to 86.4 seconds. A day is 1000 beats, or a million pulses.
The movie Metropolis has a base-10 clock in the background. It's in the scenes with the business owner.
The 10h clock is also used in the scenes where a worker madly adjusts the hands to keep the moloch running.