Earlier quoted context omitted.
But at least 7 days per week resonates approximately with the lunar orbit.
clearly we need to reposition the moon
Or genetically engineer ourselves to have a different number of fingers
Metric Time
131–140 of 343 posts
Re: Metric Time
#132Although confused by the conversion between standard time and metric time, I LOVE your description of Time is Money.
Re: Metric Time
#133Love it! I built something similar where the current day, week and year is displayed as elapsed percentages [0]. [0] https://trivialanalog.de/zeitfortschritt/
Cool. I would suggest to make it multilingual as the T, M and J labels are not easy to understand by those who don't speak German.
Yes, it's on the list.
Re: Metric Time
#134For this to work you would also need weeks to have 10 days, months have 100 days and years have 1000 days.
Re: Metric Time
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. The exact amount of sleep needed on average is almost certainly an irrational number. (Because almost every number is irrational)
Are you sure? Isn't the average calculated by dividing by n , an integer? Edit: I mean, you're right that nearly every number is irrational. But I think averages are going to be some of the tiny fraction of numbers that aren't.
Only if you take an average of rational numbers. Like e/2 is still irrational.
Re: Metric Time
#136Lol, this was EXACTLY my high school sr. year social studies project in 1980, with roughly the same effort (sadly, I didn't create a working clock). I won first place, with just this. The only difference is I named the metric units 'mints.'
It's not super hard to create a clock, you just have to find a 24-hours clock then you create custom labels/board for it.
Or if your system works with 2 rotations per day use a regular clock.
Re: Metric Time
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, no mention of the need for only 10 big-ass time zones instead of 24 relatively narrow time zones. The continental US might have only 2 time zones instead of 4.
Why is having fewer time zones a good thing? Wouldn't this actually be confusing, because things would have to be happening at different local times depending on where you are in the time zone?
This is already the case, timezones have weird shapes and some of them are huge.
In Europe and China you have timezones spanning over 3 "sun" timezones. In practice that means the sun rising and setting at different times. People are used to have the sun setting late or rising early depending where they live.
Re: Metric Time
#138Re: Metric Time
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
And 12 divides into 2, 3, 4 and 6. Base 12 is far superior to base 10. Those Babylonians weren’t stupid.
I was going to say: time is based on degrees of a circle, and 10 doesn’t work great for it. I’m not a fan of non-metric length measurement, but time seems to be a rather sensical usage of it.
The important aspect of the metric system is consistency, not the actual base. The base is 10 because it makes math easier in almost all modern languages
Time is weird because its units are so necessarily arbitrary. We don't control (yet at least) the relationship between the rotation and revolution times of the planet, and both of those values are so very much essential
It's also interesting that you almost never will need to convert between time units. In normal life you will maybe convert minutes to hours and days or months (which aren't even of uniform length) into weeks and years. But scientists or engineers will always work in "metric" units of seconds and astronomers / archaeologists will always work in "metric" units of years
Compare this to mass and length/volume units, where a normal person will frequently need to traverse multiple orders of magnitude even just to bake a cake (grams to kilograms and milliliters to liters) and will have frequent experiences involving much higher orders (meters to kilometers every time they are following directions on their phones, or tons if they are loading a truck or buying a car)
Re: Metric Time
#140> Working with base-10 numbers is so much easier than trying to think in base-60, base-12, and base-24. > To get a good night sleep (8 standard hours) you'd sleep for 3.33 metric hours. Quote 2 seems to clearly contradict quote 1. 60 is great as it divides into 2,3,4 and 5. That's a feature not a bug
8 hours standard sleep would just adapt. It's only 8 because it's a nice round number. Very few people I know actually sleep exactly 8 hours, so the recommendation will just adapt to another memorable number.
It's 8 because it's 1/3 of the day. 10/3 is not a nice round number.
Also 1/4 of a day is 6 hours, another nice round number! 10/4 is 2.5 which is not as bad as 10/3 but still not a round number.