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Metric Time

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Re: Metric Time

#141

Post by toxik »

pmontra wrote: post #97
toxik wrote: post #74

I love how the example is super confusing. You sleep 3.33… metric hours. You fall asleep 9:50 metric time. You'd think we can just interchange the . and : so you should wake up 12:83…, or 2:83… the next day. But no, it's apparently 2:75 metric time. Why? Also nice how they IMMEDIATELY ran into a continuing fraction 1/3, which is exactly the point of the 60-minute hour, 24-hour day, or 360-degree circle: lots of facto…

I didn't check the details of that metric time system but there would be no problem living a 10 hours day with 100 minutes hours and 100 seconds minutes. The second would be defined with a different number of "cycles of the radiation produced by the transition between two levels of the cesium-133 atom" and that's all. Instead of rounding our lives at "our" quarters of hours or ten minutes, five minutes marks we would…

Nobody questions the logical consistency of the system, I think.

Presently, we use 24-hour time (AM/PM or otherwise), so the loss in precision is enormous going from 24 to 10.

Think about it.

A tenth of a standard hour is 6 standard minutes.

A tenth of a metric hour is 144 standard minutes, more than two standard hours.

A hundredth of a standard hour is 36 standard seconds, or half a minute. It is in the context of hours a negligible amount of time.

A hundredth of a metric hour is 14.4 standard minutes! Imagine being 0.01 metric hours late for a meeting.

So everywhere you now have to specify time to two decimal places /at least/, three to have sub-standard-minute precision.

Layer on top of this the fact that the new system has significantly fewer distinct prime factors, so you quickly run into continuing fractions. Disaster.

Re: Metric Time

#142

Post by gorlilla »

pif wrote: post #124
Entalpi wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its like we have built our entire lives around another time system! /s You get similar problems converting between Freedom degrees and Celsius. Its just what people have built an understanding of.

You meant "Fahrenheit" rather than "Freedom", didn't you?

I think they said what _they_ meant _and_ still meant what _you_ said.

Re: Metric Time

#143

Post by dghughes »

funcDropShadow wrote: post #106
jader201 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is the author thought this was an original idea, and just named it “metric” since that usually means some form of base-10 measurement.

No "metric" units means they are derived from the meter. Originally, most units in the SI systems were derived from the meter.

And based on a 1,000 (kilo) of something so 1 metre 1,000g (kilometre), 1 gram 1,000g (kilogram). You can have centimetres but that not in the spirit of the metric system really.

Maybe we need a cron for an hour or a day? 1,000 crons for an hour sounds better than millicrons by breaking up a day if it was 1 cron.

Re: Metric Time

#144

Post by phist_mcgee »

edent wrote: post #7

Personally, I prefer 100 metric hours in a day. Each centiday is about 15 minutes. Each milliday is about 90 seconds. And a microday is slightly shorter than a second. But, sadly, this revolution won't occur until after I'm elected God-Emperor of Mars, so it is all rather academic.

The Adeptus Mechanicus might have something to say about that...

Re: Metric Time

#145

Post by willis936 »

L3viathan wrote: post #91
toxik wrote: post #74

I love how the example is super confusing. You sleep 3.33… metric hours. You fall asleep 9:50 metric time. You'd think we can just interchange the . and : so you should wake up 12:83…, or 2:83… the next day. But no, it's apparently 2:75 metric time. Why? Also nice how they IMMEDIATELY ran into a continuing fraction 1/3, which is exactly the point of the 60-minute hour, 24-hour day, or 360-degree circle: lots of facto…

> Also nice how they IMMEDIATELY ran into a continuing fraction 1/3, which is exactly the point of the 60-minute hour, 24-hour day, or 360-degree circle: lots of factors. While I agree in principle, this example is not evidence of it. It's not like we measured the amount of sleep needed and it's precisely 8 hours. A more reasonable thing to say would be: You need to sleep for 3.5 metric hours.

I don't really care how much sleep I get as long as it's enough. I care greatly when the bus leaves and when my meetings are. Anything that hopes to replace a clock had better be adding precision rather than removing it.

Re: Metric Time

#146

Post by jhbadger »

vaughan wrote: post #102

.beat time or Swatch Internet Time is way better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

In a way, China kind of has something like the Swatch gimmick for real. There's just one time zone in the whole country (which is roughly the size of the Continental US). This has benefits (easy to coordinate video conferences in different cities) and drawbacks (the official time is far off from what the sun would indicate in much of China).

Re: Metric Time

#147

Post by josefrichter »

Well, the nice thing with decimal time is that it also gives you a better indication what portion of the day is over. at 6 o'clock you know 60% of the day is gone. With 2pm you don't make that calculation. Not that it's important, but it's one of the nice benefits.

Re: Metric Time

#148

Post by have_faith »

shiroiuma wrote: post #85
0wis wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, a very confusing error. The metric time is the SI time (24h 60m 60s). The decimal time is base 10. French tried to get it used during the revolution and it did not work. Its the only unit that resisted decimalization, with a couple others ones in a handful of countries still using something called « imperial units ». Another similar thought experiment is binary clocks which I remember using to get use to read in…

>with a couple others ones in a handful of countries still using something called « imperial units ». The only country I know of offhand that uses "imperial units" is the UK. There's a different, but similar (and sometimes overlapping) system called "US Customary Units" that's used in the US. Imperial pints and gallons are NOT the same as US pints and gallons.

We use a mix of everything in the UK, although metric is common in many areas where it matters.

Re: Metric Time

#149

Post by wizofaus »

tcmb wrote: post #31
donatj wrote: post #14

The problem is base 10 is a terrible base for any unit that needs to be divided. It’s an arbitrary base with no positives based on our fingers. No reasonable species would have picked base 12 when base 12 is so much better and so close. 10 can’t be evenly divided into 3 or 4 parts. 60 minutes in 3 parts is 20 minutes. 100 minutes in 3 parts is 33.3333 minutes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal

True. And having 7 days per week is majorly impractical, also for reasons of divisibility. With 7 being prime, it's impossible to do things every other day or every three days without being left with a remainder.

Just as bad as having 31 days a month, for randomly chosen months. If any periods of time need to fixed it's surely weeks and months. How about 5 day weeks (3 working, 2 not - and yes, therefore 10-day "fort"nights) and scrap months altogether...

Re: Metric Time

#150

Post by ivanbakel »

toxik wrote: post #141
pmontra wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't check the details of that metric time system but there would be no problem living a 10 hours day with 100 minutes hours and 100 seconds minutes. The second would be defined with a different number of "cycles of the radiation produced by the transition between two levels of the cesium-133 atom" and that's all. Instead of rounding our lives at "our" quarters of hours or ten minutes, five minutes marks we would…

Nobody questions the logical consistency of the system, I think. Presently, we use 24-hour time (AM/PM or otherwise), so the loss in precision is enormous going from 24 to 10. Think about it. A tenth of a standard hour is 6 standard minutes. A tenth of a metric hour is 144 standard minutes, more than two standard hours. A hundredth of a standard hour is 36 standard seconds, or half a minute. It is in the context of h…

What? A metric hour is 144 standard minutes - or do you imagine that a day of metric hours is 1441010 = 144,000 standard minutes long?

A tenth of a metric hour is 14.4 standard minutes. A hundredth of a standard hour is 1.44 minutes. Being 0.01 metric hours late, or 1 metric minute late, is not too much more than being 1 standard limit late.

And current time is specified to 6 digits for second precision - hours, minutes, and seconds.

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