The major flaw of metric is that half of 10 is 5 and half of 5 is 2 and 1/2 . A good measuring system should not yield fractions when dividing by 2 until you reach 1. I will fully support the octal system. Long live Octal. Off with the pinky fingers.
Metric Time
291–300 of 343 posts
Re: Metric Time
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
Base 6 is better than base 12. https://www.seximal.net/
Pretty light on details, but if it works for you that is great. Quartiles and hand counting would be my argument for 12 but am probably biased based on familiarity.
Seximal is actually great for hand counting. You can use fingers the classical way for one digit per hand or base 6² compression for two digits per hand, allowing you to count up to 1296 with two hands.
Re: Metric Time
#293I can't believe no one has pointed out the one huge fatal flaw in metric time yet.
The resting heart rate of a healthy adult is approximately 60 BPM. So 1 second is 1 heart beat, which makes it extraordinarily intuitive since it's literally pulsing through your body.
Making a metric second take longer by 40% is the opposite of what you want since average resting heartbeat of the population is higher than 60 BPM.
PS: Anyone downvoting is someone who feels offended having significantly higher BPM due to lifestyle. For normal people, the intuitive measure of a second is very useful.
Re: Metric Time
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, we could be measuring time in radians. We already subdivide degrees into minutes and seconds, might as well call the day 2 pi radians. We sleep for 2/3 pi radians of the day in that case.
The whole argument started when somebody above claimed that we probably do not sleep exactly 8 hours, but some weird irrational number. That problem persists even if you measure in radians...
Do the physicist thing and just define all your constants to be one.
"How long is a day? 1 day."
"I slept for .37 days."
This nicely unifies things with the tao manifesto[1] people since 1 day = 1 turn = 1 tau = 2 * pi radians and reinforces the periodic nature of these things.
Re: Metric Time
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s almost certainly a rational number as activity in the body is finite. There will be an exact point at which a certain molecule has interacted with another molecule marking the exact point of perfect sleep. Averaging many rational numbers can’t get you an irrational number. Also it is invalid to compare infinite series like you do in your paracentesis argument, there are infinitely many irrational numbers and inf…
The statement OP put in parentheses is a well-defined statement in mathematics. It means that the Lebesgue measure of the set of the rational numbers is zero in the space of real numbers.
That's nice, but reality doesn't live on the real number line.
Re: Metric Time
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
The statement OP put in parentheses is a well-defined statement in mathematics. It means that the Lebesgue measure of the set of the rational numbers is zero in the space of real numbers.
That's nice, but reality doesn't live on the real number line.
"all models are wrong but some models are useful"
You're not being clever by being pedantic.
Re: Metric Time
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
No "metric" units means they are derived from the meter. Originally, most units in the SI systems were derived from the meter.
A second is the period of a pendulum with a length of one meter. :-) (But not really; that was originally considered as a way to standardize the meter, IIRC, but the period of a pendulum varies too much even over the area of France to be used as a concrete standard. But the relationship is remarkably close for a coincidence, like the way a rod is almost exactly five meters.)
The calculation of a second has been updated in 2019
The second is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the cesium
frequency ∆ν, the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of
the cesium 133 atom, to be 9 192 631 770 when expressed in the unit Hz, which
is equal to s−1.
Re: Metric Time
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
"If the physical property that time meassuring devices meassure is continuous, it must also contain irrational numbers?" Is that what you are refering to? Mabye... To me it seams like nothing is truly continuous i nature. But mabye there is such a thing somewere out there somewere. But irrational numbers require definitions that contain or require recursion. Mabye physical time is built with such a recursive definiti…
No, I am not referring to that statement. > irrational numbers require definitions that contain or require recursion The computable reals are also known as the recursive reals, but almost every real number is not computable.
Which way was your comment suposed to be interpreted?
Was it just a "out of context comment" on something that poped up in your mind as you read the text?
Re: Metric Time
#299I 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…
Metric time is about factors too, but it prioritizes the factors that simplify the comparison across (literally) many orders of magnitude. This is way less helpful for everyday life because we usually only reason within 2-3 orders of magnitude, but we deal with tons of harmonic subcycles that the 24h clock makes easy. For a fun, a more justified usage of metric time, check out Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" (…
Came here to mention/contrast Vinge's metric time with with my (quick, approximate) understanding of this approach...
The problem with this approach is it attempts to "redefine" hours and minutes... part of what I liked in Vinge's/Deepness' approach was, it ignored all that and just talked about seconds in standard exponential scientific notation... it makes a lot more sense in space though, where there's no need/logic to connecting or synchronize to a specific solar cycle, so they just think/talk in kilo-seconds (about 40 mins) and mega-seconds (about 11.6 days)... or at least those are the two I recall them using enough that I got semi-used to thinking in them while reading the book... I had to convert, but I didn't have to redefine any existing unit or remember/remind myself which meaning of hour/minute they're using, because nothing changed.