I’m too stupid to get this one
Metric units are based on the idea that conversion numbers are 10^X. You know X by the name alone, like a kilogram - kilo meaning 1000 (10^3) - has 1000 grams. That’s a major reason people think they are superior. Yet, we all still use time units which break this rule. Proper metric time would have a day consisting of 10^X seconds.
* 86400 seconds most of the time. Time changeover and leap seconds are fun.
One year is pi times 10^7. With good accuracy. Easy.
So the diameter of Earth’s orbit is 10 million seconds! That’s awesome!
In seconds? I get 363.61 days doing that.
That day and a half sucked anyway
I got this system running in a constructed world, but it actually makes sense there - unlike in real life. It’s something like this:
>space settlers leaving Earth colonise another planet
>seconds are still useful for their scientific paraphernalia, so they keep the unit
>days in the new planet are not 86.4ks long, so they ditch “Earth day” as a measuring unit
>since ditching Earth days, might as well ditch minutes and hours. 1ks (~15min) is good enough of a measuring unit
>human life gets extinct from Earth but survives in the other planet
>millenniums go on, and the descendants of those settlers in the new planet send new settlers into other planets
>one of the colonies hit Earth, without realising that it was humankind’s birthplace
>colony capsule is fucked up - the cryogenic chambers are intact so the settlers survive, but every other system gets wrecked
>you got a bunch of people from a scientific civilisation thrown in the middle of the jungle, without access to the tech that they’re used to
>they use some primitive methods (like a dripping bucket) to determine the length of the day in Earth, around 80ks
>since it’s really inaccurate might as well use a round number. 80ks per day it is
>split the day in eights so you can get “neat” 10ks divisions
>split those divisions into 100s
>their descendants eventually go full roaming tribal, but keep the measurement units inherited from their starfaring ancestorsI don’t get it. No one from any country that uses metric units would convert a day to seconds. This is not something we do. What’s the joke exactly?
The joke comes from the fact that all of the measuring units in the metric system ( for weight as well, since the main unit is the gram not the kilogram) used add a suffix to the unit’s name to indicate a size that is x10 x100 x1000 … Smaller or bigger than the base unit. Time on the other hand is divvied up in intervals of 60 between the other units of bigger or lower size; while if we count time using the same logic as the other units of the metric system we would get hs ds and ks instead of minutes, hours and days; which are a lot messier since we are used to a base 60 system for time greater than seconds.
Okay … If you think that’s funny, that’s cool, man.
Its the only way virgin imperial unit lovers can attempt.and make fun of the chad metric enjoyers.
Napoleon tried to do decimal/metric time (10 hours a day, 100 seconds a minute, etc), but it didn’t catch on. Probably because both 24 and 60 are “highly composite numbers”, which means they’re divisible more ways than any numbers smaller than them. 10 isn’t divisible by 3 or 4 or 6, which makes it less useful in certain situations. Also, “megaseconds” and “gigaseconds” are way too big to be useful measures of time on human scales.
One way or another, 1 hour (in a 24 hour clock) is a nice segment of time.
The same argument about divisibility could be made about all of the metric system, but metric measurement for length, volume, mass etc all caught on just fine.
Reforming time and calendar systems in general seems to be hard to make work. The USSR tried to implement 5 and 6 day week systems which they later abandoned. Swatch had a go at metric time with .beat but that never went beyond a novelty.
I mean, those are the biggest downsides to metric for all units. 10 is a terrible number, it’s just that uniformity and consistency are better than 10 is bad.
Time is already about as consistent as it’s possible to make it, it just uses 60 instead of 10.
Everyone is already using the same system for the most part, so there’s no real reason to switch.
Units larger than a second also aren’t proper units, because they change length in a semi regular basis, and you can’t change that without making them useless, since they’re based on movement of celestial bodies.We switched to metric to move away from inconsistency and non standard units, not to move towards the number ten or “old” units.
No, it’s not the same argument.
Time is defined by a bunch of unrelated astronomic phenomena. You won’t get a homogeneous representation of that.
That wasn’t Napoleon but the French revolution. They implemented new decimal timekeeping, new decimal calendar and all the jazz - partly because they were fans of metric, partly because they absolutely wanted to get rid of all the old (=feudal and/or religious) things.
Soviets did try this too with 5-days weeks in the 20s but it was so frustrating and unmemorable you can hardly find many sources about it, like it didn’t happened. Yet, one of the similar ideas coming from the same place – a 5-year plan – was kept in action for decades.
Napoleon undid parts of the metric system, including metric time and calendar. Napoleon was an opportunist and played both the revolutionaries and the reactionaries.
It failed because replacing clocks is a lot more expensive than replacing yardsticks.
Plus, they couldn’t decide on a two day or a three day week weekend. And the annual calendar was a mathematically impossible to him because of internal contradictions.
I read a sci fi book where they used Ksec, Msec, etc. for all the time references - meant as a little background flavor but it was interesting to me just how much trying to parse it while I read just threw off my whole train of thought. Far more so than adjusting to metric spatial or temperature references.
Duodecimal gang represent!!!
Metric time does not include minutes and days. Is that the point?
Eh, just round it off.
Make every day 86 kiloseconds and every 5th day 89 kiloseconds
