Comment on Scientists are hoping to redefine the second – here's why
ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.de 1 year ago
Can’t wait for decimal time with 100,000 seconds/day /s
Unfortunately, there is no easy way to decimalise time for human use. If you make it useful for humans, it doesn’t sync well to a day. If you make it sync to a day, the resulting units are awkward for the human mind.
Amusingly, for computers, time is decimalised! UTC is a fully metric time. It’s just simpler to constantly remap to and from UTC to a user’s time, than to train the user to use UTC.
For computers, Unix time is in binary. But yes.
The divisibility of 60 is useful, too. It has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 (plus any combination of the above) as factors making dividing time a relatively simple operation.
I actually quite like this idea. Or we could start using number base 12 instead of 10 everywhere else.
I always get a semi when this calendar is mentioned, I love it so much! Maybe someday, this is what we’ll all be using.
While we’re at it… how about a decimal clock, with ten hours in a day, ten seconds in an hour, etc.
Those would be long days… 87 (current) hours and 40 minutes.
I’ll draft a letter to the moon to advise them to reduce their number of annual cycles by 2.
I like the spirit, but it needs tweaking. Sept, Oct, Nov, and Dec need to go back to being 7, 8, 9, & 10, respectively. Also, make the leap day at the end of the final month to keep all the weeks starting on the same day of the week.
29 June would be another non-weekday, much like Year Day.
Which months would you (re)move to adjust Sep-Dec to 7-10? Personally, I would just rename all of them but no idea what they should be.
If we’re doing that, we should fix the month names. We start off really strong with January, named after Janus, Roman god of doorways, transitions and new beginnings. Banger name for a month honestly. Things remain pretty solid up until June, then we completely drop the ball in the second half of the year. Honoring two egotistical tyrants, then we just give up and number the rest of the months, and incorrectly at that.
I would change month names entirely to prevent confusion with the old system. Viva la révolutión!
It seems the leap day should just be next to the New Year’s Day, not randomly in the middle of the year. Most people then get an extra long weekend (almost) every 4 years.
I agree: legacy devices that display the weekday will only need to be readjusted once in each year.
So I become a Sol baby? Everything I have would need to be changed.
The only winners here are the January babies.
Fuck this…
It’ll likely happen once we move to living mostly in space (if we survive that long ofc)
With a full switch to metric, hopefully. We’ve lost a Mars probe to unit confusion already.
Not everything needs to be base 10.
No but everyone’s life will be easier. Fortunately, most space agency empoloyees are scientists who embrace the metric system because it is less error-prone and does away with arbitrary conversion like in^3^ / floz. Space civilians will hopefully follow suit.
Metric also has a different unit name for force (N) and mass (kg) as opposed to the ambiguous pound – which works well enough on Earth but not on bodies with different gravity.
EnglishMobster@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Decimal time exists, thanks to the French Revolution.
There are 100 decimal seconds in a decimal minute, 100 minutes in a decimal hour, and 10 hours in a decimal day. Each second is slightly shorter than a SI second.
ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.de 1 year ago
I know and nobody uses it.