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If time were metric, what would it look like

nyarlathotep's shoe horn

00:06 / 25.01.06

well?

365.25ish days per year
30ish days per lunar phase cycle.

so, how can we divide up the days, years and millenia to make them self-similar across levels of magnitude like the metric system does with the dimensions of matter (ie length, mass, etc)?

for longer measures, the mayans used a vegidecimal system (based on 20s).

the year is divided into 20 months of 18 days (5 days calculated off the calendar)
then by powers of 20

20 years
400 yrs
8 000 yrs
16 000 yrs
320 000 yrs

(it's very I-Ching and binary friendly).
etc
using such self-similarity across smaller lengths of time:

could we adjust to a 20 hour day?
a 10 hour morning and a 10 hour night?

20 seconds a minute? 20 minutes an hour?
what atom should we use to calculate absolute time (currently it's Cesium)?
If our measure of time is binary-friendly, would computers be easier to work with (in terms of clocks and calendars and so on)?

what should be the basis of the division of our day?

curious but quite serious.

--not jack

11:28 / 16.02.06

didn't napoleon have a crack at something like this? it didn't catch on.

11:48 / 16.02.06

It a tough one, given that the two possible metrics of time that actually have an effect on us, the solar year and the lunar month, change quite a lot over time, so aren't really suitable for an absolute. I quite like the way seconds tie pretty well with resting heartbeats, that seems a good metric to adopt for your shortest time. Maybe metric multiples of seconds would be the way forward?

It would seem a step in the wrong direction to divorce ourselves from the natural order of things so much - maybe months could reflect the lunar cycle better, but then they wouldn't tie up with years, and that would make the calendar far less useful.

So much of our time suits a circular presentation, down to the notation (the abreviations for minutes ', and the abbreviation for seconds ", are the same as in measuring angle. In fact, so are the words come to think of it), the length of minutes/hours, and all of that. We'd really have to commit to a much more digital presentation of time before we commited to changes in it's measurement.

12:28 / 16.02.06

Even if we ignore the sun, moon and stars, the seasons, and even our own heartbeat and make seconds, days, months and years of arbitrary duration, we'll still need to divide the new day into three. The shift is the basic unit of time.

07:38 / 17.02.06

Well, considering one Earth revolution around the sun takes 365 days plus 1/4, a metric system would be kinda of, well, arbitrary.

remember this "metric" system only exists because we have 10 fingers in our hands, instead of 8 or 6 or 12.

unheimlich manoeuvre

10:13 / 17.02.06

didn't napoleon have a crack at something like this? it didn't catch on.

Revolutionary France before Napoleon suggests the Wiki.
As well as some others of interest.

14:08 / 17.02.06

The metric system works because we count in the base ten, rather than, say, the Maya, who counted in the base three. Its disengenuous to say that we use metric because of the number of digits on our hands (why not five, or twenty, if this were the case?). We use it because it fits neatest with the counting method we inherited from the Mesopotamians, which they passed to the ancient Greeks, which the Romans then "borrowed"; they then ran roughshod all over Europe, then Europe ran roughshod over the majority of the rest of the world.

I find the idea of splitting the day into shifts appealing on the level that it fits quite well with our day-cycle (aside from the fact I sleep for nine hours and work for nine hours, rather than eight). However, the thought that our lives may be dictated by something so closely related to work (in the pejorative sense) seems unpleasent.

17:42 / 17.02.06

eerr. base 8 works better than base 10 (and is the reason that american slang for 25 cents was (is?) 2-bits -- 2 bits of the dollar cut into 8ths), and base 12 has even greater advantages over 10, in terms of casual ability to generate fractions. 12 lets you casually do thirds as well as halves and quarters. "shifts", anyone?

the 10-base occurred as accidentally as britain's current train-track-width (and europe's/america's current side-of-road-to-drive on (cheers, napoleon) ): created by the east (the decimal scale came from west india), only the middle-eastern cultures at that time offered sufficient scope for non-productive(immediately) people to leech off current wealth while they contributed long-term value, they created 0 originally as a spacer for 10 (eight, ten, twelve, two, three, take your pick: same concept just different scale)

23:21 / 17.02.06

There's an interesting thread in Headshop about Calendar reform which crosses over a bit with this subject.

Not the same, but it relates.

17:52 / 19.02.06

We don't actually measure time based on planetary rotation, etc, any more, though we tranlate the units we do use into that notation for the general convenience of the populace. But our technology, such as GPS, measures the frequency of radiation from a Cesium-133 atom--approximately 9 billion cycles per second, 550 billion per minute, etc--which is measured with lasers. Somewhere I have read that astrophysicists are concerned that this might not be exact enough for astrogation purposes, because it is still based on relative velocity, but there is a theorized frequency of radiation at the speed of light that might work better.

17:55 / 19.02.06

Ah, to make this answer the question, we could chop up the "beats" from the Cesium-133 atom any way we needed to, but, in terms of our immediate need, what's so bad about the system we've got?

19:12 / 19.02.06

Doesn't the speed of light (in a vacuum, I assume, as it's different in other media) vary according to the variation of the cosmological constant? (I know that some say that the cosmological constant is fixed, but some don't). So there's no way to measure time that's not relative to the universe it's in, and any measurement is going to be affected by that in the first place. So I suppose that is the most absolute measurement of time you could get. I don't know enough about ground-level caesium transitions to know how close they are to absolute, though. Do we use ceasium because the ground-level transitions are so incredibly frequent?

As I said earlier, the traditional time system worked very well for circular time-telling methods (they all divide well into the 360 degree presentation), but a lot of the methods we use are digital now, so the numbers look like an anachronism, and something better suited to digital presentation would be (potentially) better.

Saltation - I didn't say that counting in the base ten was necessarily a good idea, in fact I inferred that it was little more than cultural bagage myself, so on that we agree. What I did say, and what I stand by, is that the metric system works very well precisely because everyone already counts in the base ten. It makes sense to have measurement systems that fit with the number-base that you're counting to.

19:34 / 19.02.06

I think the question is still begged: why do we need a more "elegant" system? We would still have problems with daylight savings and leap years and so on.

As far as I am able to understand the theory, the cosmological constant is a handy explanation but not an attestable fact at this time--eg, it is a "thingie" that holds certain theoretical doors open, one of them being the frequency of radiation at the speed of light.

But, you know, I'm kind of ignorant actually.

02:00 / 20.02.06

Its disengenuous to say that we use metric because of the number of digits on our hands (why not five, or twenty, if this were the case?)

Well, there are many indications that a system based on 20 could have evolved. Have ever heard the term "score"? Or did you know that "eighty" in french is "quatre-vingt" (Four-tewnty)? Five-digits based system could have arise, but I do not know of any case in particular.

Yes, we inheret our numeric system based on 10 from the Mesopotamians, but why did they choose that number in particular, and why did it appear in more than one place (the Chinese use it too, as far as I know) I still stand by my theory

10:18 / 20.02.06

How did this become a discussion about why we count in base ten? What I originaly said was metric is the best solution when you do already count in base ten (as we do). I didn't suggest that counting in the base ten was any better or worse than anything else, but we are culturally stuck with it (despite minor attempts by bases 2, 8, and 16 to have a bash). Saying that we use metric because we have ten fingers is a dramatic oversimplification at best, and completely baseless at worst. I can't see any reason for a causal link between the two that can't be explained equally by coincidence or some other reason.

I think it's fair to say that fitting a measurement system with whatever base you happen to count in is sensible.

You're right about the cosmological constant, it's pretty much a fudge factor as far as I can tell. I was trying to say that the time we measure is always going to be realtaivistic; there's nothing we can do to escape our own relativism, that I'm aware of, so there's no such thing as absolute time anyway, it depends on where you are and how fast you're travelling.

Back to the original topic, there must be something we can improve about how time is told, or how it's displayed? I'd certainly like something that was easier to assimilate at a glance than, say 12:17, and maybe more eloquent about how far through the day that was.

16:38 / 20.02.06

>Back to the original topic, there must be something we can improve about how time is told, or how it's displayed? I'd certainly like something that was easier to assimilate at a glance than, say 12:17, and maybe more eloquent about how far through the day that was.

hmmm. well, maybe we should start with some way that communicated the concept of a Cycle at a glance. showed the ever-renewing day in one symbol. say, a circle. or a disk.

then we need some way of pointing out how far we are through that cycle on that circle. maybe an arrow pointing at how far around the daily cycle we've come so far? yeah, that'd be nice and clear, at a glance. we'd just need to decide which part of the circle was the starting point, and we're away. maybe the top, maybe the bottom: they seem the best candidates.

and for ease of micro-scheduling things, maybe we could mark off on another circle with another arrow how far we were through some subset of the whole circle. OK, that's kinda fiddly having two circles-- how about we overlaid them, so that people knew to look for whole-day time on one arrow, and intra-subset time on another arrow. we could maybe make them different sizes or something, for clarity.

yeah, i like it. i think this would be vastly better than "12:17", and you wouldn't even need to be able to read or to read it clearly: you could just glance at it in almost any visibility conditions and immediately know the time. someone should tell london underground and they could change their "modern" clocks for the better.