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Scientists are hoping to redefine the second – here's why
(theconversation.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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Can't wait for decimal time with 100,000 seconds/day /s
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.
I know and nobody uses it.
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.
However, humans can get used to longer/shorter seconds, minutes and hours. Arguing the opposite is like saying the meter would never work because it doesn't have a human body relation like feet. The problem is the sheer amount of documents, equipment and SI using the 24/60/60 system, and the indivisibility of 365.24.
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.
This would outdate centuries of equipment and scientific publications in the metric system.
A better idea is the International Fixed Calendar:
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.
Semi-what? Truck?
I think the gentleman refers to his flagpole being at half-mast.
Oh that's sad. Who died?
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Uh, hell no. There should be ten months a year, ten days in a month, and ten hours in a day, ten minutes in an hour... and we should all use artificial lighting with scheduled blackout blinds to make the daylight hours line up. Putting everyone in the world on the one true timezone.
Those would be long days... 87 (current) hours and 40 minutes.
Why not one year a day ?
Today is Jan 1, 2312 . Tomorrow is Jan 1, 2313. My birthday is Jan 1 every 365 years for 1,095 years starting on year 2493, then Jan 1 366 years later. After that, repeat the thing.
So it would match what we all tell Steam is our birthday.
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.
That works for me!
I would get rid of July and August because I don't care for the Caesars. I guess we could expand the format and have a Quinquember and Sexamber.
Sounds like a fun idea to do with friends and keep it going as a running joke!
It doesn't show on the calendar, but the description already said each month ends on a Sunday, so 29 June is a Sunday.
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.
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!
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.