John's Blog: A Proposed Decimal Clock
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A Proposed Decimal Clock
This is a little diversion I've thought about off and on: What if we could measure time with a "metric system", that is, base 10, rather than the current screwy collection of units we have now?
Once you start thinking about it, you realize pretty quickly that if we still want to keep any kind of relevance to the sun, i.e. days and seasons, there will always be (for the practical future, anyway) roughly 365 1/4 days in a year, and the whole idea of decimals breaks down right away. Even dividing the year into 10 months rather than 12, which you might at first think would help, isn't much of an improvement. The months would then have to have half 36 days and half 37, plus it wouldn't divide evenly by 4 to represent the seasons. So if you want a purely decimal system of time, you'd have to go with something like the "Stardate" system that Gene Roddenberry (creator of Star Trek) came up with way back in the 1960s, and forget about having it correlate with Earth's celestial events at all.
Short of that, which I don't think I'm ready for, there's no reason that I can see that a day must be subdivided into our current 24, 60, 60 intervals. Why not at least use decimals there? Our clocks (if we still wanted round ones with hands, which I still think are nice) could have 10 tick marks, 0-9, and those are the numbers for all the hands. No more of this silly 1-12 for the hours, but 5,10,15, etc. for the minutes. (Of course digital clocks would just have three of four digits with a decimal point.) So I made up this little "clock" page to help me see what it would feel like.
When I was first working on this this page, I made up some unit labels such as "decimal minutes" and so on, but concluded that that was more trouble learning than it was worth. Since it's decimal, why not just read it as a percentage? So that's what I'm doing now.
If you do the math (as I'm about to do for you), you'll find that the percentage points work out to the following equivalent times:
| Each 10% | About 2 1/2 hours |
| 1% | Almost 15 minutes |
| .1% | About 1 1/2 minutes |
| .01% | Almost 9 seconds |
And some common times of the day (for me):
| Wake Up | 7 AM | 29.16% |
| Start Work | 8 AM | 33.33% |
| Lunch | Noon | 50.00% |
| Leave Work | 5 PM | 70.83% |
| Eat Supper | 6 PM | 75.00% |
| Bedtime | 10:30 PM | 93.75% |
So if you were referring to the time in conversation, you might say things like "Let's meet at time 45%", or "Just give me a tenth or two and I'll go with you."
So, what would be the reason to adopt this system? Just making it easier to learn to tell time doesn't seem quite worth it. You also wouldn't have to worry about converting between 12-hour and 24-hour notation, which we computer types often have to deal with, but that's pretty trivial, so who cares?
Unfortunately, just adopting a decimal time of day wouldn't help us with the really hard stuff: date arithmetic. Questions like "What is the date 90 days from now?", or "What day of the week was I born on?". For this to be simple, we'd have to extend the decimal system to dates as well, and forget about correlating time to solar events at all, as mentioned above. The world is probably not willing to do this, and I'm probably not either.
[Update, 2/19/04: I just wrote some JavaScript code to calculate days difference between the current date and some other date, here.]
So I guess that's why we haven't bothered doing any of this already. And even if we did, you can be sure we'd need to convert back and forth like crazy to deal with all the records kept before the change-over, which would be almost as much of a pain as the current system. Update, 7/9/03: Plus, referring to the time as a percentage sounds so much more cold and scientific than saying "Gimme a minute" or "I get off work at 5 o'clock." Although maybe we'd get used to it.
But it was a fun thought experiment anyway!
2 comments
2 Comments:
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