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flurbius
flurbius
01:57
@tchrist that was a superb answer, well done and thank you. I find these sort of issues fascinating, but unfortunately rarely do I have the chance to read a well structured and thorough treatment, is there any place on the web or in mainstream or professional media that you know of that would help me find such discourse?
Especially one pertaining to metric or decimal based time.
Another of my pet eccentricities is the desire to do away with time zones, does anyone know if this has ever been proposed and also does anyone have a truly compelling case for time zones?
tchrist
tchrist
@flurbius Thanks.
There have been metric (=decimal) time proposals, but they haven't gotten far because we're too used to the other way.
Time zones are hard to get rid of when people think noon should be the solar zenith.
But we should definitely shoot daylight saving time.
And maybe leap seconds.
Metric time
Metric time is the measure of time interval using the metric system, which defines the second as the base unit of time, and multiple and submultiple units formed with metric prefixes, such as kiloseconds and milliseconds. It does not define the time of day, as this is defined by various time scales, which may be based upon the metric definition of the second. Other units of time, the minute, hour, and day, are accepted for use with the modern metric system, but are not part of it. == History == Although part of the decimal metric system, the second derives its name from the sexagesimal system,...
And there's nothing to be done with the year, which is perfectly 360/sexagesimal plus 5 or 6.
It would be nice to have 12 months of exactly 30 days each.
Buit then you need intercalary days, and that annoys people.
flurbius
flurbius
yes I have found a few references on wikipedia, to metric time, I would love to see it given a fair go, say have both systems available for a while and let peoples preferences decide, Im guessing most of us over about 35 wouldnt make the transition very easily but within a generation it will have taken hold.
Used to it is the reason why the US has a mishmash of measurement units, thus not really a good enough reason.
tchrist
tchrist
That's part of why.
Not all of why.
flurbius
flurbius
yes I think we are stuck with a year and a day, the rest are more or less arbitrary
flurbius
flurbius
02:16
I actually have an android widget on my phone - that I wrote about 7 years ago - it divides the day into 10 hours = 1,000 minutes = 100,000 seconds each second being equivalent of 0.846 of a standard second, as for the days it just says how many days since Jan 1.
I am almost certain that I have the only copy but I have lost the source code for it (it was rather trivial though) If I do rewrite it I will have it report the same time no matter where on the planet it is, which I have been thinking lately as being way more useful in our ever shrinking world.
tchrist
tchrist
hah
If it's in java just uncompile it. :)
flurbius
flurbius
I did actually but it would make more sense to rewrite it as the only 'business' logic in it is one line of code that converts the system time into the metric form.
Most of the rest of the code is a service that triggers the update every second or so and I never got around to doing any settings or other options which is why I never submitted it to the play store, I did see someone else wrote one as well and I had a look but I dont think it was accurate - Im guessing the author was trying to reinvent the wheel and keep track of the time in the app.
tchrist
tchrist
02:36
I see.
 
8 hours later…
Yuki Inoue
Yuki Inoue
10:34
@tchrist mentioned on the comment in the quesiton post, so Responding...
eigo-nikki.com/article/13544470.html
Not in the actual English source I've found 12:00pm as noon, but on the English explanation sites (in Japanese), most of them said that noon should be written as 12:00pm, so I wondered and asked the question.

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