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how come time isn't in metric?

Subpar Spatula

Subpar Spatula

Banned
like, we have meters, centimeters and all that jazz that is multiples of 10. how come time goes for 60 seconds to 1 minute, with another 60 for an hour, 24, for a day, and 7 for a week. isn't there a more efficient way?
 
Subpar Spatula said:
like, we have meters, centimeters and all that jazz that is multiples of 10. how come time goes for 60 seconds to 1 minute, with another 60 for an hour, 24, for a day, and 7 for a week. isn't there a more efficient way?
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its been this way for too long, we cannot fuck with it now.
 
O29DbWs.jpg
 
sarcastor said:
a more important question is why the fuck are we still using fahrenheit. or feet, or acres, or inches.
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Technically all of the measurements used in the US are based on the metric system. They're all just run through a conversion process.

The official definition of a yard used by the US government is a measurement of distance equal to 0.9144 metres. The official definition of a pound is a unit of weight equal to 0.4536 kg.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmSJXC6_qQ8
 
Metric measures are handy when you want to scale things up or down without much effort, but even in countries that have adopted metric measure there has to be some accommodation for traditional measures. So the UK has litres of fruit juice in the supermarket but pints of beer in pubs, metres of curtain fabric but distance in miles on the road signs. For time, metrication just never caught on because the traditional measure is too deeply ingrained.

Revolutionary France did experiment with decimal time, dividing the day into ten decimal hours of 100 decimal minutes each with 100 decimal seconds. This required the decimal second to be about 86.4% of the traditional second. This never caught on in general use and was only officially mandated for a little over 6 months. There followed a number of French attempts to introduce decimal time over the nineteenth century, but none found favour.

China also used a decimal time system until 1645, when a European-style time system was introduced by Jesuits.
 
sarcastor said:
a more important question is why the fuck are we still using fahrenheit. or feet, or acres, or inches.
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There are a shit ton of legacy maps, infrastructure signs, standards and all kinds of random stuff that would be extremely expensive and time consuming to switch over and convert. Teaching engineers and scientists to use both is easier and cheaper. If you can't handle unit conversions then you should probably find another field is the gist of it.
 
I remember thinking about this in primary school and asking the teacher.

It'd be a pretty interesting shift considering how tied to a 7 day work cycle many occupations accross the world are. How would the perhaps 7 days of work and 3 day weekend affect people's health and productivity? I mean they could go 4 on/1 off but I would not like a 1 day weekend. Maybe 4 on/2 off, 3 on/1 off would be nice.

I certainly wouldn't be against it in general. Metric hours, minutes and months would take some getting used to but would probably be easier for future generations.
 
jobrro said:
I remember thinking about this in primary school and asking the teacher.

It'd be a pretty interesting shift considering how tied to a 7 day work cycle many occupations accross the world are. How would the perhaps 7 days of work and 3 day weekend affect people's health and productivity? I mean they could go 4 on/1 off but I would not like a 1 day weekend. Maybe 4 on/2 off, 3 on/1 off would be nice.

I certainly wouldn't be against it in general. Metric hours, minutes and months would take some getting used to but would probably be easier for future generations.
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The thing is the massive effort to change it is not worth it. Is metric better? Sure. But by how much? Is any significant segment of the population struggling telling time?
 
Manzoon said:
Teaching engineers and scientists to use both is easier and cheaper. If you can't handle unit conversions then you should probably find another field is the gist of it.
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In Europe science is normally taught in SI units. The thought of an astronomer working in miles or a meteorologist working in Fahrenheit and inches of mercury makes me quite giddy. The issue with legacy units does still exist in civil engineering, though the Ordnance Survey recalibrated Britain on a metric grid in the mid-twentieth century and this has considerably simplified the problem.
 
Blame the babylonians with their base 60 arithmetic and the solar system for how long it takes for earth to go around the sun.

Our measurements are irregular because the units are all tied to physical quantities. A day is significant as is a year. And the babylonian system makes sense regarding divisions if you are counting in sexagesimal
 
Because 12/24/60 are all way more divisible than 10/100. Really, all units and our counting system should be in base 12, if we get down to it. It would make everyone's lives way easier.
 
It was a huge issue, the biggest issues of the 1800s

Smart Euro scientists: changing clock to metric
Early USA Union scientists: removing the U from hour
 
jstripes said:
Honestly, a Base-12 system would have been ideal.
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I was taught base-12 currency (shillings and pence) and base-12 length (feet and inches). But we had sixteen ounces to the pound, fourteen pounds to the stone, and eight stones to the hundredweight. And as for distance, I won't even bother to detail the multipliers for yards, chains, furlongs and miles. They were all different.

That stuff takes time and effort to master. I think kids are a lot better off without all that nonsense. Decimal is good enough.
 
Hollywood Duo said:
The thing is the massive effort to change it is not worth it. Is metric better? Sure. But by how much? Is any significant segment of the population struggling telling time?
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It's not really about telling time rather making calculations based on time.

Though yes the change is massive and would have huge implications on everyone's daily lives depending on what format they choose. The benefits probably don't outweigh the cost so it is unlikely we will change. There are also some facts we simply can't change like the number of days in the year. Still interesting to think about.
 
Because for all the merits and logic that the metric system can claim, its format for time and date are least beneficial to organization or communication.

We should be thankful metric time is not popular.
 
to divide a solar day into 10 "hours" that each have 10 "minutes" that each have 10 "seconds", you would have to redefine the duration of a second

thankfully nobody subdivides seconds by anything other than powers of 10
 
StrategyFan said:
you might be able to get rid of leap years with some very different numbers from 24/60/60

you'll never get rid of leap seconds because the earth's speed isn't constant
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Sorry, question was unclear... meant eliminate having both leap years and leap seconds. Mainly, I was always curious why we couldn't just adjust how long a second is so that -- barring changes with the earth's orbit around the sun that periodically forces us to make second-level adjustments -- we don't have to add a whole calendar day every four years as well.
 
Didn't we have this thread a few months ago?

They tried it during the French Revolution and it didn't stick, though in the 1970s when there was a push to adopt the metric system, there were metric clocks sold as gimmick items.

But this is why scientists use the MKS system - meters, kilograms, seconds and strictly speaking, not metric.
 
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