Thursday, April 15, 2004

Several years ago, while riding the ferry out to the San Juans, I wrote up a new system for measuring time. I'm tired of carrying the piece of paper around so I'll put it here for the world to see.

We have this great metric system for measuring mass, volume, etc. But we still have 60 second minutes, 60 minute hours, and 24 hour days. What a mess. Instead I propose a system with 100,000 seconds a day. Each minute would consist of 100 seconds. Each hour would consist of 100 minutes. And each day would have 10 hours. Compared to old time (with 86,400 seconds/day):

New second = .864 old seconds
New minute = 1.44 old minutes
New hour = 2.4 old hours

You could name the new units something different if that would be less confusing to people. I'd propose the following lengths for common daily activities:

Work = 3 hours
Lunch = .5 hour
Sleep = 3.5-4 hours

Yes, that's a little more sleep and a little less work than Americans are used to. This is a good thing. :) I have some ideas for reseting the calendar system back to match the solar/lunar cycle, but that isn't fleshed out yet. It would be fun to write up a little clock program that displayed this time format.