Decimal Time

Here:

Reply to
Tom Biasi
Loading thread data ...

The human animal has a very strong preference to continue to do what it is used to. It probably has a psychological name and also an evolutionary significance. In some cases, it may be a good thing, but in other cases, it hampers our progress tremendously.

Your post demonstrates this perfectly. You are trying to invent something new, but you keep getting stuck in your old ways, the ways that you are so used to.

Here in Norway, we used to read numbers between 20 and 100 with the tens before the ones, like the Danes and Germans still do. So, 24 would read as "four and twenty". 23,795 would read as "three and twenty thousand seven hundred and five and ninety". Imagine the number of mistakes that were made when trying to write down a number that someone spoke. As the phone system made its introduction, the need to write down long numbers increased, so the problem became more apparent.

In 1951, the government decided that we would end the insanity and convert to the system that the Swedes and English use, where the digits are read in the same order they are written. Since then, the school children have been thought the new system, and the state broadcaster has used the new system exclusively (except quite a few slip-ups, of course).

There is a clear trend, where the old method is more prevalent among older people. Even still, people who were born twenty years after the change was officially made, still often use the old way today.

As you can see, changes take huge amounts of time. Even a small, simple change like that, after more than 60 years, we are probably not even half way there.

One morning in the early fifties, a military officer spoke to his battalion: "As of today, we no longer say four and twenty, but two and forty". He was simply so set in his ways that he was unable to break free of them, even when he tried.

As I mentioned in another post, we keep the second, the day and the year. Hours, minutes weeks, months all get thrown away. We may need to introduce a couple of new units, but that will work itself out automatically.

--
RoRo
Reply to
Robert Roland

No animal has any concept of what an hour is. If we humans decide to divide the day into 173 in stead of 24, the animals wouldn't even notice any difference.

Of course, the cows expect to be milked at the same time every day, but they don't care if the farmer calls it 6 o'clock or 32.4 o'didly.

--
RoRo
Reply to
Robert Roland

And probably on solar time, too. Except that cows get used to the drift if the farmer insists on using clock time...

Mike.

Reply to
Mike Coon

You still haven't explained how any of this will be better than what we have now.

--
Rick C 

Viewed the eclipse at Wintercrest Farms, 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
rickman

The sun comes back nearly every 24h !

Animals , like us, live based on circadian rythm.

Reply to
Look165

Have you been thinking of the induced cost (around 1000 billion $)

Who would pay ?

And practically :

Clocks and watches replacement (What about Big Ben and others ? )

Reprogramming BIOS or human time clocking on PC.

TV and radio station should fix up the problem.

Redefine a reference second.

Enterprises should have to update their payment bulletin.

Redefine geographic meridians

And what about the travels (planes, boats... ? ).

...

Reply to
Look165

Big Ben would be a deferred problem: it has just been stopped for 4 years for maintenance!

Mike.

Reply to
Mike Coon

5 day week, 7 week month, ten months in the year, a week and a day (two on leap years) for New Year. 11% more free time, assuming we still have a 2 day weekend. Or more, if the robots are doing all the work anyhow.

Boom!

Reply to
Clifford Heath

Look165 wrote on 9/2/2017 3:42 AM:

So what does that have to do with hours, minutes and seconds??? You do know there are 24 hours in a day, right? Changing the length of the hour won't change the length of the day.

--
Rick C 

Viewed the eclipse at Wintercrest Farms, 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
rickman

Yep. At the time (about 1975), I was working for a company that tried to switch to metric. This was aided by having the drafting manager and mechanical designer also serving on the metric conversion council (or whatever it was called). At one point, we started sending metric fabrication drawings to various vendors. They were immediately returned. The problem wasn't understanding the new metric way of doing things, it was that they would need to replace all their English lead screws, measurement instruments, gauges blocks, programming, etc before they could cut metal. They also claimed that they needed considerable staff training to handle the change (because someone tried to simultaneously switch to true position dimentioning). We would need to wait until the shops converted before we could orders parts in metric.

So, we went back to English units and waited for the "inevitable" conversion that never happened. It seems that most of the other customers followed the same pattern. They tried metric, failed, and went back to English. So, we asked the various fab shops why the delay? They answered that since everyone seemed to be going back to using English measurements, they must have run into some problem with metric. Therefore, the fab shop saw no reason to convert. After getting approximately the same story from ALL our vendors, we gave up in disgust.

"Why hasn't the U.S. adopted the metric system?"

The idea of decimal time has been around for centuries: The big problem is that time, astronomical, and navigational units that are based on nautical miles, degrees, minutes, seconds, will end up with some rather odd looking numbers. Right now, 1 degree is equal to 60 nautical miles at the equator. It's too hot right now to think about what decimal time would do to all those. Of course, we could make things look better by switching from 360 degrees per circle, to

400 gradians per circle: When in doubt, change everything.

Everything that deals with time will need to be tweaked. That's going to be a problem since we have many ways to keep accurate time: Notice the difference in seconds. Some smartphone vendors are still having problems keeping accurate time: More ways to keep time, all of which will need to be decimalized or maybe decimated:

This is what happened when most everyone assumed that NASA was totally metric, but wasn't: I suspect that a decimal time change will have similar transition problems.

Why don't you just declare that the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle is exactly 3.0 instead of 3.14159...? I think it would be easier than changing to decimal time.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

The whole world measures car wheel diameter in inches. There is, however, one country where you can (or at leasy could) buy car wheels in millimeter sizes. Wanna guess which country?

--
RoRo
Reply to
Robert Roland

We are dividing and multiplying by 10, which is much easier to understand and to do calculation with.

--
RoRo
Reply to
Robert Roland

Then there is the Hebrew lunar calendar: which adds an extra leap month in 7 out of every 19 years (3, 6, 8,

11, 14, 17, and 19): Being able to handle such an ugly calenadar might explain why Jews are quite good at finance. Can you imagine what a loan amortization schedule looks like under such a calendar?
--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Jeff Liebermann wrote on 9/2/2017 3:03 PM:

I'm for it. How will you get the circle to agree?

--
Rick C 

Viewed the eclipse at Wintercrest Farms, 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
rickman

You need to do a bit more than say, "it will all work out". Sounds like a steaming pile of crap to me. The calendar will be crap no matter what you do because there is no connection between the day and the year. We are using a crap system because there is no such thing as a good one. Units less than a day are invented and can be changed at will. But we don't have the will.

--
Rick C 

Viewed the eclipse at Wintercrest Farms, 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
rickman

Excellent.

Not a problem. Just put a flat spot (chord) somewhere on the circumference. That will shorten the circumference sufficiently so that the ratio equals exactly 3.0. Please feel free to name such a flattened circle in my honor. The newly established Bureau of Decimation should then declare that the official US circle will have a flat spot.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

We had little resistance here in Australia too, and plenty of people who would "not have gone with it". But it was mandated; all aspects of industry and commerce were evaluated and placed on a time-line. By a certain date, all green-grocers were required to display prices in both pounds and kilograms. Some time later, prices had to be charged by the kilogram. Some time after that, it became illegal to display prices in pounds. Etc... and so for every part of life, on a schedule that was planned ahead to assist people in learning the new system. It was not just recommended as "a good idea".

My understanding is that "the land of the free"(*) failed because they did not make it mandatory.

Clifford Heath

Reply to
Clifford Heath

Years ago I went down to the office post room to buy a few stamps. They were, IIRC, 19 pence at the time. Thinking the young girl at the counter would tear off a 3x3 block for me I asked for 9 stamps. Her face fell with panic at the prospect of asking me for the money! So I took pity on her and changed my request for ten stamps. That didn't help her...

Mike.

Reply to
Mike Coon

I think that circle is already in use. I've seen shafts that shape and once in awhile I see tires that shape. Heck, I saw one the other day that was on a wheelbarrow. The story was that it was filled with polyurethane foam instead of air and sat too long while curing. lol

--
Rick C 

Viewed the eclipse at Wintercrest Farms, 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
rickman

ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.