I feel like the time thing is less an issue than other systems because it’s better adopted across the world. Part of where metrication came from is that each country would have their own standard for how long a foot or how big a gallon was, but the months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds are pretty well agreed these days. Most units can be selected arbitrarily without changing much about their usefulness, but with time you want to stick as close as possible to solar days, number of solar days per year, and maybe line up with some seasons/solstices/equinoxes. Changing the sub-divisions of the day also means we’d probably want to re-draw time zones, so we’d want a subdivision that can be reasonably easily divided by something close to 24. I guess you could have a 10 hour day and each hour be 100 minutes, or some such and move to 20 or 25 time zones to keep relatively consistent. A 10 day week doesn’t divide evenly into a year though. The divisors of 365 are 73 and 5, so I guess you could do 10 and have one of the weeks split somewhere, but then you still have to deal with the occasional leap year.
Then there’s the consistency issue, the length of a day varies over time, so regardless of the subdivisions we choose, high precision measurements are going to need to account for that to keep our time in line with the solar day.
You’re definitely right that people can agree on the length of day and year regardless of where they live. This way, there’s no urgent need to change that part of the system.
Since 365ish isn’t a number you can neatly divide with anything, I suggest we just pick some number you like, and then add a leap day when needed. So, let’s say you want to divide the year into 10 decimal months, so let’s call them “donths”. Each donth has exactly 36 days, which means that at the end of the year you still have 5ish days left. It’s not exactly 5, because astrnomy, but don’t worry about it. Then you’ll just lump all the remaining bonus days into an extra donth and you’re done. The length of the first 10 donths is always constant and the length of the leftover extra donth at the end of the year is whatever it happens to be. You could make those days a national holiday when people just wait for the new year to start or whatever.
36 day month is just as arbitrary to me as having 28-31 days per month though, and do you make a week 6 days to fit the length of a month, or keep it at 7 since it doesn’t really evenly divide into current months(aside from February 3/4 years), anyway and then those extra 5-6 still messes up the rotation. National holiday sounds good if you’re doing the kind of work that can be put off for the week, but becomes a pain for business that need to keep running through holidays, particularly a holiday that lasts more than 2 days. Lots of our economy is based on things like standard work weeks/months, billing on monthly basis, etc… At best I think we could shuffle a couple days from the 31 day months to February so it’s more consistent, or make them all 30 and make things like solstices/equinoxes/new years day be the extra 5 tacked on to (or between, but consider it part of the month for purposes like monthly billing) the appropriate months. Lots of disruption for minimal gains though.
Really, we have the second defined well in SI, and there’s no real reason we couldn’t just use that with the usual prefixes for things that don’t need to correlate with the calendar. When we get to the point of colonizing other worlds then there’s an argument to make some consistent standard to accommodate each world having a different solar day/year but as long as pretty much everybody hangs out on Earth I just don’t see any significant benefit to trying to metricize timekeeping.
I understand the desire for mathematical beauty, but the real world is messy, inconsistent, somewhat random and constantly drifting. There is no good solution to a problem like this, and that’s why my first proposal was to remove months entirely and just count the number of days instead.
The current 7 day week is pretty good IMO, so there’s no urgent need to mess with that. However, if you want all the numbers to align beautifully, 7 not a very nice number for that. If you change that, you would still need to figure out how do you put rest days somewhere in there, and that’s when it’s going to get really messy.
That billing thing is a good point, so having agreed upon periods of some sort would be beneficial. If we have months of some sort, then we should use those. If we just count days instead, then billing could happen every 20 days or whatever number you happen like.
When it comes to SI prefixes and seconds, I would love to see engineers and scientists count things in ks, Ms, Gs etc. If people do this all the time, they would probably memorize important values like a work day is about 28.8 ks or a lunch break takes about 1.8-3.6 ks etc. If you’ve estimated that your experiment is going to last 33 ks, it’s going to require two shifts from your research team. If your shorter experiment can be left unsupervised for 4 ks, then that would be the best time for lunch.
I feel like the time thing is less an issue than other systems because it’s better adopted across the world. Part of where metrication came from is that each country would have their own standard for how long a foot or how big a gallon was, but the months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds are pretty well agreed these days. Most units can be selected arbitrarily without changing much about their usefulness, but with time you want to stick as close as possible to solar days, number of solar days per year, and maybe line up with some seasons/solstices/equinoxes. Changing the sub-divisions of the day also means we’d probably want to re-draw time zones, so we’d want a subdivision that can be reasonably easily divided by something close to 24. I guess you could have a 10 hour day and each hour be 100 minutes, or some such and move to 20 or 25 time zones to keep relatively consistent. A 10 day week doesn’t divide evenly into a year though. The divisors of 365 are 73 and 5, so I guess you could do 10 and have one of the weeks split somewhere, but then you still have to deal with the occasional leap year.
Then there’s the consistency issue, the length of a day varies over time, so regardless of the subdivisions we choose, high precision measurements are going to need to account for that to keep our time in line with the solar day.
You’re definitely right that people can agree on the length of day and year regardless of where they live. This way, there’s no urgent need to change that part of the system.
Since 365ish isn’t a number you can neatly divide with anything, I suggest we just pick some number you like, and then add a leap day when needed. So, let’s say you want to divide the year into 10 decimal months, so let’s call them “donths”. Each donth has exactly 36 days, which means that at the end of the year you still have 5ish days left. It’s not exactly 5, because astrnomy, but don’t worry about it. Then you’ll just lump all the remaining bonus days into an extra donth and you’re done. The length of the first 10 donths is always constant and the length of the leftover extra donth at the end of the year is whatever it happens to be. You could make those days a national holiday when people just wait for the new year to start or whatever.
36 day month is just as arbitrary to me as having 28-31 days per month though, and do you make a week 6 days to fit the length of a month, or keep it at 7 since it doesn’t really evenly divide into current months(aside from February 3/4 years), anyway and then those extra 5-6 still messes up the rotation. National holiday sounds good if you’re doing the kind of work that can be put off for the week, but becomes a pain for business that need to keep running through holidays, particularly a holiday that lasts more than 2 days. Lots of our economy is based on things like standard work weeks/months, billing on monthly basis, etc… At best I think we could shuffle a couple days from the 31 day months to February so it’s more consistent, or make them all 30 and make things like solstices/equinoxes/new years day be the extra 5 tacked on to (or between, but consider it part of the month for purposes like monthly billing) the appropriate months. Lots of disruption for minimal gains though.
Really, we have the second defined well in SI, and there’s no real reason we couldn’t just use that with the usual prefixes for things that don’t need to correlate with the calendar. When we get to the point of colonizing other worlds then there’s an argument to make some consistent standard to accommodate each world having a different solar day/year but as long as pretty much everybody hangs out on Earth I just don’t see any significant benefit to trying to metricize timekeeping.
I understand the desire for mathematical beauty, but the real world is messy, inconsistent, somewhat random and constantly drifting. There is no good solution to a problem like this, and that’s why my first proposal was to remove months entirely and just count the number of days instead.
The current 7 day week is pretty good IMO, so there’s no urgent need to mess with that. However, if you want all the numbers to align beautifully, 7 not a very nice number for that. If you change that, you would still need to figure out how do you put rest days somewhere in there, and that’s when it’s going to get really messy.
That billing thing is a good point, so having agreed upon periods of some sort would be beneficial. If we have months of some sort, then we should use those. If we just count days instead, then billing could happen every 20 days or whatever number you happen like.
When it comes to SI prefixes and seconds, I would love to see engineers and scientists count things in ks, Ms, Gs etc. If people do this all the time, they would probably memorize important values like a work day is about 28.8 ks or a lunch break takes about 1.8-3.6 ks etc. If you’ve estimated that your experiment is going to last 33 ks, it’s going to require two shifts from your research team. If your shorter experiment can be left unsupervised for 4 ks, then that would be the best time for lunch.