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stephengillie

How about the metric time system?

1 day = 10 hours

1 hour = 10 minutes

1 minute = 10 second minutes

1 second minute = 10 third minutes

Or should it scale at 1:100? Why or why not?

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The French [0] tried to implement this twice! They failed both times, and I think it's due to more than having everyone in the world (or country) relearn to hold time in their head. Ultimately I believe it becomes less practical in day-to-day usage. 12 (and obviously 60, as a multiple of 12) can be divided by 2,3,4, and 6, while 10 can only be divided by 2 and 5. This would be the most difficult change for people, as a quarter or third of an hour are important metrics for daily life (I understand that seconds expand the divisibility for the sake of quarters (thirds remain unattainable), but this can happen in our current system and it's not often people speak in eighths of hours). I think this is a more common usage than the expansion of seconds-to-minutes, hours-to-seconds, etc. (a use-case where the decimal system really shines). Though, perhaps with the simplicity of the scaling, people would change their perspective on how they think/speak about time! It's definitely interesting to think about.

As an aside, I think this makes for a lot of practical uses for the imperial system of measurement. In a scale-intensive environment (science labs, kitchens, etc.), I think it would be foolish to not use metric. However, with small, one-off projects (mostly w/r/t length) I think it makes great sense to use feet and inches for halves, thirds, and quarters.

[0] http://mentalfloss.com/article/32127/decimal-time-how-french...

I built and android app just like this that marks ten hours, ten minutes, ten seconds and ten ticks being each tick 0.864 ancient seconds. Midnight starts at 000 and noon at 500.

Link?

Not the original poster, but I have decimal time as part of my (free) Android French Revolutionary Calendar app.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ttaxus.the...

or the source https://github.com/jhbadger/Thermidor-Android

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