Decimal Days and Metric Time

I always thought it would be cool if we counted time in units that were multiples of ten of each other. This is known as decimal time. There’d be 100 seconds in a minute, 100 minutes in an hour, and ten hours in day. A recent Twitter conversation got me thinking about this again.

The problem with this idea is that it requires the second to be redefined. To be sure, there are other problems, too, like how do you convince six billion people to change their notion of what seconds, minutes, and hours are?

But changing the length of a second means changing a lot of scientific constants, and that’s a pretty serious undertaking. It would be better to start with the existing unit of a second (which, incidentally, is a metric unit), and build on top of that.

So, let’s put aside the actual labels we’ll give each of these units, and let’s keep a second a second. Now let’s put 100 seconds in a minute, 100 minutes in an hour, and that gives us 8.64 hours in a day. That’s not a very nice, round number. How important is it that it be a “nice” number, though?

On Earth, the average day is 86,400 seconds long. On Mars, the average day (sol) is 88,775 seconds. In our decimal time units, that would be 8.86 hours. On Earth’s moon, a day is 2,551,443 seconds long, or 255.1 hours (are you starting to see the advantage of decimal time?). Obviously, as our species spreads out to other celestial bodies, having an even number of hours in the day everywhere will impossible, because not all days will be the same duration.

So, let’s compare some other durations:

Yuck! The problem with decimal time based on the existing second is that there are no conveniently-sized units for most day-to-day human activity.

The quarter-hour, or 15 minutes, is 900 seconds. That’s nearly 1000 seconds, so perhaps the kilosecond would be a convenient unit. Ten kiloseconds would be a little over 2 h 45 m traditional, so maybe we’re on to something here.

I’ve rounded the kilosecond times for the activities, because their durations aren’t very precise to begin with. It seems like the kilosecond could be a fairly convenient unit, after all.

Now we just need to find good names for these decimal units. Seconds are fine, but the rest need new names that are easy to say, abbreviate acceptably to unit labels, and don’t sound cheesy (the old Battlestar Galactica used “centons,” and I never did figure out how much time that represented).

We might also ponder how one writes decimal time. Traditionally, in the U.S. and other parts of the world (but definitely not all!), a time of day (or duration) is written as double-digit numerals separated by colons: 12:37:58. Decimal time can be written much more simply, as decimal hours in the day: 4.548. Now, imagine you want to add (in traditional units) 4 minutes and 22 seconds to 12:37:58. Try it. It sucks. But adding 262 seconds to 4.548 decimal hours is much easier: 4.548 h + 0.0262 h = 4.574 h.

It may seem weird, but if you grow up with these units, and everything around you uses them, they’d be obvious, and the units we use today would seem strange.

Sources

Metric time. (2011, February 17). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 05:51, March 27, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Metric_time&oldid=414432996

Timekeeping on Mars. (2011, January 15). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 05:52, March 27, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Timekeeping_on_Mars&oldid=408111863.

Lunar day. (2011, March 17). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 05:53, March 27, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lunar_day&oldid=419235268.

How Not To Seek Employment

I just got this email from someone looking for work. This is reminiscent of “please send me the codes.”

LinkedIn
naiteek sangani has indicated you are a Friend:
Hi Rick,
I am a recent graduate from Columbia University and am seeking FULL TIME employment in the field of Software Development. Kindly get in touch with me if you have anything in store for me.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
regards,
- naiteek sangani

I’m not sure of this person’s culture, and what passes for initiative or standard practice, but here in the US (and I think it’s fairly evident from my LinkedIn profile that I’m in the US), this kind of approach is guaranteed to make any potential employer avoid you like the plague.

No, I Don’t Want to Invest in Your Securities or Commodities

For the last several months, I’ve been subject to a dramatic increase in the number of cold calls from companies suggesting I invest in oil fields, precious metals, or some security or another. Lately, I’ve been receiving a call or two per day. I’ve decided to list the companies and phone numbers in this post, so I’ll continually update it.

The number they’re all calling has been listed in the Do Not Call Registry for years. Now, like typical pro-consumer legislation, the Do Not Call rules allow companies with “existing relationships” to continue to contact you, as well as some degree of their subsidiaries and partners. It also has very little teeth. I had hoped for $500 fines per incident (similar to unsolicited faxing), but it doesn’t appear to be so.

So, back to the calls. They’re generally native English speakers, cheerful and energetic. They almost always imply a pre-existing relationship, by saying they’re following up on the information I requested before.

To be clear: I have never requested such information. I am hypersensitive to marketing efforts, and do all my research anonymously online. I never knowingly request information of this nature. I think it’s a blatant lie, intended to confuse me, or cause me to doubt myself, and is an attempt to shield themselves from the law that allows contact in case of pre-existing relationships.,/p>

On to the calls. This list is by no means complete. I’ve received literally dozens of calls, many I ignore. Some wake me in the morning. If I’m patient enough, I’ll get a name from the caller. I also don’t trust the caller ID; it could easily be forged, I think.

When I called one back (to verify it was not a legitimate missed call), he answered as if he were not expecting a business call. A “hello,” some confusion, and after I asked who this was, because I saw the call in my call log, he replied, “This is the after-hours answering service for US Oil Fields” (a company that has called me before, or with a name similar to one). This makes me think that these aren’t even call centers, but individuals in their homes, making these calls.

I’ve filed a complaint via the Do Not Call Registry, but they don’t address individual complaints. I filed a complaint with the FTC, but they don’t, either. I think the next step will be to contact my local representatives.

Update 2010-01-25: I called the FCC today, but unfortunately the people who handle these complaints were gone for the day. Supposedly they’ll be calling me back.