Talk:Metric time
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Time, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to Time on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this notice, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion. |
| ??? | This article has not yet received a rating. |
Archived of this talk page restored at Talk:Metric_time/archive1
Contents |
[edit] note to contributers in the USA:
the use of non ISO standard seperators in articles should be avoided.
96% of the world uses a comma (,) as a decimal seperator ex: (0,864) and a period (.) as a thousands seperator, ex: (1.000.000 = 1 million) the ISO standard is to leave a space between thousands, and to use a comma as a decimal point.
American date format (MM DD, YYYY) is also unique in the world (used only in the USA) and should also be avoided. the world standard date format being: (DD MM YYYY), and the ISO standard (YYYY-MM-DD). ISO standard time format: (00:00:00)
the term Billion also causes problems when used in the American definition (1.000.000.000) since the rest of the world uses the chuquet system where 1.000.000.000 is a Milliard (1000 million) and 1.000.000.000.000 is a billion.
American Standard measures, based on obsolete English Imperial Units, should also be avoided, since the USA is the only remaining country still using this system.
you will cause a great deal of confusion to those outside the USA (which accounts for only 4% of the world's population) by using standards unique to the USA.
- Please see Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_dates_and_numbers for the current en: wikipedia policy on this. If you feel that this is incorrect, or should be changed, please discuss it there. Specifically, dates should follow the guide lines in that document, (i.e. <no wiki>Month-name-in-full Day-Number Year--number</no wiki>) as this allows local user cutomisation.
Iainscott 13:13, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I am delighted by the (apparently) sudden and passionate interest in decimal and metric time, since the posting of the articles, and more than happy to discuss the subject/s, and additions to the articles here..The Author
- This is not an addition. It is a reversion to material that is formatted incorrectly as per the Manual of Style, not to mention grammatically incorrect and HTML-using. If you wish to make actual useful edits, please do, but don't continue your crank-like obsessions with keeping your version of the article. -- Grunt (talk) 14:37, 2004 Aug 20 (UTC)
make whatever corrections you feel are needed, however any US standard formatting will be reverted to international formatting
- If you would like to change formatting, please do so without reverting everything else too. -- Grunt (talk) 15:03, 2004 Aug 20 (UTC)
sorry, next time I will only edit the formatting, many of your links were not active Wiki links, were you planning on writing articles for these?
Your statistic of 96% is patently false, and irrelevant to the English Wikipedia. Our conventions are based on what is most agreeable to the majority of the English-speaking world, which almost universally uses periods and commas to delimit decimals and thousands, respectively. On the French Wiki, Continental punctuation conventions are observed, as this is what the majority of French speakers expect. This is as it should be.
The so-called "American" convention for millions and billions is that used throughout the scientific community, and commonly avoided by enumerating such large numbers anyway. As for your apparent hatred of dual-standard measurement systems, I invite you to peruse, at your leisure, our manual of style, in addition to our excellent article on metrication.
Hope this helps.
this time I have only edited the formatting and not the text, shall we agree to leave it as it is, until more useful material can be added? :-)
btw. The current world population is 6400 Million - the current US Population is 4,6% of the world total (300 Million) - the Population of the EU is 450 Million - which includes Great Britain (an English speaking state) - English is not defined as "American".
- I'm English. Here we use a period as a decimal seperator and a space as a thousands seperator. [[User:Theresa knott|
]] 15:34, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)
here in Germany (and the rest of the continent), we use komma (,) as a decimal seperator, and punkt (.) as a thousands seperator, which makes reading English sites quite confusing %-(
-
- Well I find reading french or german websites quite confuseing... I dont, however, go to the french or german wikipedias and insist that they change their style conventions. Perhaps you could extend the same curtosy to the english wikipedia? Iainscott 16:17, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I would first like to apologise for my persistant reverts and header removal, I give you my word as a gentleman that no such edits will occur again. it was not my intention to be disrepectful, nor uncooperative. I would prefer to work with all of you in working out an positive solution which is acceptable to everyone.
in reply to Iainscott - I understand, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with american standards, I am simply suggesting that ISO formatting (which is a global standard, comprehensible to anyone - americans, europeans, asians, etc..) would be a practicle compromise solution. do you agree?
- While I can't speak for Iainscott, I certainly do not agree. The ISO convention is perfectly suitable for ISO standards, but encyclopedias are written in common language using common conventions. The English-speaking world, and for that matter the entire Western Hemisphere, is accustomed to seeing the period used as a decimal point; to suddenly usurp this in the name of "Internationalism" is unacceptable. One of the first things learned in the course of studying another language is its punctuation conventions, and swapping around the marks we use to delimit numbers would serve only to confuse, not disambiguate. (At any rate, you're on the wrong page for this discussion—if you want to effect policy change, take it up at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style.) Austin Hair 02:33, Aug 22, 2004 (UTC)
Yes, I see that the English-speaking world is quite unified in this standard, however The Entire Western Hemisphere is not, since I also live in the Western Hemisphere, along with those in other non English speaking European countries, all of which use a comma to signify a decimal place, and a period to signify thousands.Metrische Zeit 31 August 2004 - 16:00 (UTC)
[edit] Asimov units
The Asimov proposal had names fot the units. I don't remember them, and anyway the essay was translated. Probably one of them was the while or something like that.
[edit] metric v. decimal
This article seems to be more about Decimal time of day than about the metric system.
There seems to seems to be some confusion here between metric and decimal, and between time interval and time of day. The modern metric system (SI) defines units of time interval, while the time of day is defined by various time scales, some of which are based upon the metric base unit of time interval. Time of day is like, "We will strike the enemy at 0800 hours." Time interval is like, "The battle lasted 8 hours." You measure time of day with a clock or watch, and time interval with a stop watch. The stuff about French clocks and Swiss watches should probably be moved to the Decimal time article.
But then, if this article was really about the metric system's definitions of time, then perhaps it should just redirect to the existing article on the Second. The only reason I can think to keep it would be if there were other metric time units in use or seriously proposed. Although "millidays" sound intriguing, does anyone actually use them? I see that there are a lot of web sites about individual proposals for "metric time," but most of them are really about decimal time of day, and many seem to have little to do with the metric system. -- Nike 07:00, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)
-- Now the Decimal and Metric articles point back and forth to each other. The historic version of this page was better in that respect.
Someone has added a heading "Alternate Meanings" which repeats information already in "Alternate Units". I don't object in principle to this section, but the two sections should be distinct from each other if they are going to both be there. -- Nike 07:55, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)
"Better" how? Please be specific. I tried to make the two articles complementary, rather than contradictary. Of course they point to each other, since they cover similar topics, and are often mentioned together, or confused with each other. Of course, there is always room for improvement, so if you think that something could be worded better or added, please go ahead, anonymous one. -- Nike 11:58, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)
[edit] Alternative Units
I made some changes to this section. I reverted the line about "notable acceptance", because lack of familiarity isn't the only reason people haven't all changed base units for time. Much of the rest of the last paragraph was repetitive or just very poorly written, and I removed the last line:
- A quarter that was current in China for a couple of millennia before the Jesuits had the ke redefined.
- because it doesn't make any sense at all. FireWorks 06:09, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
-
- Lapidary, admitted, but I envisaged the interested and clever reader to follow the ke-link for clarification. As for acceptance, it is a well tested fact in office and home environments with decimal clocks that it was lack of feeling for how long new franctions of minutes and hours were that made people most uneasy with the new units. / Kurtan 23:08, 13 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Moved from article space: "In computing"
I wanted to point out, that most computer operating systems use (at least internally) metric time for timekeeping and assigned date/times to objects like files (in contrast to using seconds,minutes,hours,day,month,year, as for example DOS did). I therefore added the paragraph:
[edit] In computing
In computing, at least internally, metric time gained widespread use for ease of computation. Unix time gives date and time as number of seconds since January 1, 1970, Microsoft's FILETIME as multiples of 100ns since January 1, 1601 [1].
This was just reverted. Perhaps other editors may want to voice their opinion. --Pjacobi 12:27, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
- I don't think that Unix time is usually considered any more "metric time" than UTC is, since they both use whole SI seconds to track civil time, rather than measuring time interval using metric prefixes. Unix time is decimal expression of time, which some people call metric time, but strictly speaking, it's not.
However, metric time submultiples are used on computers, e.g. milliseconds, microseconds and nanoseconds. Unix time is usually stored in binary as an integral number of seconds; milliseconds, etc., are stored as a separate number. Network Time Protocol is another application using nanoseconds. I would like the article to elaborate more on the use of metric submultiples (and multiples) on computers. --Nike 11:05, 22 June 2006 (UTC)
[edit] The O'Harian Calendar
I doubt this is worthy for inclusion in Wikipedia, but it might be. Anyway, I just found this page [1]. Its about an alternative system of times and dates. Best of all though, it is actually going to be used - on asdfjkl;.com I just wondered what other Wikipedians thought of the idea?--Bjwebb (talk) 10:09, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
- This seems to have nothing to do with the subject of metric time, and Wikipedia does not allow original research. Try a calendar reform forum, such as CALNDR-L. --Nike 19:52, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Metric time in fiction?
Might be worth to make such section. E.g. I know that Vernor Vinge used kiloseconds and megaseconds in his novels. 80.201.199.103 17:40, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
- And that one episode of The Simpsons. Principal Skinner moves Springfield to a version of Metric Time. It's that first one with Stephen Hawking.--The Sporadic Update 00:23, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Date metric system was introduced
The article states:
- When the metric system was introduced in France in 1795, it included units for length, area, dry volume, liquid capacity, weight or mass, and even currency, but not for time.
Someone changed this, with the note "exact date: 24 November 1793 (4 Frimaire of the Year II)". This is incorrect. That was the date that the full Republican Calendar was introduced, along with decimal time. The Republican decimal metric system of weights and measures was introduced by the act passed on 18 Germinal an III (April 7, 1795). There were earlier acts passed relating to the metre in 1793, but it was the 1795 act which finally established the entire system, including the metre, litre, gramme, are, stere and franc, along with the metric prefixes. Decimal time was also indefinitely suspended in the same act. See A History of the Meter for more information. --Nike 22:43, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Unit of Metric Time
One of the drawbacks to the argument for adoption of metric time is that a usable unit of measurement has not been derived.
All other measures are based on the meter - liter as 1,000 cubic centimeters, gram as the mass of a cubic centimeter of water, degree as 1/100th the amount heat to transform that volume of water from solid to gaseous states, etc. - but no such derivative has been defined to equate time, in any meaningful way, to the meter.
Compounding that problem is the inability to correlate a decimal measurement to readily observable phenomena (phenomena on which much of human activity is based). Specifically, the relationship of an observable day (one full rotation of the earth) to an observable year (one full rotation of the earth around the sun) cannot be expressed evenly in multiples of ten - therefore to use either as the basis of measurement would render the other useless for any but the most academic of purposes.
Granted, none of this points to a solution - but it may be indicative of the reasons a solution for metric time has not yet been defined, and may possibly never be defined. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 209.246.150.146 (talk) 15:56, 12 April 2007 (UTC).
It might be possible to use the speed of light as a basis for a unit of metric time.
The speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second - so the base unit (I'll call it a "tick" for lack of a common term) could be the amount of time it takes light to travel one gigameter - which would be roughly a third of a second (1 second equals 3.3444 ticks)
That would satisfy your first goal (to have an objective measurement, derived from the meter) ... though it does not satisfy your second goal (even numbers for observable phenomena) - a day would be 25.0872 kiloticks and a 365-day year 9.156 megaticks.
But then, to beg the question, are observable phenomena really that important? Water may boil at a nice, even 100 degrees - but every other liquid boils at a non-interger temperature - and what observable phenomenon corresponds to one kilometer or one megagram?
Granted, human beings live their lives in daily, seasonal, and annual cycles (dismissing the month and week, as those are entirely arbitrary), but I see nothing wrong with a 25-kilotick clock and a 9-megatick calendar, aside from having to adjust for "leap" ticks (which is no different from the current standard, with leap seconds and leap days).
- This is original research. Besides, there already is a unit of metric time, which, as the article states, is the SI second, and which also has a precise relationship with the meter in the SI metric system. This is a solution in search of a problem. It would make no sense to define the metric time unit in terms of the meter, because we can measure time much more precisely than we can measure distance, which is why the meter is defined in terms of time, instead of the other way around. The metric time unit is defined in terms of atomic oscillations. The metric system has had a "usable unit of (time) measurement" for over a century now. It may be unfortunate that there is no even number correspondence with the meter, but there is not such a correspondence with other base units, either. In fact, despite its original definition, the kilogram is not defined in terms of the meter today, and is only an approximation of the original definition, and the gram, itself, is defined as 1/1000 kg. The liter was also for a long time only an approximation, until it was more recently redefined to be a synonym for the cubic decimeter.
- Also, please be sure to sign your comments. --Nike 22:42, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
-
- Try this: [2]. It provides both consistency and obedience to septimal week from Ten Commandments by geometrized derivation of all units from daynight, while using septimal multiples and submultiples. Wikinger 16:14, 10 August 2007 (UTC)
- In all ideas of time the day is the only constant. So it seems to me that the base unit of metric time should be the day, like the Chinese used. Everyone here is talking about the second being the base unit of time, but the second is only an arbitrary value that is 1/60th of a minute, which is 1/60th of an hour, which is 1/12th of 1/2 of a day. The second is just a small fraction of the actual base unit, 1 day. I know this in all falling on deaf ears, so does anyone know if there is anywhere that someone could share real ideas of metric time with the world and have an educated conversation? --TGO 21:24 December 18, 2007 (CAT)
First, the "septimal" stuff is totally irrelevant here. Second, the article is primarily about what is, rather than what ought to be. The second is the only accepted and used metric unit of time, although others have been proposed. There is a forum where conversation about these ideas are shared. --Nike (talk) 22:16, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
[edit] 40-hour Day
If ever we decide to metricize the day, maybe we should go with a 40-hour day (instead of the 10-hour day most would propose); we'd have a 10-hour morning, a 10-hour afternoon, a 10-hour evening, and a 10-hour overnight period.
There's a system of angular measurement called, variously, the grad, grade, gradian, gon... There are 400 grad per circle -- that's 100 per right angle...
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grad_(angle)>
This works reasonably well with the Earth, since it's very close to being 40 000 km in circumference.
So, a 40-hour day would line up reasonably well with the Earth's movements... One hour (1/40th of a rotation) would cover 1 000 km of distance (at the equator).
But as with most metricized days, the second would have to be redefined. Currently, there are 86 400 s/d (24 x 60 x 60).
With a 40-hour day, each hour having 100 minutes, each minute having 100 seconds, there'd be 400 000 s/d (40 x 100 x 100).
An alternative would be to have hours and millihours instead of minutes and seconds: so, 40 x 1000 = 40 000 mh/d. That'd make the mh a little more than twice what the second is now. To ease transition, the second could be defined as half a millihour, making 80 000 s/d. The new second would then be 1,08% of what it is now.
Of course, there'd be some repercussions; e.g., the speed of light would become 323 775 854,64 m/s, due to the slight increase in the duration of the second.
rAS--192.75.95.127 (talk) 05:45, 10 January 2008 (UTC)
