Decimal Time

It’s another sea day, it’s still stormy outside, and I may have too much time on my hands.

Last night Glenda had already been asleep for an hour, but I was still up studying timekeeping. We had just passed into another time zone. My Apple Watch not only wanted to know what time it was, it also wanted to know where we were. Inside this floating metal cage, my gps would not work. Besides, we are sailing by the most remote of the Kurile Islands, and there is not a city Apple devices recognize within a thousand miles--uh, 1620 kilometers. And I wasn’t about to go outside with these twenty foot waves spraying this third deck to get a gps fix. When I had difficulty finding a city nearby, all of the solar and lunar indications went haywire. In the attempt to repair this, I discovered a watch face that divides the 24-hour day into ten equal parts, called “hours,” or “decimal hours.” One advocate of the decimal system abbreviates this to “dours.” Each decimal hour is divided into 100 decimal minutes or “dinutes.” Each decimal minute is divided into 100 decimal seconds, or “deconds.”

The day starts at midnight or 0 hours. The 24 hour day is divided into 10 equal segments. Noon marks the first half of the 10-decimal hour day, so it is designated as 5 hours, 0 minutes. Half a day, or .5 days. At six o’clock in the morning the day is one quarter through, so it is designated as 2 hours, 50 minutes--or 2.5. (The day is 25% through. Make sense?). At six in the evening the day is three-fourths through so the time is 7 hours, 50 minutes, or 75% through. Get it?

While I saw some applications that use local time, most adherents advocate using UTC. By doing so any time in the world could be designated by year, day of the year, hour, and minute. Ordinarily one could leave off the seconds. For example, I’m writing this on a Tuesday, the 276th day of 2023. Using decimal notation the time is Tuesday 2023.276.788. I could even leave off the name of the base 7 week and designate this time as 2023.276.788. No am & pm. As simple as a phone number. No odd-numbered months. And, God be praised, no daylight savings time. No time zones. This is the time everywhere on earth at this moment. I actually found a watch you can buy that has a ten-hour face. Like all things metric, keeping time is not hard—until you try to convert it to English, or Imperial, or base 13, or the length of King John’s nose.

I doubt that this system will ever catch on. Actually it was proposed by the French after their revolution. Their notion of the decimal system included not only length and weight, it also included time. While the decimal measurements for physical objects caught on, the measurement of time never did.

For more information check out this website.

https://forbrains.co.uk/education/decimal_time_…Weiterlesen