Someone was talking about decimal time where the second is shortened by
about 15% allowing 100 secs/minute, 100 minutes/hr, 10 hr/day.

I think the utility of this is limited and it would cause a lot of changes
in society. We presently have a large number of convenient time increments
which would not be so convenient in the new system.

First, the hour would be 2.4 times longer leaving us with no convenient unit
about the same length of time as the hour. The closest would be the
quad-deci-hour which would be 0.96 old hours. The deci-hour would be pretty
convenient about 4% shorter than a quarter hour. The old half hour would
now be about a fifth of a new hour, so we could call it a "fifth" which
might become confused with a non-metric liquor measure, a fifth of a gallon
which has since become 750 ml in metric.

The inconvenience would come from the need to totally recalibrate every type
of measurement we use that considers time... speed limits, work days, time
zones... Would we extend this change to measurements of angles which often
are done in degrees, minutes, seconds?

How would we adjust the work day? Do we go to 3 hour work days which would
be about 7.2 old hours? Shift work would have to split hours to get three
shifts while some businesses that use two 12 old hour shifts would hum along
just fine with 5 new hour shifts. Many businesses opening at 9 AM would now
open at 4:00 (I assume we would just count 0 to 9 hours rather than the
annoying AM/PM thing), folks would take a lunch break at 5:00 and banks
would close around 6:00 while retail would remain open until 9:00 or 9:50
(hmmm, that is still about the same).

The minutes gets pretty whacked gaining 26.4 old seconds. So "give me a
minute" becomes a quarter more weighty of a request. The original pulse was
conceived to match the human pulse so our normal pulse rate will become 86
bpm instead of 60 bpm.

In science the changes would be enormous. With a redefinition of the second
every time related measurement would have to change including many in EE
such as capacitance/charge/current, heck, the definition of the
gravitational constant and even the speed of light would have to change.
Every text book would change and every instrument. This would create so
much confusion that we really would need new names for the second, minute
and hour.

This could go on all day (the one measurement that doesn't change) with a
huge list of changes we will have to make and the many adaptations we as a
society would need to accommodate. Then, in the end, we would still have
leap years.

--

Rick C

Viewed the eclipse at Wintercrest Farms,
on the centerline of totality since 1998