Tom Biasi wrote on 8/31/2017 10:16 PM:
On 8/31/2017 10:00 PM, rickman wrote:
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.

Anyone old enough may remember when the USA tried to go metric. The people
just would not go for it and it was abandoned.

I don't remember that "people just would not go for it". I don't recall
much resistance at all. I think the "resistance" was at other levels. We
had a partnership with Canada to change together and had a multi-step
program. We completed the first two or three steps and quit. That's why
metric is taught today in schools, it was part of step two or three. When
we had to take a step that would actually change something (I think it was
highway signs) we told Canada to go on without us and we'd catch up later...
*much* later.

I can't believe that even today we still use English units in many
engineering fields. Mechanical engineers often use inches and feet. God
knows what civil engineers use, probably rods. It was just recently that I
learned the acre comes from 160 square rods.

Actually I just looked it up and the acre was defined as 1 chain by 1
furlong while a rod is a quarter of a chain. A chain is 0.1 furlong, so
they are all a related system of measurement.

--

Rick C

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