Once upon a time on usenet rickman wrote:
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

"English Units"?

Like an American gallon?
--
Shaun.

"Humans will have advanced a long, long way when religious belief has a cozy
little classification in the DSM*."
David Melville (in r.a.s.f1)
(*Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)

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.