Reposting bc I dun goofed before

  • Trashcan@lemmy.world
    56·
    9 个月前

    I’m sure the artist intended to be smart and use metric time as something silly.

    The problem is he used regular time.

    60 * 60 * 24=86400=>86.4 kseconds where k stands for 1000. Like kilo for 1000 grams. Kilometer for 1000 meters etc.

    The comic doesn’t make sense…

    • neonred@lemmy.world
      48·
      9 个月前

      I cannot see what’s wrong saying a day consists of 86.4 ks. It’s a fact and it’s mathematically correct.

      • Rodeo@lemmy.ca
        23·
        9 个月前

        If we’re redifining time, why do we have to keep the same unit size? Simply adjust the duration of a second to make exactly 100 ksecs per day.

        • GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
          17·
          9 个月前

          It’s ingrained and arbitrary. The only thing we’ve found so far for measuring time that doesn’t appear to be arbitrary is Planck time, which is so small it has no use in daily life. So if you have to use an arbitrary unit anyway, why make a new arbitrary unit? And while the second, minute, hour, and to a lesser degree month are arbitrary, days and years are not, they are just based on the unique circumstances of when we started observing our world in a scientific manner.

          • Rodeo@lemmy.ca
            8·
            9 个月前

            So if you have to use an arbitrary unit anyway, why make a new arbitrary unit?

            Because whole point of metric is to use powers of ten.

            • GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
              8·
              9 个月前

              The SI unit for time is the second. It just happens to be the same length as the imperial second. Minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years are not SI units.

            • NegativeInf@lemmy.world
              5·
              9 个月前

              12, 24, and 60 are highly composite numbers and easily divisible by more numbers than 10. Also, if you are doing that, go ahead and redefine degrees in a circle and all that jazz too. Go ahead.

              • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
                5·
                9 个月前

                There has been a “metric” measurement of angles for a long time. The radian. It’s pi based instead of 10 based, but it makes way more sense than degrees.

              • Rodeo@lemmy.ca
                1·
                9 个月前

                In the days of doing math by hand, that might have mattered.

                Let me introduce you to this little thing called a calculator.

          • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
            5·
            9 个月前

            Plank time is arbitrary too. Plank time is the time it takes light to move 1 Plank length. It’s no different than any other time measurement other than it’s the shortest measurable unit of time.

            • GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
              3·
              9 个月前

              How is the shortest measurable amount of time it’s possible to measure with the physics of our universe arbitrary?

              • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
                3·
                9 个月前

                It’s arbitrary in the same way measuring the time between photon absorption/emission in a cesium atom is arbitrary or the rotation of our planet is arbitrary.

                Picking the smallest is arbitrary just like picking a larger interval.

                In the cesium clock case, you count 9192631770 because it’s close to 1 second we already are familiar with and arbitrarily say 9192631770 transitions is defined as 1 second.

                For example Planck time is defined as 5.391247(60)×10−44 seconds. But what is that second? It’s the arbitrary 9192631770 cesium transitions we picked because it’s close to the second that come from Earth’s spin.

                • GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
                  4·
                  9 个月前

                  Planck time doesn’t appear to be arbitrary, but a feature of our universe, hence the shortest measurable unit of time. It’s length in seconds is arbitrary because seconds are arbitrary. And seconds are arbitrary because the only non-arbitrary unit of time we have found so far is too unwieldy to use for anything but scientific purposes, and it’s very unwieldy for many of those.

          • lugal@lemmy.world
            1·
            9 个月前

            How is a unit that varies in time less arbitrary than units that at least have a fixed length?

            • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
              4·
              9 个月前

              Because the day and year have meanings. They are “the time it gets for the earth to make a full rotation” and “the time to come full circle around the sun”. They are of varying length, so we actually use time periods that are almost the real day and year, and call them day and year. These are fixed length.

              The second is arbitrary, because we just arbitrarily decided to split up the day in 24 hours, hours into 60 minutes and minutes into 60 seconds. Why 24/60/60? Kinda arbitrary.

              Now, does arbitrary mean it’s bad? I don’t see why. The meter is defined in a similar manner, but using multiples of 10 instead of 24/60/60.

              I know the meter and second have been redefined to be based on scientific phenomena and be independent from the earth, but their length has the same arbitrary origin. And as such, they are arbitrary.

              I don’t see what being arbitrary has to do with being a good or bad unit of measurement.

              • thecrotch@sh.itjust.works
                3·
                9 个月前

                It was created by the Babylonians, who had a base 12 numbering system. It’s no more arbitrary than base 10, and in fact superior in some ways. 12 can be evenly divided by 2, 3, 4, or 6. 10 can only be evenly divided by 2 and 5.

              • lugal@lemmy.world
                1·
                9 个月前

                I was referring to months which are arbitrary “to a lesser degree” but maybe I misunderstood the comment above mine

          • quantenzitrone@feddit.de
            1·
            9 个月前

            Seconds are defined as one gazillion times the Phase transition of some caesium atom, not the planck time.

            Otherwise you are correct.

        • Coskii
          9·
          9 个月前

          No matter how you alter seconds, minutes, and hours, days and years are fairly well set. There is no nice basket to put 365.25ish days as a year into.

    • zaphod@feddit.de
      17·
      9 个月前

      No, it’s correct, metric time is just using seconds for everything, you end up with minutes, hours, days,… as auxiliary units. And then there’s decimal time, which tries to divide the day into 10 hours, the French tried to introduce that during the revolution.

      • lugal@lemmy.world
        3·
        9 个月前

        Are you talking about SI unites? I mean, sure, there is overlap but the metric system is what people use in everyday life and SI is a scientific system where you don’t even use prefixes (like kilo) but just powers of 10. In no case to people use kiloseconds

        • ParsnipWitch@feddit.de
          2·
          9 个月前

          The SI system is a metric system and also defines the use of the words describing powers of ten. The use of kiloseconds also isn’t wrong, it just means 1000 seconds, obviously. But it only makes sense in context (for example short lived isotopes).

          The same way “Megameter” is formally correct but no one uses it because there is rarely a context where this was useful.

          • lugal@lemmy.world
            1·
            9 个月前

            I bet there is are least one or two kilo people who use it unironically.

            Jokes aside, there is a different between a metric system and the metric system, and also between not wrong and right but at this point I’m just nitpicking that people shouldn’t be so nitpicky. Don’t take me serious.

    • RoyalEngineering@lemmy.world
      22·
      9 个月前

      This is the most succinct way I’ve heard metric time explained. Very easy to understand the conversion and the reasons to use it.

    • pHr34kY@lemmy.world
      20·
      9 个月前

      It doesn’t explicitly say it, but that redefines the second to be 1/100,000th of a day.

      Doing that would break everything.

      That said, I wish speed limits were in m/s. It makes more sense to me.

      • Ultraviolet@lemmy.worldEnglish
        14·
        9 个月前

        Miles or kilometers per hour makes sense in the context of travel, you can very easily estimate how long it’s going to take to get somewhere.

        • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
          4·
          9 个月前

          Ironically, km/h is better for estimation because hours are 3600 seconds. If an hour were 1000 seconds or whatever, it would barely take more effort to calculate with m/s

        • pHr34kY@lemmy.world
          1·
          9 个月前

          I was thinking about estimating stopping distances and reaction times. The number of metres you cover every second becomes important then.

    • quantenzitrone@feddit.de
      3·
      9 个月前

      This is bullshit.

      Seconds are already metric no need to redefine them.

      Furthermore, if we redefine seconds we would also need to redefine a lot of other units.

      This would result in massive confusion and a lot of avoidable errors in science and engineering, similar to what is already happening in the us with their bullshit freedom units.

      It is not even that much harder if you get used to it.

      If 86.4ks are too much to count for you, you could instead resurrect the metric prefix myria- for 10⁴. So 1day = 8.64 myriaseconds. And instead of minutes, use hectoseconds.

  • GluWu@lemm.ee
    41·
    9 个月前

    And deci. What’s wrong base 10? Why aren’t you touching your decilitres.

  • usualsuspect191@lemmy.ca
    38·
    9 个月前

    Why would metric time still use the same seconds? Surely it’d be a different unit that was a nice multiple of 10

    • Rob Bos@lemmy.ca
      47·
      9 个月前

      Thr second is already a metric SI unit. A day happens to be 86.4 kiloseconds. I’m not sure why that is weird.

      Redefining the second would be a lot of work for no real benefit.

      Hours, days, weeks are not metric, you wouldn’t really say kiloday or centiday.

      • itslilith
        14·
        9 个月前

        There was an attempt originally, 100 seconds a minute, 100 minutes an hour and 10 hours a day, but it never stuck

        • Flumpkin@slrpnk.net
          12·
          9 个月前

          French Republican calendar time system used in France from 1794 to 1800, during the French Revolution, which divided the day into 10 decimal hours, each decimal hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds (100000 decimal seconds per day)

      • gazter@aussie.zone
        4·
        9 个月前

        We’re looking at this the wrong way. The problem is the number of seconds not dividing neatly into the period of the day. You’re right, adjusting the length of a second is impractical, so let’s look at our other options here.

        • korfuri@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          9 个月前

          The main issue is that the length of a day is not actually constant. Leap second occur (in either direction) which mean that a day is sometimes one second shorter or longer. Timezones and DST also can make a day a whole hour longer or shorter.

          Seconds are a unit for physical measurement. They’re always the same length. Minutes, days, weeks, months, years, etc are imprecise shortcuts that are convenient for our society but this convenience sometimes comes at the price of being bonkers units from the physics standpoint.

      • BakerBagel@midwest.social
        2·
        9 个月前

        Oh, so you are saying that overhauling a system that has been used for millennia in favor of one that is a bit more logical for niche cases isn’t worth it on large scales?

        • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
          10·
          9 个月前

          Saying that the metric system is a bit more logical than imperial units for niche cases is like saying that LeBron James is slightly better than my 70yo mom at very specific aspects of basketball 🙄

    • Magister@lemmy.world
      19·
      9 个月前

      60 is good because you can divide it by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30 which is convenient

      • quantenzitrone@feddit.de
        2·
        9 个月前

        yeah, lets all start counting in base-60

        I’ll start by counting to ten

        0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z α β γ δ ε ζ η θ ι κ λ μ ν ξ ο π ρ σ τ υ φ χ ψ ω ϟ 10

      • Lmaydev@programming.dev
        9·
        9 个月前

        You could change the length of a second so a day is 100 kilo seconds for instance.

        Much like other imperial measurements the length of a second is arbitrary.

        • Pohl@lemmy.world
          10·
          9 个月前

          The length of a day is variable. You would have to update the second (and every unit derived fro It) after every big earthquake, and a thousand other events.

          The solar system does not give a shit about your preference for base 10 numbers there will always be (roughly) 365.25 rotations per revolution and you don’t get a choice about that.

          • wjrii@lemmy.world
            3·
            9 个月前

            Exactly. You don’t get very far at all before perfectly natural divisions of time can’t divide evenly by 10. You can’t “fix” it, like you can with mass or length, unless you demand people give up on centering time around astronomical events. The second is an SI unit. Science can be done in seconds. Anything else just shifts the awkwardness of orbital mechanics elsewhere, while pissing everyone off.

            • Lmaydev@programming.dev
              2·
              9 个月前

              Can you explain this argument to me.

              The second is currently a fixed length, there’s a fixed amount in the day and we don’t adjust it now.

              So how would it be any different if we changed the amounts?

              • wjrii@lemmy.world
                2·
                9 个月前

                My main point is that you’ve done nothing but kick the can down the road a little bit, so people decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. It’s annoying that there 60 seconds in a minute, 1800 in an hour, ~86k in a day, fair enough. Let’s say you make a new metric second that has 100k in a day. You make certain things easier, but how are you keeping time on anything like a larger scale?

                You can probably come up with something fairly usable with ten-day weeks, but what about years? This is is where it breaks down. A year is based on astronomical events, but different ones than a day, both are deeply ingrained into the routines of life. It is 365 and a a quarter (-ish) days in a year. We’re stuck with that, unless you just want a number that has no useful context for humans after a few years. Throw in that you also have leap seconds to add every so often, and in the end it’s still going to be a mess of decimal units that go unused, and customary units that will not be given up, but with all the drama of making a change.

                There is no single bandaid to pull off, so it’s not the obvious improvement that other weights and measures are, because time is more fundamentally rooted in our experience as animals than what we label a given amount of stuff.

                • Lmaydev@programming.dev
                  1·
                  9 个月前

                  Decimal time works perfectly. For years, as you say, you are stuck by how long a year is. All you can do here is better divide the months. 13 x 28 days is my preference.

          • GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
            2·
            9 个月前

            Due to tidal forces, the length of a day is constantly trending longer. Also, the moon is slowly drifting away from the earth for the same reason and lunar months are also getting longer.

            So, no, the day hasn’t been and will not always be the same length.

      • SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world
        2·
        9 个月前

        “The second […] is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the caesium frequency, ΔνCs, the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium 133 atom, to be 9192631770 when expressed in the unit Hz, which is equal to s−1.[1]”

        • Klear@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          9 个月前

          Those definitions are picked to be as immutable, unambiguous and easily replicated in a lab as possible, but have nothing to do why a second is defined like that.

          But did you know that if you tie exactly 1m of string to some heavy object, it will swing once per second?

  • quackers
    26·
    9 个月前

    Not gonna lie… i think i would like this unit of time measurement

  • SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world
    23·
    9 个月前

    We have 24 hours in a day because the people that came up with the sundial lived around the equator (always half a day off light) and counted in base 12. 12 light hours and 12 dark is our 24 hours. You can count base 12 by using your thumb to count the bones in your finger. 4 fingers with 3 bones each gives you 12.

    It’s also why we have 60 minutes. They counted with their fingers on one hand to 5, with the other to twelve so you get 60. Why not 144? You make mistakes easily when counting to 12 with both hands.

    By now there have been many attempts to launch a different system for time keeping and calenders but it never took hold.

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
      4·
      9 个月前

      You can count base 12 by using your thumb to count the bones in your finger.

      You can count to 1F on one hand without getting knuckles involved and 3FF on both, also without knuckles.

  • pseudo@jlai.luEnglish
    16·
    9 个月前

    The metric system has one big problem indeed: it’s not duodecimal.

  • aname@lemmy.one
    13·
    9 个月前

    You cannot really make all the time units a multiple of 10 to each other as a day, months and a year, for example, are defined by external factors.

    You could perhaps change seconds so a day would be exactly 100k seconds, which would make seconds slightly shorter than they now are but that wouldn’t really change the fact that a year is 365.25 days and that a month is either 27.32 or 29.53 days depending on how you measure it.

    • Klear@sh.itjust.works
      9·
      9 个月前

      Let’s first establish decimal time, then we can talk adding thrusters to Earth to adjust its rotation…

    • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
      7·
      9 个月前

      A day is the spin of the Earth and a Year is the orbit of the Earth, but months are completely arbitrary because we (Western world) don’t use Lunar cycles for months.

      There’s no reason we couldn’t have 10 months.

      • aname@lemmy.one
        1·
        9 个月前

        You could argue that years are also arbitrary.

        Yes, we follow orbital year and adjust our time to follow it, but the orbital year has meaning in anything except scientific world.

    • reinei@lemmy.world
      3·
      9 个月前

      Except a second is also already defined by external factors so making it shorter actually messes up ALL other SI units/compound auxiliary units…

    • Railcar8095@lemm.ee
      1·
      9 个月前

      The MS has a solution for that. Days, years, weeks… are not part of the system. They are understood and the conversions accepted, but that’s it.