this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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Reposting bc I dun goofed before

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[–] [email protected] 105 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (17 children)

A proposed better calendar that would have made as much sense as converting to the metric system

https://www.mic.com/articles/139584/this-13-month-calendar-proposal-on-reddit-would-make-our-lives-so-much-better

EDIT: turns out that the idea is not so new ... it was called the "International Fixed Calendar" and it was first proposed in 1902
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar

[–] BlueMagma 49 points 6 months ago (8 children)

In my country, the week starts on monday

[–] [email protected] 37 points 6 months ago (6 children)

I think weeks start on monday everywhere except for one country..

[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 months ago

Yeah, the country that makes all the fking calendar apps that make me go to settings and change the first week day. Every time. God fking why.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago

Uhh no. India too has Sundays as the first days of the week.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (3 children)

I think it's a US thing to start on Sunday 1

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Great if you birthday is always a Saturday!

Not great if your birthday is always a Monday 🙁

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (7 children)

What's stopping us from just switching to this calendar right now? How do I convert my birthday to this calendar? I'll switch this very second

[–] Patches 20 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago

damn pieces of paper 😔

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago

I prefer the way the Hobbits do it: 12 months of 30 days, then 5 (or 6) days straight of winter holiday/new year festivities. But I would totally get behind this calendar in a heartbeat, too.

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 6 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago

The only non insane person

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 6 months ago (5 children)
[–] [email protected] 22 points 6 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

UTC while abolishing time zones is the superior format anyway.

2024-02-15T23:30:33Z

Largest to smallest. The only other logical way is smallest to largest. But that gets annoying when filing systems are involved.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (5 children)

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...

[–] [email protected] 49 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago (10 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago (12 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 6 months ago (6 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 26 points 6 months ago (5 children)

It’s not the measurement system’s fault people like to fall down two notches and use hundreds of milliliters instead. The same applies to decimeters. Most people use meters and centimeters for some reason.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 6 months ago (1 children)

At least in Sweden, decimeter and deciliter are very commonly used. They are rather convenient units of measurement.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago (4 children)

Because the Swede is reasonable, unlike the Danes

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It strikes me that decagrams would be good for measuring flour

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

That´s because it in fact is. In Austria dekagramm is a common unit, abbreviated dkg or dag. In shops it´s standard to buy and label cheese and sliced cold meats in dag and in Austrian recipe books stuff like flour, cornstarch, sugar, butter and fat are measured in dkg.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 6 months ago (19 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 49 points 6 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago

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)

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 months ago (5 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Exactly RuneScape ticks are where it's at, there are 100 ticks in a minute

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 25 points 6 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 22 points 6 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 6 months ago (1 children)

as a promoter of the kilofoot I about agree and am offended by this comic.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago

you might be interested in centipedes

they don't really have 100 feet, but at least their name is metric

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (3 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago (7 children)

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 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

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

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