time & calenders; where is your year ZERO?

[IAM]

The metric system brings coherence to measurements around the world and in space but our time/calendar system seems ancient in comparison. Here are some ideas to make the world better.

1- USA and the few other holdouts should adopt and use the metric system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_system

2- Get rid of systems like daylight savings time. Daylight savings time moves the hour forward or backward twice a year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time

3- Institute a Universal time system based on a 10 hour day. With the current system some use a 24 hour system some use a two 12 hour system but both are not based on an easily used decimal point system. With 24 hours 60 minutes in each hour and 60 seconds in each minute you have 86,400 seconds per day. In a metric time system you would have 10 hours with 100 minutes (deci-hours) in each hour and 100 seconds (centi-hours) in each minute for a total of 100,000 second units. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time

4- Reset the date (I am very interested in different opinions about what your '0' year would be). It would be nice for 0 year to be the day the earth began but there is no specific date and then we would have to record the billions of years for simple dates so it must be something universally significant to mankind. A threshold looking toward the future. I would say the day man first orbited the earth would be year 0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Gagarin So 1961 would now become year 0. So this would be the year 52.
Other than that I would choose some astronomical event like the Mayan calendar did to set year 0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_calendar

5- The months in our current calendar are not logically based. We should go back to a 28 day month calendar. The moon and female cycles are a 28 day bases and use to be reflected in our time keeping. <IF you are married/girlfriended you are on a 28 day calendar whether you acknowledge it or not.> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_reform
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
http://www.lawoftime.org/thirteenmoon.html

If I could only do one of these it would be #2 because the daylight savings time is the most irritating.
But for humanity I think the most important are making a 28 day month calendar and reseting the year. If the year reset is based on space exploration, like Yuri, then I would say that is number 1.

 

[Quintillus]

I don't think any of these is a great idea (as in, a good idea and realistic), but the reasons differ.

1 - This will probably happen over the course of the next century, but it will go much more smoothly if done gradually. It's already happened in areas where it really matters, like rocket science, but whether it happens tomorrow or in 50 years doesn't matter much for things such as cooking. Do it gradually - add kilometers to distance signs when they are replaced, for instance (but still leaving miles for the near future), and eventually people in the U.S. will have a better sense of what a metric unit represents and will be less opposed to them. It's not a bad idea, but it is a bad idea to go on a crusade trying to get it changed quickly.

2. I personally really like daylight savings time, and would advocate extending it to all year round. Extra daylight after work/school in the evenings is great. If it were done away with, I might look into learning Spanish and moving to western Spain (although realistically, I probably wouldn't), but as it is I'm glad I live in the western part of a time zone and in one that does save daylight.

3. I don't think this causes enough of an issue to be worth the hassle of changing. In real life, I almost never deal with more than 90 seconds or so at a time (if I do, I refer to it in minutes or hours), so the fact that there are 86,400 seconds in a day instead of 100,000, doesn't matter. Meanwhile, we have tons of clocks and computers already used to a 12/24 hour day. If someone says, "Meet me at 8 tomorrow" and you aren't sure if they mean morning or evening, it's easy enough to ask and clarify. If they say, "Meet me at 20:00 tomorrow" it's already clear.

4. I think this would be a terrible idea. I think it's actually an advantage that our calendar is ancient, because that makes it convenient for referring to historical dates as well. If I tell you that Diocletian died in 1064 AUC, it probably doesn't tell you a lot. Similarly, if I tell you that he died in 1650 BG (Before Gagarin), the average CFC poster probably doesn't know what that means. But if I tell you he died in 311 AD, you now have a decent idea what time he lived in. Changing what year we take as our starting year would just cause confusion with the centuries of documents that are already dated in Anno Domini.

True, the lack of a year 0 is occasionally a nuisance, but a pretty minor one.

It also would get really old really quickly if we re-based every few decades or century (which wasn't uncommon prior to the introduction of Anno Domini more than a millenia ago). For now we say Anno Gagarin; in 50 years we'll say Anno Musk after SpaceX establishes a successful colony on Mars. Five centuries from now we'll have gone through eleven year-numbering schemes and figuring out how long ago something was when it happened in 2014 Anno Domini and all you have is the original source dated in AD would be far less convenient than if you just knew that the current year is 2532, and with some quick math you know that this post was made 518 years ago.

5. Like 3, probably not worth it, although perhaps less problematic. Inherently, having 13 28-day months or 12 30-day months with a few bonus days at the end isn't a bad idea. But attempts to implement this, such as during the French Revolution, never caught on for more than a short time. And that was before we had calendars built into electronics.

Aligning with the lunar calendar isn't bad in theory, but I'm not sure very many people would really care that the first day of the month is also when the full moon is. And it isn't exactly 28 days, is it? Wikipedia indicates it's approximately 29.5 days, and I don't think anyone wants a month of 29.5 days.

So what would I change?

6. Get rid of leap seconds or make them predictable. Not a big factor in everyday life, but not predictable and not a big deal to be half a second off the solar mean. If we're 12 seconds off in a century, just change it all at once.

7. Make the date of Easter predictable. I know that technically it's something like the third Sunday after the first full moon after the second Tuesday of February, but that's a boatload to keep track of. If it has to be a Sunday, why not "the 2nd Sunday of April" or something easy to keep track of like that? Or "observed on the first Sunday after April 6th" - it seems kind of silly that the anniversary of the resurrection can move by more than a month when it's based on an actual event.

8. Extend Daylight Savings Time to year-round. That way we wouldn't have to move the clocks an hour backward or forward twice a year, plus it wouldn't be dark when driving home from work in the winter.

9. Convert all our time units (minutes, seconds, hours) to be multiples of two, so it's easier and more efficient for computers to work with. 16 hours in a day, composed of 64 minutes each, and each minute having 64 seconds. You wind up with 65,536 seconds per day - not that many less than we have today, and conveniently just a small enough number that it fits in an unsigned 16-bit integer, nice and convenient for legacy or small-scale embedded systems.

Okay, (9) is a joke, but it's an example of why I don't see the 100,000 second day to be superior to the 86,400 second day (or, indeed, to the 65,536 second day).

A few nitpicks aside, though, I don't feel like aggrieved by the deficiencies in the Julian/Gregorian calendar systems, or Anno Domini.

 

[Perfection]

How about we leave it as is and spend the time we could have spent doing this partying?

 

[Tahuti]

I think variety in measurement systems is a good thing: There is nothing to prevent you from crossovering metric and imperial units and doing so can grant us greater flexibility overall.

A major advantage of imperial units over metric units is that imperial units often roughly correspond to their namesake. However, the lack of it in metric units often give it an edge in other uses, like shoesizes. It is largely a personal thing overall, so I wouldn't favour complete metrication of the world, even though I come from metrified country myself.

 

[Perfection]

Shoes should be measured in feet

 

[IAM]

I don't think any of these is a great idea (as in, a good idea and realistic), but the reasons differ.

1 - This will probably happen over the course of the next century, but it will go much more smoothly if done gradually. It's already happened in areas where it really matters, like rocket science, but whether it happens tomorrow or in 50 years doesn't matter much for things such as cooking. Do it gradually - add kilometers to distance signs when they are replaced, for instance (but still leaving miles for the near future), and eventually people in the U.S. will have a better sense of what a metric unit represents and will be less opposed to them. It's not a bad idea, but it is a bad idea to go on a crusade trying to get it changed quickly.

2. I personally really like daylight savings time, and would advocate extending it to all year round. Extra daylight after work/school in the evenings is great. If it were done away with, I might look into learning Spanish and moving to western Spain (although realistically, I probably wouldn't), but as it is I'm glad I live in the western part of a time zone and in one that does save daylight.

3. I don't think this causes enough of an issue to be worth the hassle of changing. In real life, I almost never deal with more than 90 seconds or so at a time (if I do, I refer to it in minutes or hours), so the fact that there are 86,400 seconds in a day instead of 100,000, doesn't matter. Meanwhile, we have tons of clocks and computers already used to a 12/24 hour day. If someone says, "Meet me at 8 tomorrow" and you aren't sure if they mean morning or evening, it's easy enough to ask and clarify. If they say, "Meet me at 20:00 tomorrow" it's already clear.

4. I think this would be a terrible idea. I think it's actually an advantage that our calendar is ancient, because that makes it convenient for referring to historical dates as well. If I tell you that Diocletian died in 1064 AUC, it probably doesn't tell you a lot. Similarly, if I tell you that he died in 1650 BG (Before Gagarin), the average CFC poster probably doesn't know what that means. But if I tell you he died in 311 AD, you now have a decent idea what time he lived in. Changing what year we take as our starting year would just cause confusion with the centuries of documents that are already dated in Anno Domini.

True, the lack of a year 0 is occasionally a nuisance, but a pretty minor one.
It also would get really old really quickly if we re-based every few decades or century (which wasn't uncommon prior to the introduction of Anno Domini more than a millenia ago). For now we say Anno Gagarin; in 50 years we'll say Anno Musk after SpaceX establishes a successful colony on Mars. Five centuries from now we'll have gone through eleven year-numbering schemes and figuring out how long ago something was when it happened in 2014 Anno Domini and all you have is the original source dated in AD would be far less convenient than if you just knew that the current year is 2532, and with some quick math you know that this post was made 518 years ago.

5. Like 3, probably not worth it, although perhaps less problematic. Inherently, having 13 28-day months or 12 30-day months with a few bonus days at the end isn't a bad idea. But attempts to implement this, such as during the French Revolution, never caught on for more than a short time. And that was before we had calendars built into electronics.

Aligning with the lunar calendar isn't bad in theory, but I'm not sure very many people would really care that the first day of the month is also when the full moon is. And it isn't exactly 28 days, is it? Wikipedia indicates it's approximately 29.5 days, and I don't think anyone wants a month of 29.5 days.

So what would I change?

6. Get rid of leap seconds or make them predictable. Not a big factor in everyday life, but not predictable and not a big deal to be half a second off the solar mean. If we're 12 seconds off in a century, just change it all at once.

7. Make the date of Easter predictable. I know that technically it's something like the third Sunday after the first full moon after the second Tuesday of February, but that's a boatload to keep track of. If it has to be a Sunday, why not "the 2nd Sunday of April" or something easy to keep track of like that? Or "observed on the first Sunday after April 6th" - it seems kind of silly that the anniversary of the resurrection can move by more than a month when it's based on an actual event.

8. Extend Daylight Savings Time to year-round. That way we wouldn't have to move the clocks an hour backward or forward twice a year, plus it wouldn't be dark when driving home from work in the winter.

9. Convert all our time units (minutes, seconds, hours) to be multiples of two, so it's easier and more efficient for computers to work with. 16 hours in a day, composed of 64 minutes each, and each minute having 64 seconds. You wind up with 65,536 seconds per day - not that many less than we have today, and conveniently just a small enough number that it fits in an unsigned 16-bit integer, nice and convenient for legacy or small-scale embedded systems.

Okay, (9) is a joke, but it's an example of why I don't see the 100,000 second day to be superior to the 86,400 second day (or, indeed, to the 65,536 second day).

A few nitpicks aside, though, I don't feel like aggrieved by the deficiencies in the Julian/Gregorian calendar systems, or Anno Domini.

1. If people have both mph and kph on signs they will just default to the familiar. We have 'tried' switching to metric before and then switched back. Metric should be the first and primary system taught to kids. Different units being used lead to this space disaster...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter

2. My primary concern is to stop the change in time.

3. The point is more about converting to a decimal system. The number of seconds in the day was to illustrate that The new system would still be usable on a daily basis.

4. Changing to a new starting date is more about getting away from mythology. Not about changing years to keep up with current events. We could just as easily pick a significant astronomical date 1,000 years in the future.

 

[Tycho Brahe]

I would like to get rid of the 30/31 day month. I find it confusing and annoying. But I still want them to fit the solar year.

If all the months where 30 days long, that would leave 5 days (6 in leap years) for something. Festivus! Like, say, one extra day around every solstice and equinox, except the winter solstice, which could be two dayes (three in leap years)

Only a suggestion.

Months that doesn't stay in the same place of the seasons is a bad system.

 

[Pegasus_77]

You obviously observe your girlfriend or wife really well. Is that also a beginning day of a several-day span for you to have “a rest ”in bed ?haha.

 

[IAM]

You obviously observe your girlfriend or wife really well. Is that also a beginning day of a several-day span for you to have “a rest ”in bed ?haha.

It's really weird how every month for 3 or 4 days I am super loaded down at work; sometimes I even have to go out of town.

 

[IglooDame]

I don't mind DST too much, though I've lived in places where it's either hilariously inadequate (Alaska) or pointless (Hawaii). What I do mind is governments changing the days the adjustment falls on, as our glorious US Congress did a few years back. A global standard spring/fall day would also be extremely beneficial so global call centers don't have to shuffle schedules twice a year to accommodate the week or two of one country shifting to DST ahead of another one.

Metric time (or any time-unit adjustment) is a non-starter, it would make the Y2K mitigation efforts look trivial by comparison.

 

[IAM]

Metric time (or any time-unit adjustment) is a non-starter, it would make the Y2K mitigation efforts look trivial by comparison.

Well, maybe not right now but when we start rebuilding after the apocalypse then we will have a fresh start.

 

[Perfection]

Metric is stupid and arbitrary. We should abandon it and the obsolete decimal number system in favor of binary and Planck units.

 

[classical_hero]

1. Metric is good and everyone should be using it.
2. Daylight savings suck and thankfully we have rejected it 3 times.
3. Time is already metric, just not to the power of 10 like you want it to be, just to the power of 6 instead.
4. there is no zero year and never will be. Playing with zero is very dangerous

5. Our calendar is a combination of lunar and solar cycles. It is the best of both worlds and I ain't changing that for nobody.

 

[Agent327]

4. there is no zero year and never will be.

Glad someone noticed.