Nobody Cares: Technology-only Edition

[Veritable Quandry]

This is a decimal clock from the French Revolution. When they threw out imperial measures in favor of the metric system, the French revolutionary government came up with a 10 hour day with 100 minutes in an hour and 100 seconds in a minute. Compared to current systems:

Decimal	24 hour	12 hour
0 (midnight)	00:00	12:00 am
1	02:24	2:24 am
2	04:48	4:48 am
3	07:12	7:12 am
4	09:36	9:36 am
5	12:00	12:00 pm
6	14:24	2:24 pm
7	16:48	4:48 pm
8	19:12	7:12 pm
9	21:36	9:36 pm

Napoleon kept most of the metric system, but decimal time was abandoned very quickly among those who even bothered to make the change.

 

[Free]

Want.

A modern version, because as an antique I don't think I could swing the cost...

Hmm.

 

[bubblesort]

This is a decimal clock from the French Revolution. When they threw out imperial measures in favor of the metric system, the French revolutionary government came up with a 10 hour day with 100 minutes in an hour and 100 seconds in a minute. Compared to current systems:

Decimal	24 hour	12 hour
0 (midnight)	00:00	12:00 am
1	02:24	2:24 am
2	04:48	4:48 am
3	07:12	7:12 am
4	09:36	9:36 am
5	12:00	12:00 pm
6	14:24	2:24 pm
7	16:48	4:48 pm
8	19:12	7:12 pm
9	21:36	9:36 pm

Napoleon kept most of the metric system, but decimal time was abandoned very quickly among those who even bothered to make the change.

In Loki, all the clocks at the TVA use hexadecimal time. Look at Miss Minutes, for example.

 

[Essence Lumin]

Since we are making things cleaner with metric time we might as well dispense with leap seconds too and use International Atomic Time. It doesn't vary. It is as accurate as the average of over 400 atomic clocks which is very accurate indeed. It's currently 37 seconds different than the usual time.

 

[Soen Eber]

...or we could use January 1st, 1970 at 00:00:00 UTC as a starting basis ... say, 1,634,247,960 right now.

 

[Essence Lumin]

...or we could use January 1st, 1970 at 00:00:00 UTC as a starting basis ... say, 1,634,247,960 right now.

We could store it in a 32 bit signed integer too! Until 2038 anyway.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

There's several SF future histories where everything is in multiples of seconds because once you're off Earth days are no longer a useful way to divide time.

The question is... should a kilosecond be 1000 seconds or 1024 seconds?

 

[Veritable Quandry]

In the Foundation series (I believe) they are trying to identify the original planet humans evolved on, and they decide to look for planets where all of the units are one (one gravity on the surface, one day rotation, one AU from the star, one atmosphere pressure).

 

[Free]

The question is... should a kilosecond be 1000 seconds or 1024 seconds?

Are you purposefully looking to become my nemesis?

 

[Noodles]

Everyone:


Noodles: Yes, the past few hours breaks down into NN:NN and .22 of a single, normally standard but inexact second in metric time.

It seems like the core issue is the days to years conversion. It's basically going to be 364.25, unless we find a way to either accelerate or decelerate the Planet, either down to 100 days per year or up to say, 500 days per year. Then we could count a "year" as two rotations, and call it 1000 days/year.

Otherwise it's .6 seconds = 1 metric second.

 

[Free]

It seems like the core issue is the days to years conversion. It's basically going to be 364.25, unless we find a way to either accelerate or decelerate the Planet

That's if you rely on using an annual, cyclical system. Who said we need years fitted into a calendar-style notation?

 

[Essence Lumin]

It's basically going to be 364.25,

Your're short one, or to be more exact it's 365.2422.

 

[Noodles]

Your're short one, or to be more exact it's 365.2422.

Look, no one ever said you have to be good with numbers to do goofy meme math.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

In the Foundation series (I believe) they are trying to identify the original planet humans evolved on, and they decide to look for planets where all of the units are one (one gravity on the surface, one day rotation, one AU from the star, one atmosphere pressure).

Asimov has a number of short stories where people in the future identify the Earth, mostly humorous.

Spoiler: Big spoiler for a story that's probably been out of print 50 years.

I think he wrote the one where the most common artifact remaining on the surface were toilet bowls, and nobody could figure out what they were for, or what the ceramic tiles with the untranslated inscription "EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS" meant.

Another one where they wonder why ancient humans used base 10, because humans have 12 fingers. Their kilosecond would be 1728 seconds.

Edit: Free I like to think of us as frenemies.

Coincidentally recent XKCD: TSP vs TBSP

 

[Ashiri]

It seems like the core issue is the days to years conversion. It's basically going to be 364.25, unless we find a way to either accelerate or decelerate the Planet, either down to 100 days per year or up to say, 500 days per year. Then we could count a "year" as two rotations, and call it 1000 days/year.

Otherwise it's .6 seconds = 1 metric second.

The year was 500 (shorter) days in the very distant past.

 

[Free]

The year was 500 (shorter) days in the very distant past.

I don't think we had math (of any kind) then.

 

[Noodles]

I don't think we had math (of any kind) then.

Maybe we need to uninvent math...

 

[bubblesort]

I sometimes wonder what a surprise Y2K would look like in 2021. There's like 2 or 3 packages out there that could cause it, if some obscure coder got hit by a bus somewhere in the world, because even unix time is too much of a pain in the ass to work with. I like unix time! Time in general is just obnoxious.

 

[Free]

I sometimes wonder what a surprise Y2K would look like in 2021.

You'll have to wait for 2038.

Year 2038 problem - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[bubblesort]

You'll have to wait for 2038.

Year 2038 problem - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Oh yeah, I'm not worried about 2038 at all. We have time to fix it. I remember working tech support at Mindspring, at midnight, Jan1, 2000. We were all bracing for chaos, because, you know... who knows what could happen? I got like, one call all night, because nobody was on the internet, because they were scared of Y2K, LOL. It basically turned into a New Years party at work, LOL

The catastrophe I'm imagining is if something like the left-padding issue happened, but instead of left-padding, whoever runs NTP dies, or maybe gets hacked. NTP is a bit of a stretch, I know they probably have safeguards at NIST... but how many super important things like that can break without notice? Looking at npm, how many people are really maintaining some of those widely used time packages? Think about the time zone packages, too. How many of those mostly unknown, volunteer coders would have to get hit by a bus before critical parts of the internet failed, causing bank transfers to stop, and planes to drop out of the sky? It would be worse than Y2K or 2038, because nobody knows when, or if it's coming.