Time?

"PartyPooper2012" (PartyPooper2012)
11/27/2019 at 09:46 • Filed to: None

Yes. Day before thanksgiving is a good day to ponder things that have little or no use so lunch can come quicker.

Weight can be measured in Metric system or Imperial.

Distance can be measured similarly.

What is time measured in - metric system or imperial? I know you will say it isn’t measured in metric or imperial system. I know this

But if it were to take sides, would it be on the side of metric or imperial?

I for one think time is measured in imperial system. You see, if it were in metric, there would be something like Kilohours or centiminutes. Instead we have individually named units of measure similar to foot or mile or ounce...

DISCUSSION (7)

someassemblyrequired > PartyPooper2012
11/27/2019 at 10:04

24hrs/60mins probably have more to do with the glorious numerical properties of multiples of 12, which would have made factoring units of time (and also mechanical clockmaking) easier . Time is one unit of measure where the SI (metric) and Imperial systems have always had common definitions .

kanadanmajava1 > PartyPooper2012
11/27/2019 at 10:44

Wikipedia says this:

“The metric system was first used in France in 1795. It had units for length, area, dry volume, liquid capacity, weight or mass, and even amounts of money, but not for time. Decimal time of day had been first used in France two years earlier, but was set aside at the same time the metric system was started, and did not follow the metric pattern of a base unit and prefixed units. James Clerk Maxwell and Elihu Thomson (through the British Association for the Advancement of Science - BAAS) came up with the Centimetre gram second system of units (cgs) in 1874. The ephemeris second (1/86400 of a mean solar day) was made one of the original base units of the modern metric system, or International System of Units (SI), at the 10th General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) in 1954. The SI second was later made even more exact. It was made into the time of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation from the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom.”

So the decimal time was not based on the metric system but the following time system was. But a rough version for the second was established even earlier:

“ Greek time periods, for example the mean synodic month, were usually specified quite precisely because they were calculated from carefully selected eclipses separated by hundreds of years—individual mean synodic months and similar time periods cannot be measured. Nevertheless, with the development of pendulum clocks keeping mean time (as opposed to the apparent time displayed by sundials), the second became measurable. The seconds pendulum was proposed as a unit of length as early as 1660 by the Royal Society of London. The duration of a beat or half period (one swing, not back and forth) of a pendulum one metre in length on the Earth’s surface is approximately one second. ”

So in a way the second was originally an Imperial standard but it was made more accurate by tying it with the SI system.

Ash78, voting early and often > PartyPooper2012
11/27/2019 at 10:55

Weight can be measured in lbs, kgs, pood, or in the case of the human body, STONE, whatever the hell that is :D

I was just thinking about this time thing yesterday as my daughter was struggling to read the clock. She gets it, but it takes a while.

Then later I was logging my time from a trail run and realized how much Excel hates expressions time, and how you can’t easily compare them or perform math against them. All of it needs to be decimalized, base 10, all that.

While we’re at it, how about Julian Dates?

Ash78, voting early and often > PartyPooper2012
11/27/2019 at 11:00

Man, that loooong intro with the drums never gets old. And the background vocals just add so much texture.

One of the top 10 songs of all time, IMO.

ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com > PartyPooper2012
11/27/2019 at 11:08

There are some university (my former employer) weather sites that we pick up as part of our network at the flood commission. For some reason, they have them configured to report wind in meters/second. I don’t know why. No one reports wind in that unit of measure , but I’d like to think a physics nerd was chuckling as he set that up.

facw > PartyPooper2012
11/27/2019 at 11:28

The second is metric unit of time. All those other units of time are something else.

There have of course been other decimal time systems including one used briefly during the French Revolution and Swatch Internet Time™

PartyPooper2012 > kanadanmajava1
11/27/2019 at 11:57

If you dig a little deeper, there are 60 minutes in an hour. There are 60 seconds in a minute. There are.... 1000 milliseconds in a second... so its kind of like both... at second to millisecond it converts from imperial to metric.

Crazy