On Mon, 5 Mar 2001, Tony Eros wrote:
> Just out of curiosity, does anyone know if there ever was an attempt to
> apply the metric system to time?
I suspect you mean decimalisation (where everything is a some multiple of
ten of the base unit). I believe that it was agreed that the world should
eventually move to a decimal system of time measurement at the
International Meridian Conference in 1884. Unfortunately most humans still
use complex calendar systems loosely based on the speed of rotation of the
Earth, the time taken for the Earth to orbit around the Sun, and the time
taken for the Moon to orbit around the Earth. On the other hand, computers
commonly use a digital time system internally (for example the number of
seconds since the Unix epoch), which can be much more easily converted to
decimal than to the complicated calendar systems that we use.
I recently read "A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge, which was
interesting in that the people in it measured everything in units of
seconds, Ksecs, and Msecs.
--
------- Alex Holden -------
http://www.linuxhacker.org/
http://www.robogeeks.org/
Received on Mon Mar 05 2001 - 17:39:24 GMT