Go metric system!

The University of Wisconsin is one of the most liberal campuses... I remember going down and always having some group protesting something, be it freeing Tibet or whatever the issue du jour was. Well, the one thing I would ever become an activist for is a movement to get the metric system to the US (the British don't even use the English system!). I wanted to start an organization called CHEMS (Chem E's for the Metric System). Alas, the left wing liberal in me never manifested itself, and after graduating and joining the corporate world it disappeared altogether.

Now I was perusing Facebook, and it has the groups you can join (my favorite group I've joined is "When I was your age Pluto was a planet" with over 600,000 others). One group I also joined was one for bringing the metric system to the US. It is here where the following was posted. Please note, I did NOT come up with this myself (although I'm sure many of you would've believed me if I told you I did ). So enjoy.

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Nerdy as it may be, I once worked out a metric version of time units. I've retyped it as best I can remember and recalculate. It has an interesting effect on terms of speed, as detailed in the lower section. Enjoy.


The way things currently are:

1 day
24 hours/day
60 min/hr = 1440 min/day
60 sec/min = 3600 sec/hour = 86,400 sec/day

My proposed metric units of time:

1 day
10 hours in a day
100 minutes/hr = 1000 min/day
100 seconds/min = 10,000 sec/hr = 100,000 sec/day

So the proposed version of seconds would be only slightly faster than the current version, specifically 0.864 of a second as long. No big deal, when it's just a matter of us getting used to it. Easier than getting used to a different number on speed limit signs in kph (but we'll get to that in a bit). If you think about, you may notice this version of hours to minutes or minutes to seconds is very similar to the way meters and centimeters (and going the other way, meters to kilometers) are commonly used for measurement of length, with the deci- or deka- units ignored. But for those of you who might be interested, here's the full version...

1 day
10 hours in a day
10 deci-hour/hr = 100 deci-hours/day
10 minutes/deci-hr = 100 min/hr = 1000 min/day
10 deci-min/min = 100 deci-min/deci-hr = 1000 deci-min/hr = 10,000 deci-min/day
10 seconds/deci-min = 100 sec/min = 1000 sec/deci-hr = 10,000 sec/hr = 100,000 sec/day

Summarizing:
1 day = 10 hr = 100 deci-hr = 1000 min = 10,000 deci-min = 100,000 sec

"Deka-minute" is interchangeable here with "deci-hour". Eventually, new terms for all the deci- or deka- units would be invented.

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Make a small leap from this and you may realize that this could be usefully applied to measurement of speed (logical considering speed is distance over time, and I just mentioned how the proposed time unit is remarkably similar to already-used units of distance). Consider this:

If an object is traveling at a constant speed of 1 centimeter/[proposed] second (I know, not very fast but just go with it for a second, pun intended), then it would also be traveling at a speed of 1 meter/[proposed] minute!!! This scales to 1 hectometer/hour and 1 km/day, but I will assume you could have figured that out.


Raise the speed and things start to sound even more familiar. Let's try increasing speed by a factor of 100 and look at 1 meter/[proposed] second, a calm walking speed, about 2.6 mph in current units:

1 meter/[proposed] second = 1 hectometer/[prop] min = 1 km/[prop] deci-hour = 10 km/[prop] hour

10 'kph'. That's nothing too absurd. People could handle that being a leisurely walking speed, right? That would make bicycling at 26 mph about 100 km/[prop]hr. Sounds good to me.


Now, how would these converted speeds compare to the current versions in a vehicle? Let's use a higher speed, say, a highway speed limit - 100 kph (current version of time unit, not proposed). What would that convert to in the proposed system?

Since we're talking hours, we can ignore difference in the two systems' versions of seconds and come from difference from the other side - hours as fractions of a day.

The 'current' hour is 1/24 of a day, and the proposed hour is 1/10 of a day. The proposed hour is therefore 2.4 current hours. So, after multiplying:

100 km/[current] hr = 240 km/[proposed] hr


At first, if these units were put into use, it might sound pretty funny to say you were flying down the road at 240 Km/hr (even though it would be about the same as 62 mph in the currently used system) but I suspect the joke would wear out itself quickly enough.

Keep getting faster and you get to the next nice round number - a race car zipping by at 1000 km/[prop] hr. Okay maybe that's a little fast; that would be almost 260 mph, and I'm not sure if any race cars do that. But they probably will by the time this would get through congress.


Well, that's all for that. Hope you like it. Either way, let me know what you think. I know I have way too much time on my hands.

-Marc

P.S. I typed all this while being insomniac-ish (up for about 9.5 [prop] hours), so please forgive and point out any miscalculations, omissions, or other stupidity.