New here :-) (increasingly OT)

On Mon, 5 Mar 2001, Tony Eros wrote: 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/