29 May
2010
29 May
'10
4:28 a.m.
On Sat, May 29, 2010 at 3:46 AM, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
On 29 May 2010 at 2:55, Liam Proven wrote:
[Shrug] Who said anything about time? But if you wish, sure.
Internally, of course, most computers store time as an absolute number
of seconds, which makes working with dates and times programmatically
much easier. People would adapt.
I've encountered SF which deals in time as metric numbers of seconds -
so many kilosec, a few megasec and so on. People would indeed get used
to it. I think Charlie Stross referred to a human as a "primitive
biological system that was barely capable of maintaining state
coherence for a couple of gigaseconds", a wonderful phrase.
Metric makes sense. Everything's in tens and
hundreds and thousands;
unit conversion is trivial. The different measurements are all
connected - 1 litre = a 10 x 10 x 10 cm cube, and that much water is
1kg. Freeze it, that's 0?C; boil it, that's 100?. It all interlocks
like clockwork, no fooling around with 24 of this makes 1 of those but
three-fourteenths of one of them, and a unit of weight depends on what
you're weighing and suchlike nonsense.
It's about as sensible, practical and useful as Roman numerals.
Absolutely. ?No sense in dealing with things such as phases of the
moon or the length of three barleycorns, dried and round.
Let's carry on by declaring that there are 1000 seconds in an hour
and 10 hours per day, 10 days per week, 10 weeks per month and 10
months per year. ?We shouldn't let such parochial notions such as the
rising and setting of the sun and the cycling of the seasons get in
the way of pure cold mathematical reason over the quaintness of a
calendar founded on flawed ancient ignorance. ?We won't even have to
name the days of the week or months of the year--or even the seasons
of the year--simply refer to each day by its ordinal number. As a compromise, we could revert to Julian dates for
everything and
sing:
?2303347 is in my mistress' face,
And 2303438 in her eyes hath place;
Within her bosom is 2303500,
But in her heart a cold 2303591. ? (Thomas Morley, 1594)
Works for me. ?Wonder if the Trekkies would use star dates...
Over in the great Metric Brotherhood, how many eggs are in a carton?
Sometimes 6, sometimes 10, sometimes 12. The 2 trays in the door of my
fridge for some reason hold 8 eggs each, which doesn't align with any
carton size I've seen and has no convenient denominator with the
packaging size. Go figure.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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