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by xattt 134 days ago
This was a missed opportunity to call it netric time.
1 comments

Wait is that available? Best clock would be UTC + decimal time anyway, netric time is a good name for that.

Decimal time: you divide the day into powers of tens, a 'deci' is 2.4 hours, a 'centi' is 14.4 ~= 15 minutes, a 'mili' is 1.44 minutes ~= 86 seconds and so on.

Great system with convenient lengths, and easy to add duration + date, and convert between different units.

While deciday is workable hour replacement and milliday is decent minute replacement, the metric time would be missing decent seconds replacement. The next named prefix, microday, is 86ms which is very small for humans.

Of course it is not insurmountable problem, but for lot of other units milli- tends to represent the lower end of "human scale"; millimeters, milligrams, milliliters, milliwatts, etc are as small as most people will ever use in day-to-day life.

In some ways it would be more convenient if the base unit would be e.g. 1e-4 days (or some other power of 10) so day would be 10 kilos. Understandably it would be lot less elegant but more practical. Deci- would be .86 seconds which is kinda nice.

I think what likely happens here is that everyone just starts calling 10^(-5) days (= 0.864 current seconds) a "second". (And then there's confusion over which second people mean, analogous to what happens now with tons.)
Internet time is already that: it’s UTC with the day divided into a 1000 beats/metric minutes.

Edit: Swatch internet time

There is no "Internet time": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_time

There is "Swatch Internet Time" which is UTC+1. (Wiki never refers that time as Internet Time, good that they couldn't take the term for their time.)

It seems "Internet time" is still free for someone to take, if they can.

See French Decimal Time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time

Not to be confused with Metric Time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time

Timekeeping units of measurement:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_of_time