[saltcured]

I think the day needs time units which are factors of 10x or 1000x to match SI prefixes. I give translations assuming current solar day length and current normal units:

- deciday (2.4 hrs)

- centiday (~0.24 hrs, ~14.4 minutes)

- milliday (~1.44 minutes, ~86.4 seconds)

- microday (~86.4 milliseconds)

But, to really get into the decimal clock, we want to also extend this into culturally useful multi-day units.

- decaday is somewhat akin to weeks

- hectoday is somewhat akin to months or quarters

- kiloday is somewhat akin to years

So we need to do some hard thinking and invent some insane tech to adjust planetary mechanics so that we can have decimal relationships between diurnal, lunar, and annual cycles. ;-)

[kps]

The revolutionary French tried decimal timekeeping, but no amount of guillotines could make it stick.

Planetarily, we only need to slow the Earth's rotation by 1.46%, so that the year becomes 360 days (1 day = 1° of revolution) and I can sleep an extra 21 minutes.

[vova_hn2]

Or you can just ignore the Earth's rotation completely and sleep whenever you want:

https://xkcd.com/320/ https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/320:_28-Hour_Day

[al_borland]

If it wasn’t for having to work 9-5, I would seriously do this. It’s what I tend to do naturally when I when several days off.

[chriswarbo]

> I think the day needs time units which are factors of 10x or 1000x to match SI prefixes

The nice thing about metric/SI prefixes is that they're generic multipliers, which can be used with any units we like. If you want to use them with day as the unit, you can just do that; nothing extra is required, and the meaning is clear (though unfamiliar!).

There is an alternative approach though: we could use prefixes for sexagesimal multiples (base 60). This has precedence, since we have a system of binary prefixes like "kibi" and "mibi".

For divisions, we can use the standard progression of "minute", "second", "third", "fourth", etc. to say there are 60 minutehours in an hour (or more generally, 60 minutefoo in a foo); that there are 3600 secondhours in an hour; and so on. Abbreviating "minutehour" to "minute" and "secondhour" to "second" when we're talking informally about time would be similar to abbreviating "kilogram" to "kilo" when talking informally about mass.

I'm not aware of any standard names for multiples (rather than divisions). My proposal[1] is “prota” for 60x, “defter” for 60x60x, “trito” for 60x60x60x, and so on; as Greek alternatives to the Latin "minuta", "secundus", "tertia", etc. (which "minute", "second", "third", etc. are derived from[2]). This Greek/Latin combo would match the multiply/divide naming of decimal, e.g. kilo (x1000, Greek) vs milli (/1000, Latin), hecto (x100, Greek) vs centi (/100, Latin), etc.

That would make an hour equal to protaminute, or one deftersecond.

[1] http://www.chriswarbo.net/projects/units/prefix_factors.html

[2] AFAIK the naming comes from "pars minuta" meaning "small part", with further divisions being "second small part", "third small part" and hence giving us "seconds", "thirds", etc. For consistency, we should really use "firsts" instead of minutes (or maybe "primes" from the Latin "prima").

[kybernetikos]

Just so long as you name the decadays so that the first one is zero indexed: https://kybernetikos.github.io/UIT/ (day is in the top left).

Personally I thought that just using the equivalent of week number (again, starting with the 0th) was fine instead of using months / hectodays, but it seems fair to give nullday, unoday, duoday, triday, quadday, quintday, hexday, heptday, octday and nonday names.

[vinc]

I've been using decimal time for years and I really like it. I revived an obsolete unit, "dimi", to go with "centi" so that 1 centiday is 0.01 days, and 1 dimiday is 0.01 centidays.