[kepano]

Fun fact: decimal time was the official timekeeping system of France for about 6 months during the revolution, but was abolished because it never caught on. However, there are still some decimal watches and clocks in existence from that time.

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

[tjradcliffe]

Time-keeping in 12's and 60's dates back to the Sumerians, whose basic unit of time was the "beru", which is usually translated as "double hour". There were 12 of them in the day, related to the 12 zodiacal divisions of the sky, related to the lunar cycle (presumably).

So unlike our measures of distance, weight, etc, our divisions of time have been fixed (mod a factor of two) for over five thousand years. On that basis I'd say anyone attempting to shift to decimal time is more than a little optimistic (much like people who think that even though every single variant of gender-neutral pronouns has been tried and has failed to catch on in the past century, their new one just might work!)

Reform of time-keeping, reform of spelling, reform of language... all great ideas, but their history is a painful illustration of how challenging it is to shift habitual norms. Inclusive language has been moderately successful, but it is basically conservative: the notion of the "gender-neutral masculine pronoun" was bolted on to English in the late 1800's as a legal convenience so laws wouldn't have to be re-written to explicitly apply to women, who were slowly gaining meaningful legal rights. "They" was the preferred gender-indefinite pronoun prior to that, and it is slowly becoming so again.

[wtbob]

> So unlike our measures of distance, weight, etc, our divisions of time have been fixed (mod a factor of two) for over five thousand years.

Our measures of distance were more-or-less fixed too. Decimilisation of time is as bad an idea as decimilisation of distance, weight and volume.

Really, we should convert to a different default base. I suggest twelve: it has more factors and more repeating decimals are non-repeating duodecimals.