What are the pros and cons for decimalising the the clock and for that matter, the calender ?

Question

Or perhaps I shouldn't have posed the questions ?

Answer 1

I agree, rough question, Like the people above, this is a relatively unfeasible scenario, but for the purposes of this discussion, we can consider some pros and cons...

Pros: Calculating difference in times, (minutes to hours to days) would be a quicker calculation to go from seconds to days. Most people go seconds, to minutes, to hours to days.
It would also be quicker to calculate rates of speed, or anything that had a cycle of per hour, per minute per second etc.

Cons: obviously difficult to implement. Also for the calendar, the moon is on 28 day cycles, If we went to a decimal calendar, we would lose the part of our calendar that predicts the seasons, with out having to calculate them back out by referring to the old calendar. We have seasons that repeat on the day with our current calendar, and is dependant upon one revolution of the sun = one day

Answer 2

The week has always been 7 days, 10 day weeks were tried by the communist and they were found too long.
Decimalising the clock may work but would take 50 years to catch on.

Russia was the first country to convert to a decimal currency. In 1710, Peter the Great set the ruble equal to 100 kopecks in a series of reforms to modernize Russia.

The United States introduced decimal currency with the dollar in 1792 (adopting only the currency aspects of a more comprehensive decimal system of measurements proposed by Thomas Jefferson).

In France, decimalisation of the coinage was accompanied by metrication of other measures, introducing the franc in 1803 to replace the Livre tournois, abolished during the Revolution.

The Metrication Board in the United Kingdom was a non-departmental public body that existed between 1969 and 1980, when it was wound up to reduce government spending.

metrification board :
Its purpose was to promote and coordinate metrication within the country and prepare the public for the change. It was established in the wake of the May 1965 decision by the President of the Board of Trade to convert to the metric system, a decision that resulted from widespread agitation by commerce and industry representatives in favour of the recommendation of the Committee on Weights and Measures (Hodgson Committee) in 1950.

Driving on left? why did we not change in the 50's??

The first legal reference in Britain to an order for traffic to remain on the left occurred in 1756 with regard to London Bridge. The General Highways Act of 1773, contained a recommendation that horse traffic should remain on the left and this was enshrined in the Highways Bill in 1835.

Answer 3

Pros: everything would be simpler to write
Con: everything would be a lot harder to live with

Changing the clock would mean changing the value of the second, the minute and the hour. And even that would not be perfect as day length varies slightly, and leap seconds are added now and then.

But the real problem would be with the calendar. 365 days is a real odd number to convert into a decimal system, and the leap year would be a major hassle.

Answer 4

Why would we want to do it? Just think about how many days there are in a year and think how hard that would be to decimalise. The clock and calender work fine as they are, why change?

Answer 5

On the calendar side, it would make the year come out all funny, and we would lose those wonderful month names that we got from the Romans. That would be too bad.
On the clock side, it would work okay, but you would have a couple of generations of people who would have to "convert" the time in order to get anywhere.

Suppose you said, "Bob, meet me at the cafe in 25 decinutes (or whatever they are called)." then "Bob" would have to translate in his mind ...
"Ummm," thinks Bob, "25 decinutes is one quarter of a dechour, which is one one-hundredth of a decday. In old time," Bob continues to ponder, "that would be one minute! Oh, no!"
And by the time Bob has figured all this out, he is very late to your meeting and he gets fired and has to go on decwelfare and turns to decrack in his despair and holds up a convenience store with his ten-shooter, killing .15 of the staff and stealing 10 to the seventeenth packages of Decslim Decjims ...

No, it's just not worth it to decimalize time, son. Let's leave it in good-old base-twelve, designed by the 12-fingered aliens who seeded us on this planet.

Plus, the aliens would be real upset if they had to teach us to tell time all over again.

Answer 6

The French actually tried this immediately after the French Revolution. Logically it's a great idea, because it would make calculations so much easier. However, the weight of history means that very few people would want to change, because all previous dates would become incomprehensible.

Answer 7

Now hold on a minute.
The reason that the metric system was always such a flop in the US is because you just cant get a half inch wrench to fit anything metric. And now you want me to have to change my wristwatch, too?

Answer 8

Because if we divided the day into 10 hours employers would still want us to work 8 of them!

Answer 9

The French, under Napoleon, tried to do this, but failed miserably.

Answer 10

I asked my mathematician wife this yesterday and my ears are still bleeding form the explanation she started and still hasn't finished, just leave it please for the sake of my sanity!