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edited Apr 11 at 21:05

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The big fear of moving away from the Year-month-day system is that people won't "know" when to do things, but electronic calendars have proven that we don't really need predictability to respond to important upcoming things things like winter, spring, summer, and fallseason changes anymore. Every year, holidays like Easter and Thanksgiving comescome... whenever... and people just celebrate it when it gets here because our calendars tell us its next week, no real need to remember a month and yearsync them to your calendar in any exact way.

What about Leap years/seconds, Time Zones, and AM/PM?

ScrewDrop them tooall. NoBy dropping all other measurements, it means no more leap anything because you no longer need to sync any units that don't evenly go into one actually cares what part ofanother.

Time Zones will likely have the daymost resistance, but they were invented to make sundials accurate. We don't use the sun to measure time cyclesthis way anymore; so, the position of the sun in the sky no longer has to be bound to a specific time of day. If you live in Spain and itthe date cycles in the middle of the night, then that's fine, because that is what you are used to. If you live in the USA where it flips over while you're sipping your morning coffee, that's okay too. If you're in Asia where it flips when you get home from work, that's also okay. Whatever your "end of day" is is not a big deal as long as its always at the same time each day. Thanks to indoor lighting, there are tons of people now who work night shifts like 9pm to 6am. They are not confused by the date changing mid-shift. It's just a mattershift; so, we already have examples of being familiarhow this is not a big deal anymore.

Oh, and no AM or PM either. Those are more confusing than a mid-day date changejust pointless.

What you're left with for datetime is a simple, single floating point number: So instead of 2024-4-11 3:25:15PM (USA/Chicago) the current datetime would simply be 739362.642535434202D

The big fear of moving away from the Year-month-day system is that people won't "know" when to do things, but electronic calendars have proven that we don't really need predictability to respond to important upcoming things things like winter, spring, summer, and fall. Every year, holidays like Easter and Thanksgiving comes... whenever... and people just celebrate it when it gets here because our calendars tell us its next week, no real need to remember a month and year.

What about Time Zones?

Screw them too. No one actually cares what part of the day time cycles in. If you live in Spain and it cycles in the middle of the night, then that's fine, because that is what you are used to. If you live in the USA where it flips over while you're sipping your morning coffee, that's okay too. If you're in Asia where it flips when you get home from, that's also okay. Whatever your "end of day" is is not a big deal as long as its always at the same time. Thanks to indoor lighting, there are tons of people now who work night shifts like 9pm to 6am. They are not confused by the date changing mid-shift. It's just a matter of being familiar.

Oh, and no AM or PM either. Those are more confusing than a mid-day date change.

What you're left with for datetime is a simple, single floating point number: So instead of 2024-4-11 3:25:15PM (USA/Chicago) the current datetime would simply be 739362.642535

The big fear of moving away from the Year-month-day system is that people won't "know" when to do things, but electronic calendars have proven that we don't really need predictability to respond to important upcoming things things like season changes anymore. Every year, holidays like Easter and Thanksgiving come... whenever... and people just celebrate it when it gets here because our calendars tell us its next week, no real need to sync them to your calendar in any exact way.

What about Leap years/seconds, Time Zones, and AM/PM?

Drop them all. By dropping all other measurements, it means no more leap anything because you no longer need to sync any units that don't evenly go into one another.

Time Zones will likely have the most resistance, but they were invented to make sundials accurate. We don't use the sun to measure time this way anymore; so, the position of the sun in the sky no longer has to be bound to a specific time of day. If you live in Spain and the date cycles in the middle of the night, then that's fine, because that is what you are used to. If you live in the USA where it flips over while you're sipping your morning coffee, that's okay too. If you're in Asia where it flips when you get home from work, that's also okay. Whatever your "end of day" is is not a big deal as long as its always at the same time each day. Thanks to indoor lighting, there are tons of people now who work night shifts like 9pm to 6am. They are not confused by the date changing mid-shift; so, we already have examples of how this is not a big deal anymore.

Oh, and no AM or PM either. Those are just pointless.

What you're left with for datetime is a simple, single floating point number: So instead of 2024-4-11 3:25:15PM (USA/Chicago) the current datetime would simply be 739362.434202D

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created Apr 11 at 20:53

Nosajimiki

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The Purely Metric Day System

Why You don't need Years, Months, Hours, Minutes, or Seconds

Time is the one last measurement system that we have yet to simplify with a single unit measured by base-10 variants. The importance of Years and Months were invented back when we were a 90% agricultural society in which primitive farmers had to figure out when to plant and harvest, but in today's society, only 10% of people are farmers. And of those 10%, most of them are now using computerized systems tied into whether forecasting software to tell them when to plant and harvest. One year they might plant on March 12th, and the next they might wait until April 3rd to avoid a late winter frost.

Years, months, and days were really convenient ways of measuring time in different contexts, just like inches, feet, and miles were, but like other traditional systems, they make conversions hard.

The big fear of moving away from the Year-month-day system is that people won't "know" when to do things, but electronic calendars have proven that we don't really need predictability to respond to important upcoming things things like winter, spring, summer, and fall. Every year, holidays like Easter and Thanksgiving comes... whenever... and people just celebrate it when it gets here because our calendars tell us its next week, no real need to remember a month and year.

Hours, Minutes, and seconds could be anything at all because they were just arbitrary fractions of a day. This leaves Days as the only REALLY relevant time measurement to modern man. All the things we do are based on our circadian rhythm. We wake up at the same time, go to work at the same time, take lunch at the same time, etc.

The new time system of course would mean revising all of our other metric units to be based on days instead of seconds, but it would make the whole metric system way more standardized and easy to use.

What about Time Zones?

Oh, and no AM or PM either. Those are more confusing than a mid-day date change.

What you're left with for datetime is a simple, single floating point number: So instead of 2024-4-11 3:25:15PM (USA/Chicago) the current datetime would simply be 739362.642535

How Time would feel when measured at base-10 days

Instead of hours we will count centidays (about 14.4 minutes) Instead of minutes, we have millidays (about 86.4 seconds) and for fine time keeping, we can do microdays (about a 1/12th of a second).

And then for things bigger than a day, we replace the workweek with a decaday. 7 days on, 3 off would closely approximate the 7 day week (maybe 4 and 6 if you're French). Hectodays would be about the length of an annual quarter, and then instead of years we could have the kiloday (about 2.74 years).