New metric units

I received the following from James Strom, with my comments added:

Hi! I like to dabble in things like you have at your decimal time site. Decimal time is definitely an idea who's time has come.

Whose time has come?  I'd say it already came and went two centuries ago! 

But for it to be practical it must be compatible with any metric system in use. If the second were changed by anything other than by a power of ten then the cost of conversion would be enormous. The definitions of a joule, newton, ampere, volt, etc. would all have to be changed as well. Can you imagine having to multiply your wattage by 0.864 cubed to arrive at the new watts? A simple way around that is to simply keep the second either the same or 10 or times smaller. I would recommend the latter so as to allow a second to be equal to 1/864th of a milliday and for other reasons.

I agree that the metric system (SI) is a serious impediment to introducing new time units.  Redefining the second would be a practically impossible undertaking, regardless of whether it's by a power of ten.  In fact, with today's technology it's just about as easy to convert decimally as otherwise.  And you cannot simply change unit values while keeping the same names, or nobody would ever know if you were talking about the old or new units.  Remember that everything in the world for hundreds of years has been recorded using essentially the same second.  Likewise for other units, although not for as long.  Creating all new units with the same names, even if they're a factor of 10 different, would create chaos.

I have noticed that if Greenwich is used as the prime meridian then 10 time zones can be created which fit very neatly with the continents. So forget Swatch's idea.

You apparently mean Swatch eliminating time zones.  You do not say why we should favor 10 time zones over one, or 24.  We may as well reform everything at once.  Business today is international.  So is my family.  It seems to me that time zones one-tenth day (2.4 hours) wide lack the advantages of smaller one-hour zones, while being only halfway to a single one for the world.

Any modification of our current system should have as a high priority ease of convertibility. The system described below has that in mind. In fact, it could be used by anyone right now without any trouble.

There is nothing that is as easy to convert as no change at all.  You need to have major advantages to outweigh the disadvantage of any conversion, no matter how easy it might be. And I don't really think that your proposal would be as easy as you claim for those who are currently using these units.

It won't be necessary for any international organization to get everyone else to agree to the change for it to work.

Who would use it, then? 

It also assumes that lower case letters will someday be eliminated.

Why?  That would eliminate half the available symbols for units and prefixes.  It would also require everyone on the Internet to SHOUT all the time. 

I've devised a modification of the current metric system that I think would be simpler, more intuitive, and easy to convert to. It would be similar to the change from the old cgs system (centimeter-gram-second) to the mks system (meter-kilogram-second).

These two systems used different names for nonequivalent units.  It was also a big pain in the ass to change, and not everyone has, yet.

As it is now the basic unit of mass requires a prefix (kilo) and doesn't correspond with weight.

The kilogramme was originally defined as a unit of weight.  The definitions of mass and weight were separated after it was realized that an object's mass is relatively constant, but it's weight is not.  My sisters in Colorado gain weight every time they come to visit me on the coast, but their masses remain the same.  (Unless my Mom is cooking.)  Scales do not actually measure mass, but the force of gravity acting on a particular mass.  However, for everyday use we can use our weight to approximate our mass.  To those relatively few professionals who have to use units of force to measure weights, it is advantageous that mass and weight have different values, lest they get confused.

The unit of density is, unlike almost all other measurement systems, is not even close to that of water but, in fact, less than that of air. This makes it difficult to visualize them.

The SI unit of density is kg/m³.  Water is 1000 kg/m³, or 1 t/m³ = 1 g/cm³ = g/ml.  I have no problem visualizing a cubic meter of water, or of a milliliter (cc).

On the other hand, if a system were devised that made the unit of acceleration close to the force of gravity on earth then it would be easy to picture it. Also, weight would become almost synonymous with mass. This would make it easy to imagine force in terms of these units. And if the unit of density were the same as that of water then there would be the obvious benefits.

I don't have a problem "picturing" these things, nor do I see how that is necessary.  I already weigh myself in pounds or kg, not 780 newtons.  I imagine newtons only when measuring small things in a lab.  (Which I have not done in decades.)  The benefits are not obvious to me.

This is what I propose:

1) The new unit of mass would be called a ton but would have the same mass as a kilogram.

We already have several different ton units causing confusion, and you want to add one that is not even close? 

2) The "new" meter would be equal to one tenth of an "old" meter or a decimeter.

Again, I don't see the benefit of changing the value by an order of magnitude. 

3) The day would be divided into 1,000 minutes. Each minute, in turn, would be divided into 864 seconds. Thus the "new" second would be equivalent to one tenth of an "old" second.

A compromise that has all the problems of both, and the benefits of neither! 

I won't go through the rest, since I am not interested in changing the metric system.  That ship sailed a long time ago.  It took a lot of time and trouble to get the entire world to accept the current metric system, and now that it's done, there is no advantage to massively change it now, even if it's not perfect.  We have discussed these issues ad nauseum on this site in the past.

4) The ampere would remain the same and would be defined as the amount of current that would produce a force of 2X10^-8 Newtons between two wires, etc., in terms of the new units. In other words; the ampere would be 1/10,000th of the value that it have if it were defined by the basic three units alone. That's an improvement over the current system that requires division by the square root of ten million.

5) The unit of angle would be 1/1,000th of a circumference. This would align it with the units of time. The earth, in relation to the sun, would rotate one degree per minute.

6) The unit of temperature would be defined as 1/1,000th of the triple point of water. A celsius-like system could be used as well so that water would freeze at 0 and absolute zero would be -1000.

7) The unit for amount of substance would not change except for its name. It shall be called a quant instead of a mole and be represented by a Q instead of mol.

8) The unit of luminosity would be equal to one joule per second per steradian in terms of the new units and be renamed the young (after the scientist, of course).

Each of the units shall be represented by one letter only without regard to upper or lower case status.

The prefixes shall follow this rule as well.

Thus there will be 26 common units and a like number of prefixes.

Ratio refers to the ratio of the size of the "new" units to that of the "old" ones in the mks system.

Unit       Symbol     Quantity          Formula      Ratio  

Ton                T       Mass                     T            1            
Meter             M      Length                  M          0.1
Are                R       Area                 M^2        0.01
Liter               L       Volume             M^3       0.001
Second           S       Time                    S          0.1      
Hertz              Z       Frequency          1/S           10
Einstein          E       Velocity              M/S            1
Gal                 G       Acceleration   M/S^2          10
Bole                B       Momentum     T*M/S           1
Newton           N       Force         T*M/S^2         10
Planck            P        Action         T*M^2/S        0.1
Joule              J        Energy    T*M^2/S^2           1      
Ampere          A       Current                  A            1
Coulomb         C       Charge              A*S         0.1
Weber            W      Flux                    J/A           1
Volt                V       Potential              J/C         10
Henry             H       Inductance          W/A          1
Farad             F       Capacitance         C/V      0.01
Siemens         S       Conductance        A/V        0.1
Ohm               O      Resistance           V/A         10
Gauss             U       Strength             A/M         10
Maxwell          X       Intensity             V/M        100
Degree           D       Angle                     D       0.36
Kelvin             K       Temperature           K  0.27316
Quant             Q      Amount                   Q           1
Young             Y      Luminosity               Y     6,830  


Symbol  Prefix  Multiple    

V                      10^33      
W                     10^30
X                      10^27
Y          Yotta     10^24
Z          Zetta     10^21
E            Exa     10^18
P           Peta     10^15
T          Tera      10^12
G          Giga       10^9
M         Mega      10^6
K            Kilo       10^3
H         Hecto       10^2
D          Deka       10^1
S           Deci      10^-1
C          Centi      10^-2
L           Milli       10^-3
U         Micro      10^-6
N          Nano      10^-9
B           Pico     10^-12
F        Femto     10^-15    
A           Atto     10^-18
O         Zepto     10^-21
J          Yocto     10^-24
Q                      10^-27
I                       10^-30
R                      10^-33

This system is meant to work with decimal time, a reformed calendar, and the eventual elimination of lower case letters.

But that is the subject of another email.

(Don't worry about copyright or anything. I don't care who gets credit for what. I only bring this up because while googling your name I found some idiot who was trying to take credit for coming up with an obvious idea that dated back to the French Revolution. There's all sorts out there.)

MJD 56115.995

Leap second

On June 30, 2012 (56108.9999884), a leap second was added to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) at the end of the day, to keep clocks within one second of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).  23:59:59 was followed by 23:59:60.  This caused some computers to crash.  Since the software should have been able to handle this, the fault is clearly a bug in the software, similar to the Y2K bug.  However, it wouldn't matter if leap seconds did not exist.

I do not think that leap seconds are necessary.  They only are if you want to keep UTC within one second of GMT (UT1).  However, few use GMT today.  In the first place, it is the true solar time only for those exactly on the meridian of Greenwich.  Everywhere else has a mean solar time that differs as you go east or west of Greenwich, so before railroads every town had its own time.  But today we use unified time zones, which are (mostly) one-hour offsets from UTC.  The time in these zones in theory may be a half-hour more or less than actual local mean solar time, and in practice it is in many places much more than that.  Plus, many places practice daylight saving time for part of the year, adding another hour.  Even Great Britain is not always on GMT, and is considering advancing their clocks another hour to be in sync with the Continent.  Nobody actually follows solar time anymore.  So why should we care about GMT?

What would happen if we simply abandoned leap seconds is that UTC would start to drift away from Greenwich.  Every few years the difference would grow by one second.  Eventually, hundreds of years from now, the difference would add up to a whole hour.  But so what?  Local times today are already arbitrary and decided by governments.  If a particular region felt that the change had progressed too much, they could simply adjust their time zone when they chose.  This already happens all the time.

UT is not the only existing time scale.  Various other scales have been defined based up on the same atomic second.  The atomic second is based upon the ephemeris second of 1820.  Since the mean solar day is gradually getting longer, and varies from year to year, the day is slightly longer now than 86,400 atomic seconds, which is why leap years are added.  International Atomic Time (TAI) was synchronized with UTC in 1958 and is now 35 seconds ahead of UTC.  Terrestrial [Dynamical] Time (TT) is 32.184 seconds behind TAI and was introduced in 1984 to replace and be continuous with Ephemeris Time (ET) back to 1900, so it is currently 67.184 seconds ahead of UTC.  GPS time is 19 seconds ahead of TAI, and therefore currently 16 seconds ahead of UTC.  These time scales do not use leap seconds, so the difference between them is constant, but the difference between each with UTC is variable.  Simply eliminating leap seconds would fix UTC in relation to these time scales.

There has been discussion for the past few years about eliminating leap seconds, and this incident will likely increase pressure to do so.

MJD 56112.435

The Higgs boson has been found

I have been watching the live video from CERN in Switzerland and there is a 4.9 sigma signal around 125-126 GeV.  It's being couched in conditional qualifiers, and still needs to be followed up, but they really think that this is it.  You can read more at BBC News.

MJD 56112.382

Mouvement souverainiste du Québec

I received the following:

I was thinking, as you know I live in Canada, and interestingly I now live in Montreal, Quebec. As you may or may not know, this has always been a hot spot of cultural debate (i.e Anglos vs Francos) and quite frankly the Francos are winning. In fact it wouldn't be to much a stretch of the imagination to say Quebec may form an independent country by next year. Whether I stay or not is another question, but I was thinking, if Quebec goes rouge (sic), why don't they re-install La calendrier Française Révolutionnaire as well as Temps FR (20hrs per day!) it would truly make Quebec a distinct society.

My answer is that Quebec was a British territory at the time of the Revolution, so it never used the Republican Calendar nor decimal time (10 hours, not 20).  France, itself, has not used the calendar in two centuries (except for a few radicals briefly in Paris in 1871) and never really accepted decimal time.  Given that 24/60/60 time is universal in every country on earth, not just Anglo ones, and the Gregorian calendar nearly so, especially in Catholic countries, it is highly improbable that there would be any interest whatsoever.

However, I am not Québécois and have only been there once, so I do not wish to presume to speak for them.  Please feel free to comment below.

Quartidi 14 Messidor an CCXX à 6 heures 82 minutes décimales t.m.P.
MJD 56111.676

Captain Picard Day

I was listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe today and the first thing they talked about was Captain Picard Day.  This refers to an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which there is an annual event to celebrate the ship's Captain, Jean-Luc Picard.  Since the episode occurs on stardate 47457.1, this was used as a basis to determine the calendar date.  If you know anything about stardates, you know that there is no reliable way to convert between stardates and calendar dates, although there are a number of different formulas used by trekkers.

Apparently, someone calculated this stardate to correspond with 2370 June 16 (186850), so every June 16 is Captain Picard Day.  Of course, someone else figured it is November 4 (186991), while others apparently go by the television air date on 1994 January 10 (49362).  There are plenty of other possibilities, e.g. March 11 (186754).  Plus, the stardate was given later in the episode, and probably refers to a date several days after Captain Picard Day.

If we accept, as most do, that there are 1000 stardates in a year, and that 47xxx represents one year, then 47457 is 45.7% from the beginning of that year, or about 167 days.  If the stardate year starts on January 1 and 47xxx represents 2370, then day 167 would be June 16.  Of course, this contradicts some references in various episodes, so the stardate year may begin on some other date of the calendar.  For instance, 54868.6 must take place on 2378 April 6 (189702), suggesting that 47000 is 2369 September 10 (186572).  There are some who even dispute that 1000 stardates are exactly one year long.

At the risk of sparking a holy war, I would say that since it's all bullshit, it does not matter what date we pick.  Happy Captain Picard Day!

MJD 56095.1

MetricTimeAngle.com

I originally started this site to sort out all the various decimal time and metric time proposals.  I imagine that in the past many people thought up the idea in isolation, rarely getting much notice, until the Internet and World Wide Web came along and then suddenly there was a plethora of web sites devoted to different versions of decimal time.  I collected all the proposals, compared and discussed them with others.  It sure seemed like a lot of people were interested in the idea, and many of them were promoting their own ideas.  Then it stopped.  It seems that once the information was out there, there was no reason for people to reinvent it.  Instead, they could just read about it on Wikipedia, or on sites like mine.  They could learn that it had already been tried hundreds of years ago, that it is currently in use by scientists, that there have already been many proposals to reform the way we tell time, and that not much is likely to change any time soon.

But occasionally, a new one pops up.  MetricTimeAngle.com defines a new metric unit, the earth-second or esecond (e), equal to the French decimal second, or 0.000 01 day.  "Earth clocks" divide the day into 100 ke (kilo-earth-seconds) equal to 14.4 standard minutes.  This just happens to be the traditional Chinese name for the same interval, although this is not mentioned.  It is also equal to de Rey-Pailhade's cé.  "Earth Time" starts from midnight UTC with 00.00, with no local time zones.  He also defines new degrees for angles and coordinates, dividing the earth's circumference into 100 kd.

The author says:

get a 100 ke earth clock. You may download one from www.MetricTimeAngle.com, and very soon your mobile phone company will provide you a downloadable one. And the best news is that a couple of clock manufacturers have started designing these new earth clocks and watches that you can buy shortly. Watch the news at www.MetricTimeAngle.com.

Will the world embrace this proposal for metric time and angle? Based upon hundreds of years of very similar proposals, I'd say not likely.  Of course, when the mobile phone apps are published I will post about it here, along with all the existing decimal time apps.

MJD 56094.827

Decimal time format

The previous post includes a representation of decimal time with the units (decimal hours, minutes and seconds) separated by colons (:), just as is usually done with standard time.  I see this with most decimal time clocks.  Not having any other model, I initially wrote decimal times this way, myself.  However, this makes it difficult to distinguish decimal time from standard time.

Also, when referring to decimal time as used during the French Revolution, this format is probably inappropriate.  I do not know when it started being used, but in old books I do not see it, either for decimal or sexigesimal times.  Often the number of hours and minutes were written out, as in "eight hours in the morning" or "twelve hours and thirty minutes".  When abbreviated, the time was typically given with the initials of the units following their number, e.g. "12 h. 30 m."  Sometimes a period was included, sometimes not, and other times a superscript was used, e.g. "12^h 30^m".  I see this historically in both English and French, and it seems to be still in use in France, although usually without the last unit, so that the "h" acts as a separator, e.g. "12h30".

In revolutionary France, when decimal times were written out, the same was done but with "décimales" added after the last unit, such as "à 5 heures décimales" or "à 7 heures 80 décimales.  I also found abbreviated times such as "à 6 h. 67 décimales".  A few decades later, French decimal time enthusiast Joseph Charles Francois de Rey-Pailhade provided superscripted examples such as "3^hd 93^md".

So I think that when expressing decimal times, at least when referring to their historical use in France, that it should probably be written in one of the ways shown above.  This is what I have done with the decimal time on

the right of this page, under the Republican Calendar date.

MJD 56045.233
Nonidi 9 Floréal an CCXX
à 2 h. 39 m. d. t.m.P.

Metric Clock Gadget

For once I'm not going to post about a smartphone app, but a Windows desktop gadget.  A gadget is an applet that sits on your Windows desktop and displays dynamic information, such as time, calendar, weather, etc.  Recently I found a new one named Metric Clock by Dr. Igor "Igogo" Bushin in Ukraine.  The description is copied from Wikipedia and Minkukel.  The gadget basically displays the current date and local decimal time in h:mm:ss format.  Options include changing the size, hiding the title, copyright and "date sting" (sic), and changing colors for all elements.  The gadget is compatible with Windows versions from XP to 8, and is free, with a request to donate on the web site.  His late cat also has a web site.

MJD 56045.171 (8:79:00 PDT)

Sternzeit

I have posted before about stardates and stardate apps for iPhone. A free new app was released in November (55877) named Sternzeit, which is German for "stardate", by Sebastian Bothe. Originally the US AppStore description was in German, although text within the app was in English, but the description has now been translated.

Version 2 was released today (56015), which fixes an issue with not being able to select the year. You can now select dates in any year to convert to a stardate. Initially there was a bug which caused it to revert to the current date every 30 seconds, but it's working now for me.

The unique feature of this app is that it gives you the ability to share the stardate via Twitter, email or SMS, with a default message like, "Captains's log, stardate : -310757.56". You can also follow other users of the app on Twitter via a hash tag from within the app. I appear to be the first tweeter.

The real problem I have is that the algorithm he uses starts counting from the year 2323, which means that all stardates in the current century are negative, as well as being six digits, unlike the ones on TV, which were four or five digits, and lack the minus sign. It's fine if you want to find the stardate Capt. Janeway brought Voyager back to the Alpha Quadrant in the year 2378, but it's not what I want in my tweets. I know that the "algorithm...is known throughout the net", but it was devised specifically for the 24th century, and doesn't even work for Capt. Kirk's time, let alone ours. There are plenty of other stardate algorithms on the Net, like the contemporary date algorithm at TrekGuide.com. (I don't recommend the Andrew Main algorithm, used by Google Calendar.)  IRL astronomers have their own way of dating star observations, which looks a lot like the stardates on The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager.  And of course, the latest version of Star Trek simply uses the year number with a decimal.

At least he no longer states that 2323 was the year of the first warp-flight, when every Trekkie knows it was nearly three centuries earlier, in 2063. How did he think Kirk got around in the 2200s?

Sadly, I can't update to the new Sternzeit version on my iPhone 4S because for some reason the app requires the new iOS 5.1, and I am stuck on 5.0.1 because I'm jailbroken. Funny, I've updated scores of other apps this month and none of them require 5.1. I had to try it on my iPad, so of course it looks like crap because it's designed only for iPhone, for some reason.

MJD 56016.339

eBooks

I have been waiting for electronic books my whole life.  I've always been a big sci-fi fan, and it only made sense to me that e-books would be superior in every way to their paper counterparts.  The very first episode of Star Trek made with Captain Kirk, which first aired the day my little sister was born, showed characters reading e-books and other documents.  Granted, in that particular episode they were reading relatively bulky monitors attached to the wall, rather than what we would call an e-reader or tablet, but in later episodes handheld tablets are used, some of which were touch-sensitive, and others which used a stylus.  The monitors worked with removable cards, referred to as "tapes", although it was not clear whether they contained literal tape inside, and sometimes documents are transferred directly from the ship's computer.  There are plenty of other works of science fiction which also depict e-books.

The first time I saw a dedicated e-book reader in real life was about 20 years ago, when I was on a flight sitting next to a man using a prototype, which he said the company he worked for was developing.  I don't know whatever happened to that particular device, but I know that a number of portable e-book readers have been produced over the years, which did not succeed for various reasons.  E-books themselves, however, could be read on personal computers, and as laptop computers became smaller, they became more convenient for reading e-books, until dedicated reading devices and tablets finally made e-books more convenient than the paper kind.

I always knew that this day would come.  Others were more doubtful.  I don't know how many times over the years that I heard people complain, even now, that e-books could not provide the same experience as paper books, the same texture and smell and the physical action of turning the pages, that reading electronic displays are too tiresome, etc.  Some of these criticisms were merely technological, and could be solved with innovations such as e-ink.  Others were rooted in sentimentality for superfluous features of the old medium, which those who will grow up with e-books will not share.  Do we today miss the characteristics of scrolls and hand-written parchment, or of clay tablets?  No, because most of us today have no experience with those things, and would consider it perverse to prefer them.  Likewise, our descendants will not recognize the desirability of paper books, except perhaps as antique collectibles.

I have always found paper books to be less than optimal.  They tended to be heavy, often heavier than my iPad today.  They were also bound, so that you had to prop them open, lest they close or change pages by themselves, and then you had to worry about damaging the spine.  And once they closed, you would lose your place if you did not have a bookmark.  It was cumbersome to have to flip through hundreds of pages.  E-book haters talk about snuggling in bed with paper books, but I always found them to be poor bedtime companions.  Plus, you cannot read them without a light!

So I am thrilled that the technology has finally caught up with sci-fi.  What I find irritating is that many people confuse the content with the medium.  For many, the word "book" refers strictly to bound leaves of paper.  However, there were books before it was common to write them on codices, and there will be after paper is gone.  A book is the words that are written on the paper, on digital medium, or other media such as parchment, clay or stone, and is independent of the medium, itself.  Remember, Homer did not write on paper; he could not even see!  But you can now download his works as e-books.  Books will live on, longer than paper will.

MJD 56015.026