I kind of love the metric system. The promise of super simple math to convert between units just has such an allure for me. Have ten of something? Bump up the unit and drop a 0! Have a wave with a 1 meter wavelenth? You barely have to think to to know you'll have 1000 crests and troughs in a kilometer. What could be cooler? And I'm completely serious. For someone so ridiculously slow at simple math (6 x 7? I still split it up mentally into ((3 x 7 = 21) x 2) = 42) this is such a time saver not to mention the error reduction benefits.
This is all fine and dandy until we get to time. Pop quiz hot-shot, how many seconds in day? I may as well have asked you how many inches in a mile. (If you know the answer to either of these off-hand at least admit that most humans don't). So if English distance is as complicated and archaic as the time units we still use whatever happened to Metric Time? So what's the deal with metric time? Where did it all fall apart? A quick trip to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time) tells us that in 1795 when the other parts of the metric system were introduced in France metric time was basically abandoned. Which I kind of get, the concept and use of the second is such a basic foundational unit in science and engineering that a shift would b like moving the ocean. Speed, acceleration, frequency: they are all based primarily on the standard second.
So that's a little background. I've thought about metric time off and on for years. It's just so darn complicated. And to make it worse, time is relatively different all around the world. First, noon in Tokyo is different than noon in LA, you can blame the rotation of the Earth for that. So we could introduce the idea of local time. The time of day being dictated completely by solar noon in the specific location. This is an idea I've been tossing around in my mind lately. With current technology it could almost be practical to have completely local times, time in each individual location being specific to that location. Want to show up to your dentist appointment on time? Let your handheld computer determine when you have to leave based on type of transportation, traffic, distance and local time. But what if I'm not physically going there, what if I have people all around the world calling into a presentation? True, so that pushes me in the other direction, a standard planet time. When I say 12:00 I'd love to have everybody think the same thing. Who cares about time-zones anymore anyway? And don't get me started on Daylight Saving Time. Not only do I need to know where you are, what time of year it is but I also need to know local customs?!? Yikes.
The reason I've been doing some research on this topic rather than just juggling it around in my head is I'm thinking about building a metric clock to tell me the metric time of day. It brings up a lot of questions. Mostly it's discouraging because there aren't any great answers. But, something on the wikipedia article I mentioned above caught my eye and gave me hope. Enter .beat time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time) aka Swatch Internet Time. Beat Time sounds both awesome and frightening depending on how you look at it and Swatch Internet Time makes me think of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Either way the idea is pretty cool, it's basically the simplest part of metric time, 1000 beats in a day actually implemented, be it very infrequently. The cool thing is they have a website (http://www.swatch.com/zz_en/internettime/) and there are a couple rudementary Android apps people have done. So it's not a lot but it's something!
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