Let's consider the following:

A millenium is 1000 years,
A century is 100 years.
The last four months are named in numerical
Latin for 7,8,9,10. (Septem, Octo, Novem, Decem).

To divide the clock into 100 seconds, 100 minutes and
ten hours. Two times ten = 1 day (20 hour day), is not
difficult.

A ten day week will work giving 3.65 weeks to a month
and 10 months to the year.

The Lunar month is hardly relevant today.

With 365 days in the year each month would alternate with
37 and 36 days with an extra day for the Leap Year.

Either a Latin numerical naming of months already existing
for the last four months could be adopted or a new naming
of months established such as the more relevant names in some
languages relating to Seasons, Harvest, Festivals.

The writing of the date is numerical and appears decimal
eg. 20.06.10.

Work 7 days 8 to 5 rest 3 days with miniscule variance from
current duration. That is, the same as 24 hour clock and
twelve month calendar.

Festival dates will remain. eg. Christmas 25.10.10.
i.e. 25th day of the last month of the year.

The idea may not be for current thinking but as currency
weight and distance went decimal in the last century
time can change in the 21st century.

This would be ideal for computers and business.

Any improvements on the concept would be
greatly appreciated.

Foxy,

That's great in theory, but...

Straight off the bat, your day would have 200,000 seconds in it. Currently it has 86,400. So, you would have to recalibrate the duration of a second so that 200,000 of them would fit into a solar day. Do you know how much disruption that would cause? Not to mention changing all the IT and computer programs that have been worked up over the decades.

Anyway, there's something quaintly familiar about our yearly calendar that goes to our civilisation's origins.

I think time is in the same category as the qwerty keyboard. Not totally sensible but way to difficult to change.

What day would the footy be on.
You just choked the religious mob.

Hi Foxy

You're not wrestling this on your own.

http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15311296

I particularly like this observation:

"Decimal time has been tried on many occasions. Indeed, a decimal calendar based on a ten-month year was used by Romans during the time of Romulus and Remus. Their calendar ran from March to December. The two missing months needed to make up a solar year were dismissed as winter when nothing grew or happened—and therefore not worth worrying about."

What a great attitude!

Not much happening this time of year, so let's not bother too much about what month it is...

Ah, simple times.

Dear RobP,

You're right there would be too many seconds.

I have been contemplating deleting seconds and only
staying with 100 minutes to the hour.
But an option could be 1000 minutes to the hour
which would make it simpler. After all there are
3600 seconds in an hour.

As far as IT and computer programs are concerned -
we did have the threat of the Millenium Bug when
computers were less developed and the problem
seems to have been re-solved.

Dear mikk,

Almost every human advance involves taking some
considerable risks - and is based on experiment,
innovation and adventure. We've gone from propeller
planes to jet engines and everybody said that decimal
currency conversion would cause chaos and yet today
we live with it comfortably.

Dear Des,

Footy would be on the 9th day and the religious would
have the 10th day.

Dear Pericles,

Yes, times will become simpler.

It's a decimal world today.

We even write time - 2.45 which actually means 2 hours
45 minutes but reads as 2.45 hours and computer technology
would make a simple meal of the conversion.

Perhaps some computer expert can set up a program on
the computers?

Hmmmm,

that means we also would need to revise angular measurement. There are considerable homologies between the angular measurements and time measurements. Particularly in astronomy but elsewhere besides.

I suggest that to be truly "modern" we should abandon metricity and adopt (with modifications) a binary angular notation for time measurement.There are (2 x pi) radians (or binary 10pi radians) in a circle. Therefore 1 hour is pi/12 radians o' the clock. Or, maintaining metricity, the "neo hour" could easily be 0.1pi, with twenty neohours in a day and so it goes. What fun! and such a boon for juniour maths teachers besides.

Think of the children.

Rusty

Dear Rusty,

Brilliant suggestion.

Unfortunately, us mere mortals have only
ten fingers on our hands and most of us
can't count beyond multiples of ten.

Besides the computer binary system (01,01,01),
clearly shows the decimal.

It appears that decimal time has been found to be
dismal. Perhaps the 22nd Century and greater
advancement of computer technology will find a
place in decimal time.

So I shall clock off for now.
(In decimal time).
(I'm counting on my fingers).

Dear Foxy,

If we really want to be au courant with the computer age we should get rid of the decimal system altogether. Computer logic works on a binary system. This means that we have to translate our input from decimal to binary and our output from binary to decimal. We could eliminate the conversion by changing our number system to one with a base of a power of 2 - 2, 4, 8, 16 - binary, quaternary, octal or sexadecimal. We no longer count on our fingers so we can dispense with the decimal system altogether. Counting by binary - 1, 10, 11, 100, etc. Counting by quaternary - 1, 2, 3, 10, 11 etc. Counting by octal - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11 etc. Counting by sexadecimal 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E. F, 10, 11 etc.

In a computer age we could do better with a power of 2 number base and get rid of the decimal system altogether.

Dear David F,

Then how would time and the calendar work?
Keep in mind we have clocks and printed
diaries and calendars.

Dear Foxy,

If we went to a sixteen hour day each hour would be one and a half times what it is now. That is an easier adjustment then going to a ten hour day. The length of a year depends on the time it takes the earth to revolve around the sun. All one has to do is convert 365 to sexadecimal. 365 to the base 10 = 16D to the base 16. We would still have to make adjustments for leap years as the revolution of the sun around the earth is not an integral number of days. There would be four months named spring, summer, autumn and winter. Four is a power of two.

Dear David F,

I didn't mean a day to be 10 hours.
But two periods of ten hours which
is equal 20 hours.

As for your explanation - I will leave
that to the computer literate to digest
and respond.

A year is made up of 365 daylight periods with an extra day every four years plus, to adjust to one annual circuit around the sun. How do you accomodate this in decimal time? How many days do you have in a decimal year? How do you calibrate longitudal gradients on the Earth in decimal time? How many degrees in a circle? Unless you had 5 day weeks included a one day weekend and 10 hour days no am or pm etc Too much to change and exceptions to be made.

Dear Philo,

You haven't read the original posts.
Where your questions are answered.
Please do so.

As for latitude and longitude -
that is a topic for another discussion.

Ummm,

Don't think philo is wrong here.

As I alluded, astronomical and angular measurements are critical.

Why shouldn't they be explicit? Why shouldn't students learn them?

Major functions of the local cycles, adjustments for rounding, precession or tidal epicycles etc.

Our computers already use the completely ratonal system of counting seconds since 1981. just a little unwieldy.

Still maintaining that a system based on angular measurements is the way to go. My (p/q)/100 Pi radians of break time relative to M21) is up now, back to the rats.

Rusty

I think Philo's right too - the difference between going metric on weights/distances and time is that weights and distances are completely conceived and calibrated by man.

On the other hand, the way we structure time is fundamentally defined by our relationship with nature - ie hours, minutes and seconds are subdivided into the time it takes the earth to spin through one full rotation on its axis. And a year is defined by the time it takes the earth to do one full rotation around the sun and pass through all 4 seasons. It turns out that the earth spins on its axis about 365.25 times (ie days) in the time it takes to do one full circuit around the sun (ie a year). 365.25 does not neatly fit into the decimal numbering system and it can't be forced to fit.

As the above describes, in nature there are cycles within cycles that simply do not conform with the decimal numbering system. And our concept of time is interwoven with nature.

As opposed to time, weights and distances are a function of man only because it is inconvenient for us to use the natural units of weight. It would not be convenient to use the Hydrogen atom with one proton and no neutron as a unit of weight or the radius of earth at the equator as the measure of distance. However, it would be as legitimate to use those measures as units of weight and distance as it is to use the time for earthly rotation and revolution for the units of time.

davidf,

True - there is no one way of measuring things.

The point I was getting at is that "decimalising" things only works when man completely defines the measurement. The most important thing with measurement is that it works. Next is that it works conveniently and efficiently. In the case of weights and monetary systems etc, decimal is best, because it works and is efficient. In the case of time - which, to be of most use to us, must conform with our daily cycles - decimal doesn't work. So, we've developed the best system that works which is the calendar and hh:mm:ss system.

For the scientifically inclined I think you're over thinking the issue.
Time as we mortals understand it is a man created naming peculiarity.

As I understand foxy, all she is saying is decimalize the units for common computational simplicity. 100 minutes an hour 20 hours a day simple arithmetic is involved. The content/length of each unit would vary to accommodate.
in short a new decimal hour would contain 1.2 old hours i.e. 72 old minutes etc. No biggy .
I smell the ghost of Y2 bug being summoned up.

The immediate issue at that level is the starting date.

Theoretically my birthday would then be 6.6.10 not 7.7.10 :-(
a month and 1 day older ;-) (joke)

That would mean I'm a Saturday child not a Friday's child....Yah

My wife birthday 5.7.10 not 8.8.10.

Dear Robp,

It is not decimal that works. It is having multiples of the same base whether the base is octal, decimal, hexadecimal or anything else. The basic unit of length in the metric system is the metre. We have subunits in tenths, hundredths etc. and superunits in terms of tens, hundreds etc.

If we had an octal system then the subunits would be in eighths, sixty fourths etc., and the superunits would be in eights, sixty fours etc.In the previous sentence I have used decimal language to express the octal units. If we were to think in octal then eights and sixty fours would be tens and hundreds. That would be more compatible with computer usage.

examinator,

If you mean plug in a date into a computer and work out what the date and time will be in 100 days and 1 minute, 43 seconds or something, computer programs already do this. They can do so by picking some arbitrary starting time (eg, 1 January 1970) and compute the running seconds from that time onwards.

Eg, Tuesday, 9 February 2010 12:32:05 PM EST was 1265679125 seconds after 00:00:00 January 1 1970.

That way all you have to do is plug in the time duration to a computer, it converts it to running seconds, adds it to your start date (in running seconds) and then converts back to a date and time. You can't see any of this because it's all done behind the scenes.

Time in space - how will we measure it?
There is no earth, no rotation, no seasons,
and no established past record.
How will computers handle it?
How will we communicate time with other
inter-planetary cultures?

Something to contemplate.

The unit of 12 is divisible by 1,2,3,4,and 6, which is 1/6, 1/4, 1/3, 1/2 the unit 10 is not equally divisible by as many equal full unit callabrations. A quarter of a circle quadrants an angle of 90 degrees. Latitudinal lines are calibrated on the degrees of a circle and time changes are linked to the latitudinal lines on the circumference of the Earth. Do we change geometry to reflect a 100 degrees in a quadrant and 400 longitudinal divisions to define time changes?

What is 1/6 of 10, or 1/3 of 10. In packaging goods it is not as practical; as most goods are packaged in containers 3 x 4 to pack in 10 can only be packed in 2 x 5.

with the new ten day week, what will we call the three new days?

I hope that one is an extra Saturday to add to leisure time. The PC and equality crowd will want to follow Sunday with Daughterday. That leaves one day. Going by the majority of posters here, no-one would object to us having a Kevinday.

Dear Austin,

In some languages days are called numerically -
such as - firstday, seconday, etc. seventh day
(Sunday) to tenth day.
Very simple.

But if you want a Kevinday - there would have
to be a Referendum - to let the country decide.
Better to vote on a Republic first - so we could
all be " in - Powered."