Simple Universal Time

First of all, there is already the Swatch Internet Time[0], which is a very similar concept (and similarly underused).<p>But more importantly, you would have to redefine the length of a second in order to keep days the same length. Redefining the length of a second is <i>not</i> <i>good</i>. Really, no.<p>Then there is the problem that this is not really a sensible metric time – 10 hours, 100 minutes and 100 seconds each? Frankly, that's stupid – ideally, you want the conversion factors to always be the same, ideally 10³. The swatch time mentioned above got this right with 1000 minutes (‘.beats’)/day, if absolutely necessary, you could probably also go with 100 quarter-hours/day and 100 seconds/quarter-hour, with 1 new second = 8.64 old seconds, or 1 old second ~ 0.12 new seconds.<p>The underlying problem here is that time lengths are intrinsically non-metric and there is little to no way to consistently make a year and a day both ‘metric’, simply because nature doesn’t require them to be. The same goes for nearly all other SI units – the equator is 40 Mm, the average height of a human is ~2m, a human weighs 80kg, not 100kg (and really, <i>k</i>g as the base unit?!).<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time</a>

Is it only me or this sounds like a terrible idea? Maybe it will eventually be more productive but during the transition phase, there'll be mayhem. Not to mention all the unusable clocks, hardware etc that'll have to be completely scraped.

Previously tried in the late 1700s:<p>"Decimal time is the representation of the time of day using units which are decimally related. This term is often used to refer specifically to French Revolutionary Time, which divides the day into 10 decimal hours, each decimal hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds"<p>It sounds quite practical, but one reason we have 60-based time and 360 degrees in a circle is that they divide evenly so many ways. Eg, 60 minutes divides evenly by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, so it's easy to measure a third of an hour or 1/6 of a circle.

I've just discovered the C implementation of SUT at <a href="https://github.com/benkaiser/sut.c" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/benkaiser/sut.c</a> - nice to see it working on the commandline :-)

Even if this was well thought out it would never catch on.

claudius, you are right, there is swatch beat. It actually tries to solve the problem different. The problem with beat is that humans are used to hours/minutes/seconds. That's why SUT reuses this principle.