Metric

[gfish]

Talking to my mom tonight, she mentioned that I was arguing for the metric system when I was ten. Which would be super cool if I was particularly good at thinking in it by now, but I'm not. I have mass, length and temperature down pretty well. I'm much weaker on volume, speed and pressure. Curse the US Congress for not mandating a switch in the 70s like they promised! One of the few powers explicitly granted to them by the Consitution, and all they've managed to do is a toothless 1988 proclamation that metric is the "preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce". Bah.

Comments

[tnarg42.livejournal.com]

I had a very devious, prankster high school teacher who convinced all of the office secretaries that we were switching to "Metric time"... They were most upset by the prospect and even wrote our congress-critters to complain... :-)

[gfish.livejournal.com]

I actually have a big 24 hour analog clock with the face divided into 'decimal minutes', 100 gradations to the minute. The workings are normal, however, so the sweep hand still ticks in seconds. I don't know why it was offered, but it seemed harmlessly amusing when I was looking for big 24 hour analog clocks.

[samildanach.livejournal.com]

You probably know this, but some areas of the French Republic ran on decimal time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar) after the revolution.

Each solar day was divided into ten hours, each hour into 100 minutes, and each minute into 100 seconds. A decimal minute was 86.4 conventional seconds, so a decimal second was .864 conventional seconds.