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

[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.