Reposting bc I dun goofed before
as a promoter of the kilofoot I about agree and am offended by this comic.
I’m sure the artist intended to be smart and use metric time as something silly.
The problem is he used regular time.
60 * 60 * 24=86400=>86.4 kseconds where k stands for 1000. Like kilo for 1000 grams. Kilometer for 1000 meters etc.
The comic doesn’t make sense…
No, it’s correct, metric time is just using seconds for everything, you end up with minutes, hours, days,… as auxiliary units. And then there’s decimal time, which tries to divide the day into 10 hours, the French tried to introduce that during the revolution.
Are you talking about SI unites? I mean, sure, there is overlap but the metric system is what people use in everyday life and SI is a scientific system where you don’t even use prefixes (like kilo) but just powers of 10. In no case to people use kiloseconds
The SI system is a metric system and also defines the use of the words describing powers of ten. The use of kiloseconds also isn’t wrong, it just means 1000 seconds, obviously. But it only makes sense in context (for example short lived isotopes).
The same way “Megameter” is formally correct but no one uses it because there is rarely a context where this was useful.
I cannot see what’s wrong saying a day consists of 86.4 ks. It’s a fact and it’s mathematically correct.
If we’re redifining time, why do we have to keep the same unit size? Simply adjust the duration of a second to make exactly 100 ksecs per day.
It’s ingrained and arbitrary. The only thing we’ve found so far for measuring time that doesn’t appear to be arbitrary is Planck time, which is so small it has no use in daily life. So if you have to use an arbitrary unit anyway, why make a new arbitrary unit? And while the second, minute, hour, and to a lesser degree month are arbitrary, days and years are not, they are just based on the unique circumstances of when we started observing our world in a scientific manner.
A proposed better calendar that would have made as much sense as converting to the metric system
EDIT: turns out that the idea is not so new … it was called the “International Fixed Calendar” and it was first proposed in 1902
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
What’s stopping us from just switching to this calendar right now? How do I convert my birthday to this calendar? I’ll switch this very second
The idea is even older: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar
And deci. What’s wrong base 10? Why aren’t you touching your decilitres.
This is bullshit.
Seconds are already metric no need to redefine them.
Furthermore, if we redefine seconds we would also need to redefine a lot of other units.
This would result in massive confusion and a lot of avoidable errors in science and engineering, similar to what is already happening in the us with their bullshit freedom units.
It is not even that much harder if you get used to it.
If 86.4ks are too much to count for you, you could instead resurrect the metric prefix myria- for 10⁴. So 1day = 8.64 myriaseconds. And instead of minutes, use hectoseconds.
