My son, the wizard, decided that we need to make a new unit of measure... We have metric standards for most units of measurement, (grams instead of ounces, meters instead of yards, etc.). And we should have a metric standard, he says, for time.
I was curious. Surely this is not a new concept. And, it is not. Still, my son thought this out pretty well, and some of his ideas match, more or less, those of some of the people "out there" who have proposed similar things to the scientific community.
In summary, we pick a standard amount of time as the base unit, such as the "day" (24 hours more or less). His term for this unit, and as far as I know this is his alone, but I think it's a good one, is the "tam". Do not ask why, it's not important. I didn't see any obvious conflicts with other meanings of the word.
So a "tam" is defined, in the current system, as a 24 hour period.
A centitam, would be one hundredth of a tam, or about 14.4 minutes. A decitam would be 10x that, or about 144 minutes (a little over 2 hrs), and a millitam would be a tenth of that, or 1.44 minutes....
Going the other way, from a science point of view, is easy. 10 days/tams is a dekatam. 100 days/tams is a hectotam, 1000 days/tams is a kilotam, etc.
1 megatam (Mt) = 1 000 000 d = 2738 years
1 kilotam (kt) = 1000 d = 2.7 years
1 hectotam (ht) = 100 d = 3.3 months
1 dekatam (dat) = 10 d = 1.43 weeks
1 tam (t) = 1 d = 24 hours
1 decitam (dt) = 0.1 d = 2.4 hours (2 h 24 min)
1 centitam (ct) = 0.01 d = 0.24 hours (14 min 24 s)
1 millitam (mt) = 0.001 d = 1.44 minutes (86.4 s)
1 microtam (µt) = 0.000 001 d = 86.4 milliseconds
1 nanotam (nt) = 0.000 000 001 d = 86.4 microseconds
Of course there's no set standard to metric times, yet. There are proposals to base metric time on the second, and in other places, the day. I am sure there may be other thoughts out there as well.
I can think of other problems with this whole thing. And for everyday living the Gregorian calendar still rules... (using "day" as your base, there are no round numbers for "year"... it's still 365 days, more or less.) So there's not any point in saying my daughter is 2,944 days old (as of May 22), or rather, almost three kilotams, when she just turned eight (years) a few days ago.
After my son brought this idea to my attention, I went back and looked a bit online. It sounded original to me, but ... there've been numerous proposals to standardize time in the metric system. His is as good as any out there. Here are some links (you can Google for more anytime).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time
http://zapatopi.net/metrictime/
http://www.decimaltime.hynes.net/metric.html
2 comments:
James,
I have to say that Jeremy is becoming more and more like you. You could never deny that he is yours even if you wanted to.
My original post (since removed) about him was much, much more negative in tone than this one, but he IS a good kid... Since he came up with this idea, and we discussed it in pretty good detail in the car the other day, I decided to try and write it out while I was thinking about it. And this post was the result.
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