It’s 176 past 289… or 4:20am last Thursday
Whilst planning for a trip to New York and the implications of time zones, we got thinking about time as whole, or more precisely, the Gregorian shackles that are the UNITS of time that surely should have been chucked out the window with the shilling.
Why have ‘they’ never brought in metric time? Possibly for the simple reason that for the next 100 years everyone would be asking each other, ‘What’s that in seconds?’. 10 also isn’t as round a number as you think. It only feels like it because we run out of numbers when we get to 9. What makes clocks catchy is the fact that you can divide them into quarters, ‘Oh, it’s about quarter past 5?. Easy! Can you divide ten into such a socially convenient shape. NO! If ‘Ten’ had 12 numbers in it (i.e. we added the additional numbers ‘Gwek’ and ‘Pif’) we’d be on course for a much more rounded 10. Now we can start making some sense with blowing down Greg’s Dusty Old Calendar.
Now that we’ve established that ’10? is officially not-that-good, we can go about cracking into shape these crappy days, weeks, months and years we’ve been putting up with. Most things we base these units on are planetary stuff spinning round each other, and what’s good for measuring circles? Degrees. We already measure heat and angles with them, it’s seems crazy we’re not already measuring time with degrees too!
So, 360 degrees in an hour, day and year? Can it work? Can We handle it? Of course not! That’s the beauty. Human’s have got to a stage where we’ve avoided evolution. 360TimeTM is a Darwinian kick start. What’s more, 12 divides into 360 in many nice socially convenient and overly precise ways! What the newly proposed TenTM‘s affects would do to that harmony, I’m not going to consider, neither should you. If that’s not already good enough for you, our years are already 365.25 days long. That means we all get to keep the ideal 360 day year whilst GAINING a 5 and a quarter day shut down every year. It’s the dark, cold, secluded holiday people just don’t make time in their busy hussle-bussle life styles nowadays.
So, most things not considered, degrees hold the key to a universal system that makes EVERYONE better off, even if that means dead. The immense upheaval required for everyone to learn the new system would only be beneficial to tomorrow’s stupider generation. The only question unanswered is, what name should this new, partially beneficial system have? A name that would suitably reflect its practicality and the confusion and pain it would cause. An unrelated stream of alpha-numeric code? Maybe with a skull and crossbones character? Or no name at all, so people would have to stay inaudible when they meant the word?
May my thoughts be with you and those that fall in the 360 Days War.