What if Napoleon hadn’t abolished decimal time?

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It doesn't really make sense to talk of binary time or decimal time. These are only counting systems. You can count the time in binary, decimal, octal or whatever.

You can talk about changing the way we count time to multiples that suit a particular counting system, this is what we normally mean by decimal time, changing to multiples of 10.

You can also match your geographical and clock systems in any counting type to get the locational "advantage" you talk of.

Displaying something based on a binary to decimal translation of a date of 01-01-01 is completely meaningless and has nothing to do with binary or decimal time or, indeed, binary or decimal counting systems. You're taking a series of decimal numbers that, when written in a certain way, have a meaning as a binary number and then converting that back into a decimal number.


I find the idea of dividing a month into three 10 day weeks to be quite clever. Why not get rid of the idea of weeks altogether and have thirty-six 10 day months with the remainding days as holidays over christmas. Nobody does any work anyway. Naming the new months would be fun.

So a solar year would be roughly thirty-six 10 day months.

A lunar month would be roughly three 10 day months.

And since hours, minutes and seconds are man made units of time anyway one could divide a day into say 100000 units of time giving 10 hours of 100 minutes of 100 seconds. The seconds would be shorter than they are now of course but people are more impatient anyway. Hang on a sec, will you?

But I guess we'll be seeing Euros in England before this ever happens. ;-)


What the writer may not realize is that our measurements of time are anthro-centric. The hearbeat of a healthy human at rest os 60 beats per minute. We have the Sumerians and the Akkadians to thank for their division of time into 24 hours comprised of 60 minutes each where each minute was 60 heart beats. Why 60? and why 24? 60 = 2x2x3x5 and so it can be divided by 2, 3, 4 and 5. 24 = 2x2x2x3 which allows 24 to be divided by 2, 3, and 4. the 12 hour clock is not my fault. It is interesting that in Genesis God Said, "I will place the stars in the heavens to mark the times and the seasons." Doesn't the Big Dipper resemble and hour hand as it circles around Polaris? It is also said of the AntiChrist that he will attempt to change the times nd the seasons. Is it any wonder that the attempts by the French to "deci-mate" time met with failure. steven


"The hexadecimal day begins at midnight at .0000. One second after midnight, the time is .0001. Half a day later, noon arrives at .8000. A second before the next midnight is .FFFF. "

Wouldnt that mean there will be 65536 (16*16*16*16) hexadecimal seconds in a (hexadecimal) day, as opposed to 86400 normal seconds. Obviously a hexadecimal second will be longer than one of the normal variety.

Red Baron

"Former Republican" poses the rhetorical question: "...who uses Nautical Miles?" Well, aviation worldwide (with the possible exception of mainland China [?]) does.

Red Baron

Very small correction: chinese "fen" for "minute" is said to be"fûn" in Japanese. There is no [u:] in Japanese, if you leave out the palatalized "yû". It is therefore "fun", not "fûn".


Reading the posts, not the article, I was reminded of a cartoon in some good quality English newspaper when the country changed from Fahrenheit to Centigrade.
Two very old ladies talking in front a frozen landscape and one of them telling the other: have you noticed, dear, how much colder it has become since they changed to Centigrade?


People can adapt. Witness the countries that have implemented the metric system and decimal currencies as well as the Euro. It might take a generation for the new system to be universally used but it does happen.
For time where accuracy counts, eg. military, they use 2400 hours on Universal time, otherwise known as GMT. Works very well - although it does have the mystery of 60 minutes and 60 seconds.
Note the author's example of a decimal angle that would allow direct conversion to a distance actually applies to the nautical mile - one minute of latitude is a nautical mile. But who uses nautical miles.
For changes such as these to occur, they would come out of the military sector. When nations had universal military service, it was a relatively quick way to disseminate a new technology to the general population.

John OConnor

Date is expressed internationally as YYYY-MM-DD, as stipulated by the International Standard (ISO 8601), in reference to the misleading information in the article: "Expressed internationally as, the first day of this year was 010110."


I never understood why February has only 28 days when there are plenty of spare days to bring it up to 30. And why add the leap day to Feb? If anything I'd prefer an extra day in the summer. Also, by adding the day to Feb every time, aren't we pushing the dates out of alignment with the seasons?


Logical but people are not. Just as the use of time zones and daylight savings time has become archaic costing billions in maintenance and billions more in errors and negative effects the 12 hour day is here to stay.

It shouldn't. Like time zones we have advanced far beyond such ancient measurements but where a person can adapt people cannot.


"Obviously, the smallest binary number in this century’s set was January 1st at the turn of the millennium (010100)"
Yet another mistake by the author.
The millenium turned at the END of 2000 AD (i.e., 31st December, 2000), not at the beginning of it. The author will do well to realise that there was no zero year.

hamilton 2.0

If the correspondent were as enlightened as the computer scientists, he would realize that decimal is itself an anthropogenic perversion of the true beauty of numbers, of which binary is the most accurate representation and hexadecimal the most convenient translation (base 4 has most of the same properties, but octal- while better than decimal- actually fails to achieve the same symmetries). Of course, were the correspondent to elevate his discourse to the level of the computer scientists, his own prodigious enjoyment of his writings might be the sum of their public value...


Your cereberally challenged rambling, brings to mind the august words of Napoleon himself: "Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is for ever."

This vacuous article rightly belongs to the latter category.

Well, I guess you can take comfort in knowing that it's eternal - in a manner of speaking!

Pardon me my honesty..

Several obscure methods for counting time has already been mentioned, so why not mention Internet Time?

Internet Time is a "new" way to tell time. The current Internet Time is the same all over the World (no time zones or daylight saving time adjustments).

Instead of dividing the virtual and real day into 24 hours and 60 minutes per hour, the Internet Time system divides the day into 1000 ".beats". Each .beat is 1 minute and 26.4 seconds.


Time zones are something that intrigue me. What if there were no time zones? GMT is all we would have had, basically. I think that's the case in aircraft communication. Where I live, time to wake up would then be 3 PM.


Oh jus' so you know, perusing this literary(?) concoction another immortal quote of Napoleon springs to mind:

"Able was I 'ere I saw this article - oops! Elba"

What prompted you to embark on this tortuous semantic journey, pray may I ask??


Actually there would be nothing especially convenient about having 10 hours in a day (one base is as good as another), and of course 12 hours is simply related to 12 months (on a sundial, say) which is lunar-related, so 12 has some real logic (on the other hand 10 is related to finger count, which seems irrelevant - who wishes to count time with their fingers!?)

Napoleon was of course only interested in being non-British, hence various other foolish changes like driving on the wrong side of the road and sugar beet - still a great curse of the common agricultural policy. But some changes might have made sense - for example just by having an occasional holiday in the year that is not a weekday (so Saturday-Christmas Day-Sunday for example) one could keep the day-to-date relationship nearly constant. This would be easier for diaries (only 2 kinds of year instead of 14) and make for more predictable holidays. But I do not expect it to happen!


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