The Metric Clock

Letter of the Week:

Dear Leafcutter Expert:

That was an interesting article but I think you could have clarified that these bees were needed in fields that were dedicated to Certified Seed production.

Indeed you are right. I had a chance to discuss the author's letter with him in person and he explained that the leafcutter bees were necessary to ensure large yields of alfalfa to provide Certified Seed for future crops. When I questioned him why alfalfa was needed, if for nothing else than to provide seed for replanting, he only responded with a blank stare...

The Metric Clock is an idea I've been toying with for a long time now. It seems to me that since Canada went Metric back in 1978, the only unit of measurement we still carried along from the old Imperial system was that of Time. Now before you think, "He's lost it", hear me out.

Every unit of measurement in common use in Canada (i.e. the Metric system) is evenly divisible by ten except for Time. And to add to the confusion, with distance being in Metric it is no longer a simple matter to calculate how long it would take to drive a known distance. Back in Imperial Canada, at 60 miles per hour, it was a simple matter to determine that if you had 20 miles to drive it would take 20 minutes. But now, if you had to drive 20 kilometres at 100 kilometres per hour, how long would it take? Hmm... 100 kilometres divided by 20 is 5. So... 1/5 of an hour is 12 minutes. OK, it can be done, but not nearly so cleanly or simply.

What we needed was a unit of time measurement which would be divisible by ten. I decided to see what divisions could be made to keep a day equivalent to 24 hours (since obviously, the day-night cycle has to be adhered to). So I tried seeing what would happen if one minute had 100 seconds, one hour had 100 minutes and one day had 10 hours. That would mean that one day would equal 100,000 seconds - 100 x 100 x 10. Now, an existing day has 60 x 60 x 24 - or 86,400 - seconds. So we were close! Therefore, by adjusting the length of a second slightly we could keep the length of day equal to the present length of a day.

After mentioning this to a friend, he looked at me like I had a screw loose, but a couple of days later he came back to me and said he thought he had a workable solution. He proposed that we would come up with different names for the units of seconds, minutes and hours. That way there would be no confusion as to what method of time measurement was being used - like Celsius and Fahrenheit. So what I need now is a name for these units. The unit closest to a second in length would be 86,400/100,000 or 0.864 of a second. The unit closest in length to a minute would be 86.4 seconds and the unit closest in length to an hour would be 8,640 seconds or 2.4 Imperial hours.

Just think, instead of 8 hour days, we'd only have to work about 3 Metric hours. Or we could easily (for some) run a mile in 6 Metric minutes and tell everybody that we can run a 4-minute mile (neglecting to mention we were talking about Metric minutes). Let me know what you think. Is it a good idea or not? I also want to hear if you have any ideas for naming the new unit of Time. I think a name for the near-minute interval would be appropriate. For instance, if it were named a Crang, the near-second equivalent would be called a centicrang and the near-hour equivalent would be called a hectocrang. "Hold on a centicrang" or "That movie was a long one - it was 1-and-a-half hectocrangs!" Give it some thought.

As always, send me your suggestions for future columns on crang.com. See you next week.

© October 7, 2000