"I've been on a calendar, but never on time." -- Marilyn Monroe

Time I recently admitted to my parents that I really didn't understand how pre-decimalisation money worked. Even though I explained that having been born in 1974 and having never used a shilling (except for when they were pretending to be five pences right into the eighties) I would never need to know how it worked, but it was still explained to me in no uncertain terms. Having 240 pence to the pound just seems wrong to me. Paradoxically, I'm quite happy with tennis scoring and the Gregorian calender which are equally nonsensical in their own ways.

Kuro5hin user circletimessquare on the other hand wonders what a decimal calender would look like:
"And the world is also on the same calendar, mostly, motivated by synchronization of business work. But unlike the metric system, the Gregorian Calendar is a hodge podge of historical and whimsical adjustments. Days of the week don't correlate with months, or years, and I still need to look up how many days there are in a given month now and then. You need to be an autistic savant to tell what day of the week a given month and year falls on. That's nonsense. The year can be divided in a lot simpler way than the anachronistic monstrosity that is the bastardized Roman Calendar."
And then somehow realises that there isn't really a decimal way of doing things. Although it's mostly because he keeps the 365 day year. Make it a thousand and then see what happens...

1 comment:

Annette said...

It's probably not a good idea to try to decimalize time, when we in the U.S. can't even adopt the metric system...