The current date and time is not working. Maybe you should see www.decimaltime.org or something. The broken time is
What's 14th July 1999 plus 11th January 1978? C'mon! Quick! It's extemely hard, isn't it? Wouldn't it be good if somebody invented decimal notation for time? Furthermore, wouldn't it be better if somebody else invented decimal notation for time? The answer to that semi-rhetorical question is "Yes, it is better, because somebody has already done it."
It was Napoleon (apparently)! But that didn't work, so I did it as well. Let me say straight away that this is not intended to replace the everyday use of time as we know it. People will still use the 24/7 notation in conversation and probably most places. This is just intended to simplify some problems and have a bit of fun at the same time. One problem with the current system is that it is very hard to do mathematical operations on time. You have to split it up into years, months, days, minutes and seconds before you can do meaningful calculations on it. This is made all the more tricky because of the irregular numbers it uses.
Decimal time makes calculations easy by providing a serial number type notation for time, where a larger number always represents a later date. It handles past dates more effectively, as a number lower than the current number will always be in the past. It also fixes the millenium bug for good, and I mean for good. Current millenium bug fixes will create a problem in the year 10,000 (no joke), but this one does not create a problem ever.
If decimal time were ever to be adopted as a global time system, it would solve a few other problems. The western world has imposed the Christian calendar on the rest of the world for business use, and while most people have accepted it as the global standard, many are resentful. The Jewish calendar, for example, is somewhere just before the year 6000 at the moment. I have no idea how other countries and civilisations measure the passage of time, but they will no doubt use similarly different methods. One solution (the current solution, it seems) is to forget about minority cultures and force everybody to use the Roman Calendar. Another is to use decimal time! Hurrah and hooray! It starts at midnight, December 31st 1999. Yes, I know this is related to the Christian calendar, but the millenium celebrations have transcended religious significance, so the number '2000' means lots, to a lot more people. By starting again from the year 0, day 0, hour 0, minute 0 and second 0, people might feel a refreshing new age has started. It might encourage people to start again, or to rethink old grudges. It will, like any change, usher out the old and sweep in the new. Well, maybe not, but you'll be able to work out how long a train from point A took to get to point B.
In decimal time notation, there are 100 seconds in an minute, 100 minutes in an hour, 100 hours in a day and 100 days in a year. Confused yet? I didn't think so. Here is the first problem: the day and the year is defined by the rotation and orbit of the Earth, respectively. We can't change these. So if we keep the length of the year the same, we only have to deal with the day problem. In the old system, there were 31557600 seconds in a year. In the new system, there are 100000000 seconds in a year. This means that a new day is going to be three and a half times longer than an old day. Unfortunately (hehe) night and day will still be the same, so if we were going to use it for normal everyday use, we'd have to devise a cunning new work/sleep schedule that fit three days into 88 hours. This could, I suppose, be easily achieved by telling everybody to sleep in an extra two and a half hours, and work an extra 2 and a half hours. Whatever.
It incorporates leap years by considering a year 365.25 days long.
If you have a javascript enabled browser (and that probably means IE4), you can see the current time in decimal notation. At the time of writing, it was -1/54 35:21:82. This looks very confusing at first sight, but that's because it's your first sight. All the punctuation is just to make it easier to read (and it is this type of punctuation that I suggest becomes the adopted standard). Raw decimal notation of the same time would look like this: -154352182. In order to maintain the property of being bigger for a later date, it is read from the right (but with punctuation, this doesn't matter).
Reading from the right, it reads 82 seconds, 21 minutes, 35 hours, 54 days and -0 years. The new decimal time format starts from the Year 2000, to simplify things, and to make sure it has no religious or social connotations. This is why the number is negative - it's 54 new days until the Year 2000. Note that it is 54 new days, 35 new hours, 21 new minutes and 82 new seconds. They are very different to the old ones. If you must know, new seconds, minutes and hours are just over three times shorter than the old counterparts.
It is not necessary to write the whole thing down. -0/54 is fine for the date, and 35:21:82 is fine for the time. If you want to do any calculations, though, it's best to keep them together.
Notice that the year stays the same as a conventional year, albeit, 2000 smaller. This is because the length of a new year is the same as the length of an old year.
Months, unfortunately, mean nothing in the new system. We could use arbitrary values like 10 days in a month, 10 months in a year, but it's probably best to forget about them for any calculations. However, they would almost certainly be used in normal conversation. The question is, which two months do we scrap? I say June and January, but the whole world would probably have to vote.
Well, if you start by thinking up some suitably round number to represent the number of new seconds in a year, you then divide the number of old seconds by that number. I chose 100000000 as a number for the number of seconds in a year, because that leaves us with 100 seconds in a minute, 100 minutes in an hour, 100 hours in a day and 100 days in a year. The calculation results in there being 0.315576 old seconds in a new second. If you want to think of it the other way round, there are 3.168808781 new seconds in an old second. And then you just work out the rest of the numbers:
190.1285269 new seconds in an old minute (x60)
11407.71161 new seconds in an old hour (x60x60)
273785.0787 new seconds in an old day (x60x60x24)
100000000 new seconds in a year (x60x60x24x365.25)
1) A train leaves London at 35:21:82 and arrives in Poole at 40:21:82. How long was the journey?
The time taken to get to Poole was
402182 - 352182 = 50000.
Now the important part: although this makes sense numerically, for a human to make any sense of it, we need to put the punctuation in. By working from the right (always from the right), we divide it up into two digits for the seconds, two digits for the minutes and two digits for the hours. Since there are only five digits in 50000, it's necessary to pad it out with a zero, but like any number this doesn't make any difference. The result is
5:00:00, which is 5 hours. Once again, remember that this is 5 new hours, so it is actually just over one and a half hours. Admittedly, that one could just as easily have been done on in 24-hour time notation, like 1336 or 2100. But how about this next one?
2) A person was born -16/09 45:67:06. The date is currently -1/54 35:21:82. How old are they?
This is easy. Simply subtract his birthday from the current date like so:
-154352182 - -1609456706 = 1455104524
Again, to make real sense of it, we need to punctuate it. An important thing to remember is this: ALWAYS WORK FROM THE RIGHT. This is because the first two digits might be a one digit year and the first digit of the day, or a two digit year. To avoid this problem, work from the right. It's easy, then, because each component only has two digits for it, unlike the year, which can have an unlimited number of digits. (i.e. year 2 or year 19,000)
14/55 10:45:24
This means the person is 14 years old, which is all most people want to know. We've also found out that he is 55 days older than 14, so he is actually fourteen and a half. If all you wanted to know was his age in years, you'd just do -1 - -16, which would give you 15 years old (this is obviously rounded up). To increase the accuracy, you could just do years and days:
-154 - -1609 = 1455
which is 14 years and 55 days. Since there are 100 days in a year, this is just over 14 and a half years.
Note that both calculations are carried out on negative numbers. This is because they are both before the year 0 (or the year 2000, whatever you want to call it). As time goes on, there will be fewer everyday calculations done on negative dates, so it will become less confusing.
To give it a real chance of becoming anything more than an interesting idea, I'd need to make a formula to convert decimal time into regular time. Well actually, I've done the formula, but it's hardly mathematical, and I've not been able to write a program that converts between the two (probably because I haven't got a clue how to program) I'll also write up exactly how I came to the conclusion that one new second should be 3.170979198 old seconds.
I imagine the main use for this system would be in computing, accounting and banking, where it is important to be able to handle dates efficiently and sequentially. Sorting the dates out in ascending order becomes a simple case of arranging them in ascending numerical order.
It is also easier for most humans to use this system as well, although I can't see it catching on unless they learn it from day one - it can be extremely hard to unlearn something, for example, the imperial system and smoking.
But then again, we've successfully changed to metric, haven't we? Who knows what we might change to tomorrow?