g’nōō-bûr

I really try to keep my mental dalliances under control. I have a million projects I’d like to work on but I realize I have priorities. Then, something hits your fancy and you do some math in your head while in a traffic queue. And then, even though the thought is complete, you put a shine on it for the next 2.4 hours (1 deci-day) before posting it.

Here is my complete waste of time: a combination base-10 (metric) time / sort-of-base-6 (normal) time wall clock.

There are actually some cool things about a base-10 time system. One thousandth of a day, a milli-day, is equal to precisely 86.4 seconds. In fact, all the numbers on the clock are precise. Conversions aren’t difficult.

Also, the intervals are convenient to use. Consider the deci-day, one tenth of a day, equal to 2 hours 24 minutes. This is a good amount of time for productive concentration on a major project. The fact that one-hour meetings always end up taking exactly this amount of time shows it as the naturally maximum amount of time people can work on one thing without giving up. This is also the maximum length of time one ever really wants to sit for a class. Any more time crosses a pain threshold.

Likewise, the centi-day, one one-hundredth of a day, is an extremely convenient measure of time, consisting of 14 minutes and 24 seconds. The next time you’re busy with something and can’t get to another thing someone needs you to do, say “Can I call you back in a centi-day? Thanks!”

addendum:

I began to think that some of the base-10 units are close to normal units. So, I made up “metric” minutes, seconds, and hours, and added them to the picture.

A metric minute is just another name for a milli-day, and a metric second is 1/100th of that, or 10 micro-days. However, to make the metric hour closer to a regular hour, it has to be half a deci-day, not a full deci-day. There are 100 metric seconds in a metric minute. But since a metric hour is only half a deci-day, there are only 50 metric minutes in (my) metric hour.