Why those other time formats have failed to work.
From SusoSight
| Number: | 71 |
| Date created: | 2002-09-26 19:23:23 |
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There was metric time, then WRLDtime, then the Swatch beat. What else is there? Probably a lot of attempts to come up with a simpler time standard that unified the time zones and made the amount of divisions in the day and year simpler. Some systems were financially driver, others were more stickley for the benifit of humanity. But none of them have caught on at all for two very important reasons.
The first and most obvious one is that they don't offer much a benefit over what we have now. People are used to the second,minute,hour system. There are so many things based on it that there would have to be a very very high compelling reason to switch to something else.
The second reason and this is what I'm mainly writing this about is that most of the other systems had to few divisions of the day. The Swatch Beat for example was something like 2 minutes and 30 seconds long. It doesn't really make it very convient for clocking the 50 meter dash, does it? Sure you could say 0.7856 beats, but that's kinda lame. The WRLDtime format was based on 100 measures in a day and 100 beats in a measure. Thus there are 10000 beats in a day. Besides the bad homage to music terminology, it still puts a beat at 8.64 seconds. That's kinda long. In musical terms that would be more than 4 times slower than Largo (the slowest musical tempo term).
When you start thinking about what would work for keeping time, the current system we are using starts to make more and more sense. We just need to get rid of the timezones.