Re: Adding time is fun
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The next time some canadian (or whatever other country) starts giving you attitude about the US refusing the metric system, tell them to change their time to a base 10 system and get back to you.
All of a sudden they understand why it seems like more hassle than it's worth.
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It's pretty geeky, but I'll admit I'd thought about this once. The time divisions that have a physical significance are year, month, and day, and these can't be changed (you can't create a unit to make the # of days in a year a power of 10). The division of a day into hours, minutes, and seconds, however, is quite arbitrary. For the remainder of this post, read "non-metric second" as today's "second", and "metric second" as a future, base-10 "second", and realize bpm is beats per (current, non-metric) minute.
Presumably the non-metric second was based upon the heart rate of an average adult at the time (60 bpm). 60*60*24 = 86,400 non-metric seconds per day. We could instead define 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hours, and 100 seconds per minute, making the metric second = 86.4% of the non-metric second.
Incidentally, this corresponds to a heartrate of 69.444 bpm. If you look at today's less healthy adults, this is much closer to the average heart rate than 60 bpm anyway, so perhaps it's a better system of dividing time. But other than making time-based calculations a little easier, changing time units would be a huge effort with little reward.
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