[shrumm]

This was a fascinating read for a totally unexpected reason.

I’ve spent most of my life in countries where the metric system is used for distance, weight, temperature etc.

This year I’ve had to travel a lot to the US for work and found the constant mental conversions a PITA. I kept wondering why people keep holding out against such an obviously easier system.

Then I read this article about 8 hours of sleep would be 3.33 metric hours. How you wake up at 9:50 after sleeping at 2:75 and I notice real-time at the absolute recoil I feel reading this. Maybe I’m getting older , but I completely get how familiarity to numbers being represented a certain way is hard to let go of.

[skummetmaelk]

8 hours comes from the worker's movement anyway. 8 hours work, 8 hours recreation, 8 hours rest. It's clearly only chosen to make a nice slogan. In reality 7-9 appears to be optimal. If you were using decimal time you'd just say 3-3.5 hours and be done with it. Convenient enough.

[II2II]

Yeah, too much of our society is based upon 24 hour time.

The transition is also unlikely to have many benefits. Unlike most of the other units of measure, the everyday conversions are fuzzy. The only exception I've seen is when payroll bean counters expect minute precision converted to decimal hours, which is a pain! Everything in science and engineering tends to be maintained in seconds, which is decimalized anyway so there is no benefit there.

I don't see "metric time" making any headway, particularly since something like universal time would be much more beneficial yet hasn't gained traction.

[vanviegen]

At least the 3.33 makes intuitive sense to me: a third of a 10 hour day.

Am I correct in assuming 9:50 and 2:75 should be the other way around?