100 o'clock

What if a day was a hundred hours? I often played this scenario in my head and thought it shouldn't be too hard to simulate. But when I finally got to it, I found that a lot of things with time are just arbitrary. There isn't a fundamental constant that defines time as we currently know it. We just had to agree on some values to get the math going.

Why is a second measured relative to the unperturbed frequency of the caesium 133 atom? What did we use before that? Note that frequency is measured in hertz, which is the cycles per second, and the second is measured in frequency, which is the cycles per second. The cycle continues. But time measurement is also self correcting because if we don't measure it right, we can just wait for the next sunrise and use any other method we can come up with to measure the time between two sunrises. But then again, the days of the year are not the same length. So instead of trying to find a perfect definition, I'll just say that a second is an agreed upon length of time.

Since we have ten fingers on our hands, it makes sense to use a decimal system. But somehow, we didn't think 10 was appropriate for time. Maybe the Greeks found it was easier to cut a circle into 60 pieces rather than 100 pieces. 60 seconds make a minute, 60 minutes make an hour. So obviously a day should be 60 hours, but no. 24 hours make a day.

So if I had to make a clock that turns a day into 100 hours, I'll have to put any logical justification aside. My clock is 100 hours because I said so. So let's see what it looks like.

The 100 hour clock.

• 1 day is 100 hours
• 1 hour is 100 minutes
• 1 minute is 100 seconds
• 1 sec is a millionth of a day.

In this case, a full day will amount to 1 million seconds. The ratio between this 100-hour-day second and our traditional second will be calculated as 1 million divided by 86,400 or ~11.574.

Here are the two seconds compared:

When rendering a clock that ticks with this new time, I realize that a second is too fast for a human to count. In fact, it's a little over 10 times faster (11.574x). So I invented a new term: Tenet. A tenet is 10 seconds. It's a human friendly time counter. Not affiliated with Christopher Nolan.

Now that we have a new second, it is time to create a clock and see how it works:

It didn't look so special. It's just a clock with 100 units for hours instead of 12. That's when it occurred to me: why aren't analog clocks divided in 24 hours? Why 12? But then again, the answer is probably because somebody said so.

What if we give the calendar the same treatment?

Not long after I built the clock, I had another shower thought. What if we have a decimal calendar? Let's take a look at the current calendar we use. A day is a day and a week is 7 days. But a month is 28, 29, 30, or 31 days. What's going on there? A year is always 12 months, but a year is also 365 or 366 days. The reason it is so complicated is because the year is supposed to track seasons. The solar year is 365.25 rounded.

But in my shower-thought calendar, a day remains a single planetary rotation, a week can turn into 10 days, a month is 10 weeks. Maybe 10 months can make a year. We lose the tracking of seasons, but that's fine we can always look out the window. Our year is now equal to 1000 days.

If we decide to go with this calendar, where do we start? If I convert today's date to my calendar, what year should it be? I decided to not be too creative, I will ignore all adjustments that have been made throughout history. Since I am in control here, I'll latch on to the current calendar and work my way back to year zero, which was ...calculating years ago.

Since year 0, we are at day ...calculating....

We have the days. Calculating the current year is a simple matter of dividing the days by a thousand. Our new calendar year is ...calculating....

We have to build an actual calendar for it, but I was met with a problem. Now that we have 10 days of the week, we have to come up with new names. I headed to chatGPT for inspiration, after many iterations it gave me some interesting choices. So until further notice, these are the days of the week:

Monaris, Tuedra, Wednesol, Thurith, Frinor, Satsan, Sundel, Ochtue, Ninive, Tendec.

Not very interesting, but they will look familiar when using only the first three caracters. And of course, we also need month names.

Monuary, Secondary, Thursdary, Fortuary, Fiftuary, Sixember, September, October, November, December.

No, this is not from chatgpt. They just made more sense to me when you can spot the pattern. I am not sorry Roman emperors.

Here is our calendar:

This wouldn't be complete if you can't convert your own dates.

Interesting facts now that we have redefined a year:

• Since a year is 1000 days, it now corresponds to 2.73x of the old year.
• The average life expectancy for a man in the US goes from 73.5 years to 26.84 years.
• An 18 year old adult is now 6 and a half years old.
• Man's best friend now lives for 4.75 years.

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