I mean, you already have 12 phalanges on one hand (3 each, from 4 fingers) and you can use your thumb as an indicator.

Nah. Just start counting on your fingers. 123 on the index, 456 on the middle, 789 on the ring, and the rest on your pinkie. Its based on the segments of each finger, and it's how Mayans used to count.

Who over the age of 6 counts on their fingers

Lol. Seriously though, for something like this these days, it will be interesting to see what happens given we will have to face the year 2038 problem. This kind of thing was still doable for the 2000 switch because of the relatively small number of devices/softwares, but because of the number of devices and softwares now, let alone in 2038, I really have no idea how it's going to be managed.

I don't understand how its any easier than using 100 and dividing...

1/2 an hour is 30 min 1/2 an hour if metric used 100 is 50 min

1/4 an hour is 15 min 1/4 an hour metric is 25 min

Any lower than that and they both get tricky..

1/8 an hour is 7.5 min 1/8 an hour metric is 12.5 min

Getting used to metric time would be an impossible thing to implement worldwide I reckon, but I struggle to understand how its any less simple than the 60 min hour we have and the 24 hour day...

My vote is power-of-two based. Everything should be binary. It is divided up so much easier and counting is better.

I loved the idea behind Swatch's .beats. A "beat" was slightly short of 1.5 minutes, so totally usable in everyday life. If you need more precision, decimals - as @[email protected] suggested - are allowed.

However, one big issue of it is that it is based on Biel, Switzerland local time and the same for everyone around the world. Might not be that big of a problem for Europeans, but while e.g. @000 is midnight in Biel, it's early morning in Australia, and afternoon/evening in the US.

And the second, bigger issue becomes obvious when you start looking at the days. E.g. people in the US would start work @708 on a Tuesday and finish @042 on Wednesday. Good luck scheduling your meetings like this.

While were at it, the day should start at sunrise not the middle of the night.

I feel like I'm going crazy at moments like this.

Wikipedia on Metric Time:

The modern SI system defines the second as the base unit of time, and forms multiples and submultiples with metric prefixes such as kiloseconds and milliseconds.

Edit: Attention that this is the SI second, not a decimal second

Wikipedia on Decimal Time:

This term is often used specifically to refer to the French Republican calendar time system used in France from 1794 to 1800, during the French Revolution, which divided the day into 10 decimal hours, each decimal hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds

metric-time.com :

With metric time the day is broken into 10 hours.
A metric hour is broken into 100 minutes.
A metric minute is broken into 100 seconds.

So either Wikipedia is wrong or the website.

Then the wikipedia is wrong? Because what the website you linked calls metric time Wikipedia calls decimal

So it's not using the SI second? That's a bit weird

Your departure form US defaultism is celebrated here, dear person.

We do it with crocodiles but maths checks out.

Well, yes and no.

In geometry, 15, 30, 45, 60, 90, 120, and 180 degrees are all important, commonly occurring angles. They can be represented as 1/24, 1/12, 1/8, 1/6, 1/4, 1/3, and 1/2 of a circle. Trying to represent these angles on a 10-degree circle, most would have infinitely repeating decimals, which would make math involving them extraordinarily ugly and complicated. You can't represent the angles of an equilateral triangle without repeating decimals. (1/6 of a circle, or 1.667 "degrees") You can't even represent the angles of a square without a fractional part. (1/4 of a circle, or 2.5 "degrees")

Dividing the circle into 360 degrees gives us numbers that are simpler and cleaner to use in base-10 mathematics. The 360-degree circle is a layer of abstraction for eliminating repeating decimals when referring to these common angles. Decimal is such a pain in the ass in geometry that stacking a sexagesimal layer between the unit circle and the number system was the most feasible way to do it.

A base-12 number system would not need such an abstraction. On a 12-degree circle, these common angles would be 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2, 3, 4, and 6 degrees. A 24-degree circle (12-degree half-circle) would allow us to represent each of these with no radix point (the "decimal point" in a non-decimal number system)

Basically, if we had evolved with 6 fingers on each hand instead of 5, mathematics would be far more elegant. We would have needed to memorize a completely different multiplication table with two additional digits. On this table, 3 * 4 = "10" instead of 12, 6 * 2 ="10" instead of 12, and 2 * 3 * 4 * 6 = "100" instead of 144. The duodecimal expansions of π, e, √2, and other irrational constants would be different, but the concepts would be consistent.

An alien who grew up doing base-12 math would look at our base-10 system like we would look at the poor bastards who used a base-7 number system.