Time.

Hello. It is currently --:--:-- in your location.

Perhaps you just took a quick glance at your clock to confirm that this is the case. It looks correct in any rate. After years of dealing with dates and time, we have all gained an innate sense that these words and numbers correspond to how long we've been awake. How far the sun has moved across the sky. Which season we are in, and what sorts of weather we can expect.

But must it be this way? This is the system that we were taught, that we have internalized, but is it the most optimal one? Can you tell me what day of the week next month begins with? Quickly recite how many seconds are in a week? Were you born on a weekend? Simple straight-forward questions like these aren't easy to answer.

I believe that we can do better. Is there any reason that there must be 28 days in February and 31 in August? Is there no possible system where every month is the same? I've written about this before, but now I want to give examples of what this would look like.

There are only two natural constants that we must obey when redesigning our system. Everything else is up to us. These are the amount of time the Earth takes to revolve around the Sun — a year — and the amount of time the Earth takes to rotate around its axis to point back at the sun — a Solar day. Divide one from the other, and there are 365.25 days in a year. This is the only constant we are forced to obey. If we lived on Mars or Ganymede, things would be different, but on Earth this is the fundamental unit of all our timekeeping.

The Second.

Focusing on the days in the year is a top-down perspective to designing our system, but before we continue, what about the bottom-up approach? One of the very basic SI units is the second, which has been given a firm definition from natural sources, but is, at its core, an arbitrary measurement. By definition, there are 86400 seconds in our day, which are further grouped as 60 seconds to a minute and 3600 seconds to an hour.

The second itself was determined in a top-down way, as it wasn't standardized for its own usefulness, but because breaking up the day into 24 pieces was useful. 24 is a very divisible number, easily broken into two, three, four, six, eight, or twelve whole pieces. Its sub-units are even more divisible, forming 60 pieces for a minute and 60 more for a second. The high divisibility of these units prove incredibly useful in everyday life, proven by the fact that we often refer to things in spans of quarter or half-hours, or in 5, 10, 20, or 45 minute intervals.

What of decimalization? Breaking our sub-units into pieces of 100 versus 60 seems equally divisible — after all, we have no troubles breaking a dollar into quarters, dimes, nickels, and a combination between — not to mention making calculations for multiple decimal hours much simpler.