Re: measuring systems (was: Selenites)

At 1:30 pm -0400 27/9/98, J.A. Mills wrote:
>In a message dated 9/26/98 2:15:08 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
>raybrown@CLARA.CO.UK writes:
>
><< It [the French decimal calendar] was adopted by the National Convention on
>5 October 1793, retrospectively as from 22 Sept. 1792, and remained in force
>until Napoleon
> abolished it & restored the Gregorian calendar on 1st Jan. 1806.
>
> Ray. >>
>
>Isn''t it curious that they revised the weekdays into blocks of 10, but left
>the months at 12?
Except, of course, if you have 10 months they'd presumably alternate 36 &
37 days a piece which makes any subdivision into groups of 10 awkward.
Whichever way you go about it, it's difficult to decimalize 365.25 (approx)
days.

>Also, from Ray's information, I gather that the basic
>building block of time--the second-- remained unchanged.  Was that perhaps due
>to the inability to adjust the timepieces of the time (unlikely, huh?).
Yes, unlikely by that time.  I believe there was, infact, a proposal to
divide the day (i.e. from midnight to midnight) into 10ths, 100ths, 1000ths
etc.  It's quite feasible, of course.  But here the revolutionaries were up
against a tradition of more than 3000 years.

Weights, measures of capacity & linear measures were a mess - each country
having their own system (& often more than one system), so a change to a
single, simple unified system was fairly readily accepted; but to change a
system that was a few thousand years old & more or less universally adopted
proved to be quite a different matter.

>It
>just seems like a half-baked effort.  IUnderstand the difficulty in a
>democratic society of changing over to the metric system, but at least the
>metric system exists.
But the revolution didn't remain democratic - along came Boney, and
changing time systems was not high on his agenda!

>After all this time (ha ha), why doesn't a better time
>system exist?
Conservatism.

Ray.