this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Standardization
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I understand the desire for mathematical beauty, but the real world is messy, inconsistent, somewhat random and constantly drifting. There is no good solution to a problem like this, and that’s why my first proposal was to remove months entirely and just count the number of days instead.
The current 7 day week is pretty good IMO, so there’s no urgent need to mess with that. However, if you want all the numbers to align beautifully, 7 not a very nice number for that. If you change that, you would still need to figure out how do you put rest days somewhere in there, and that’s when it’s going to get really messy.
That billing thing is a good point, so having agreed upon periods of some sort would be beneficial. If we have months of some sort, then we should use those. If we just count days instead, then billing could happen every 20 days or whatever number you happen like.
When it comes to SI prefixes and seconds, I would love to see engineers and scientists count things in ks, Ms, Gs etc. If people do this all the time, they would probably memorize important values like a work day is about 28.8 ks or a lunch break takes about 1.8-3.6 ks etc. If you’ve estimated that your experiment is going to last 33 ks, it’s going to require two shifts from your research team. If your shorter experiment can be left unsupervised for 4 ks, then that would be the best time for lunch.