I think it is time to start a strong campaign for metric time. Metric time, for those of you not living inside my head, makes a lot of sense. Taking the day and dividing it into smaller units (for the sake of argument, hours, minutes, second) is fairly easily done. It has none of the drawbacks of seasons and orbits which makes a metric year so fiddly.

Simply put metric time would divide the day into 10 hours. Now these hours would be over twice as long as current hours. But that is OK. We would just go to work for 3-4 hours a day (say). Things that are currently about 1 hour long would become a half an hour long etc. The beauty of the system then is that you divide each hour into 100 minutes – each of which is slightly longer, but comparable to a current minute. Each minute is then divided into 100 seconds, again comparable to a ‘traditional’ second.

The advantages of metric time is of course the ease of calculation. 5 minutes = 500 seconds. If a train, say, left London at 4:67 and arrived at Norwich at 5:87 it took 120 minutes to get there - simple. Nifty isn’t it? By the way we would no longer need the am/pm divide. 5:00 = midday.

Now I am fairly certain this has been put forward before; probably by some French guy. Those Europeans are metric tragics, don’t you know. But I thought I would virtually put my pen to paper prior to looking around the net for what I am sure must be out there – a large dysfunctional group of net-heads who agree that we should have metric time, but can’t agree enough amongst themselves to actually get organised.

But then again, I could be wrong – perhaps I am simply a lone nutcase.