Sorting Out Time

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Tom Spence, Peter Coghill, and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. And this week, we're talking about what's wrong with clocks. And due to the new lockdown, unusually, we're recording this remotely. Nick, what's wrong with clocks? Well, the other day, I think I got up quite early, five o'clock or something. And it was three in the afternoon or something. And I said to my son, well, I've been up for 10 hours already. And he said, oh, what, you mean you got up at three in the morning? And I was like, no. And then I thought, hang on, maybe I got up at one in the morning. And then I realized the whole system doesn't make any sense. It's just really, really confusing the way that our clocks work. I've got six specific objections that I'm going to outline. And then I think we can talk about whether I'm right with those objections, but also how we can make this ridiculous time better, right? So first of all, ironically, when it's like three o'clock in the morning, or five o'clock in the morning, now I know what you're doing. You're sort of thinking about this stuff. It's confusing. To work out what happened 10 hours ago should be easy at three o'clock, but it's hard. It's just you've got to do kind of annoying sums. So the first of all, two lots of 12 hours doesn't make any sense, right? Very hard to make it intuitive. You've got to do this ridiculous thing of sort of, you know, it's like modulus 12 in the middle, and it's in the middle of the day. And it's just really, you know, 12, 12, 12 is a good number. We all know that. But you know, it's not, it's not something that's intuitive. Well, we'll get to that. 24 hours and 60 minutes are too big. Right? The numbers are too big. And it's like George Orwell said about metric units is the problem with these sort of hundreds is that you can't really visualize them. You can't visualize 180 of something, but you can visualize six feet. I think too many, too many units in a chunk, right? 24, 60, too big. We need something in between. It starts in the middle. It starts in the middle of the night. What is this madness? Look at you. Imagine you've designed a system where for some reason, you've decided to subdivide the day into two chunks, which we might broadly call day and night. You start at midnight. So a quarter of the day happens before midday. And then half the day happens. And then it just doesn't make any sense at all. So that whole thing about when it starts, like midnight is a really stupid time to start any kind of system. It's this idea that day and night are somehow fundamentally different. It is no longer a relevant assumption in the modern world where we have electric lights. And secondly, and then finally, an hour is not enough to do anything. Nothing is an hour long, right? If you're going to do something for an hour, you're probably going to do it for two hours, probably going to watch a film. If you have an hour to get ready, that's not long enough to do anything, is it? An hour is a bad chunk. I don't like it. An hour is just the wrong amount of time. And a minute, on the other hand, that's not enough time to do anything at all. Like a minute is just too small. You know, they're my main objections to the way it works. So basically, I've redesigned it from the bottom up, but we'll get to that. We'll get to that. I mean, do other people share my concerns? Yeah. I mean, I don't know if we want to get into how it all, you know, got designed in the first place. But anyway, weigh in at this point. Babylonians, yeah? Yeah. Yeah, it's insane. I mean, it's like 130 BC or something. It's hardly going to fit the modern

Speaker B: 00:03:49

world, is it? Peter, Tom, anything to say at this point? Well, I thought we could weigh in from a sort of technical point of view. Time is also a pain in the bum when you're doing any kind of coding. Because you've got all these different units. Oh, I see what you mean. Not time as a concept. Not time as a concept. That could be quite much, much, much simpler. And indeed, many kind of languages and packages, libraries and things that you would use in common languages, simplify the approach to make it easier to deal with. But the fact that you've got different units, which all have different bases in relation to each other, makes time computation really quite complicated. You can't just take, you can't just say, variable A minus variable B to get the difference in time. That will usually result in meaningless garbage. You have to sort of do some sort of complicated conversion first, or hand it over to some library that will do it for you. So that's a shout out for simplifying time to help out those poor coders around the world.

Speaker C: 00:04:58

Okay. Tom? Now, I'm actually going to come out in favor of time. Right. I like the system of time we have. I think it is fit for purpose. And I think-

Speaker A: 00:05:10

Just to say, ironically, rather than having time on, actually, you have both time on your side, and you're on the side of time as well. Exactly. That's right. Sorry. Sorry, that took me a few seconds to come up with that. But anyway, go on.

Speaker C: 00:05:21

So I think that the units are appropriate. I disagree with Nick saying that a minute is too little to do anything, and an hour is also too little to do anything.

Speaker A: 00:05:30

Well, just whatever it is you're going to do in a minute, you need five minutes to do. And whatever you're going to do in an hour, you need about two or three hours to do. I think an hour is too long for a lot of stuff, actually. Right, right. So that's what I mean. But a minute is too short, right? So something that happens between a minute and an hour is not a minute or an hour. We need something else. But isn't optimal time- Shall we let Tom carry on? No, hold on. Give me a second. No, but 40 minutes is meant to be optimal learning time, isn't it? That's why lessons are often 40 to 45 minutes. I guess that gives you another 15 minutes to go on to your next lesson. But anyway, sorry, Tom, I rudely interrupted.

Speaker C: 00:06:09

No, don't worry. So I think my key argument here is that, yeah, we all like SI systems. And as Peter rightly said, they make things easier, keeping everything in the same basis and the same units. Everything's directly comparable. That's nice. But even in the hard sciences, we don't use SI units all the time.

Speaker A: 00:06:29

What is SI? Standard something?

Speaker C: 00:06:33

Yeah, so it's- Wait, everyone said that at the same time, so I didn't get it once. So Tom, what is SI? So it's the Systeme Internationale. It's the French origin. It's a system of French origin that is the standard units for all sorts of things. So for example, you have, if I just list them off, you've got the meter for length, seconds for time, the mole for amount of substance, amperes for electric currents, kelvins for temperature, candelas for luminous intensity, and kilograms for mass. And all other units are derived from those. So while that's a nice, elegant system, in sciences, you don't always use it, right? So coming from a background as a chemist, we would talk about angstroms rather than meters, because when you're talking about an atom, a meter isn't a very useful unit of distance, right? And similarly, we talk about electron volts instead of joules, because you're talking about very small amounts.

Speaker A: 00:07:33

How big is an angstrom? What am I thinking of when I'm thinking of an angstrom unit?

Speaker C: 00:07:37

An angstrom is 0.1 nanometers. Sounds a bit metric to me, but- It is metric. But then if you take the example of an electron volt, an electron volt is 1.602 times 10 to the minus 19 joules.

Speaker A: 00:07:50

And that's like the amount of charge that an electron has or something.

Speaker C: 00:07:55

Or it's the amount of energy needed to move an electron through one volt.

Speaker A: 00:07:59

Oh, okay. Pretending to understand. Sorry, where have we gone with this? I'm lost. He's getting there.

Speaker C: 00:08:06

, which is roughly, it's over: 1000

Speaker B: 00:08:54

Hold on, hold on. So if you don't mind, if physicists and chemists don't use the standard usable time, you don't actually mind if we change it? That's what you're saying? Yeah, we can come up with better ones.

Speaker C: 00:09:04

Well, what I'm saying is we still need non-standard units, like minutes, hours, for the appropriate uses. So for microwaves, for lessons, for Zoom calls, you know?

Speaker A: 00:09:18

But what, hold on, hold on. So is your argument, Tom, you're not talking about transition here, you're not talking about the complications, you're not talking about how tricky it would be to change the pace, right? Yeah, you're talking about actually, no, a minute sometimes needs

Speaker C: 00:09:33

to be a minute. Okay. I think that minutes and hours are fit for purpose, just like Angstroms and British Thermal Units are fit for purpose, even though they're not standard, you know?

Speaker A: 00:09:45

So I think, you know, if you stick something in the microwave for 120 seconds versus either 100 seconds or 200 seconds, then there's no bloody difference. I think it'll be fine.

Speaker C: 00:10:00

I spent a lot of my life weighing out very precise, accurately, approximately.

Speaker A: 00:10:06

I think Tom is, no, because if we're talking about, oh God, I need to heat up this with a bit of chicken and rice or something and bung it in the microwave, I don't put it in there for two minutes 30, because I think two minutes 30 is the right amount of time. It's just like, it's vaguely in the right sort of area. Well, there must be a tailing off of the amount of heat retained by a curry. If you're heating up for five minutes, it won't be concomitantly twice as hot than two and a half minutes. Anyway, I think we're getting, it's, I, Tom is, has presented an argument, which I 100% agree with, against decimalizing it. Now, but I have not done that with my system, which I can explain. Let's hear the system. Well, so I designed the system from really now, it's not from the bottom up as such. Is this related, sorry, is this related to your system of days as well? Because I seem to remember we had one of those. No, I'm not fiddling around with that for now, although this system could be used to do that. So I'm not interested in anything bigger than the day and I'm taking the day as a natural unit, right? Now there's some argument about whether we should use the rotation of the earth and have a day that gradually slips as the earth throughout the year. But anyway, I'm just going to go with it. We've got the same, the day is the same length. I've kept that. And what I've done is I've also decided to keep the minute. Now I'll explain why that's okay. But I've kept the minute because you know, like when they did the switch over to decimal currency, a pound was still a pound and handily the old shilling just became exactly like a new 5p. So I don't want to send people's mind around the bend. I don't want to do what the French did, where they redesigned everything and minutes were different lengths and seconds were different lengths and it was catastrophic. So that's what I'm saying. So you're keeping a second is still a second. So my system is about how to parcel up the seconds in a day, essentially. Now, if you look at the number of seconds in a day, it's 1,440. And the prime factors are 2 to the power of 5, 3 squared and 5. The 2 squared 3, which happens to be 12, pairs up nicely. So what we have there is 12 times 12 times 10 minutes in a day. Okay. Now that is great because they're all about, that's three ways of dividing it. And all of them are not big. We don't have any ridiculous 24s or 60s in there, right? We've got to count up to 12 and 12 and 10, right? So here's how it works. 10 Dekrons in a day, right? Each Dekron is 144 minutes, but don't think of it like that, right? Because in each Dekron, there's 12 Hecatonicosacrons, which are what you might have, you would think of as the 12 minute long Hecatonicosacrons, right? So there's 12 of those in a Dekron. And then the other innovation to my system is that the day starts at what is currently six in the morning. So some sort of average, kind of roughly when the sun comes up. Now I'm going to argue that a Dekron is the right amount of time to do something. If you have to go out in an hour, you just haven't got time to do anything, right? As I said, you've got Dekron, that's a nice chunk of time. So that's 12 Hecatonicosacrons, right? How long is a Dekron again? Is it 144 minutes? Yeah. That's enough time to watch a film, for example. It's like, it's a good amount of time. And there's 10 of them in a day. And it means you can, so in eight hours, you've got kind of eight hour chunk, which is where you're at work. It's a handy kind of 40 Hecatonicosacrons for you to divide up however you want. So the typical day, you'll get up at nought. You go to work at about one Dekron. You'd work between about one and a half and four and a half Dekrons. You'd come home, perhaps five Dekrons, go to bed around seven Dekrons. And everything else is really nice. It divides up nicely. So like the length of a podcast, for example, is two Hecatonicosacrons. That's my system. I've actually made a converter, which I can use to convert any time into the new system, if you're interested.

Speaker C: 00:14:38

So what's the time limit to all our meeting requests being in the Nick time continuum?

Speaker A: 00:14:45

But I think so. I think the two innovations are moving it around so that it starts at a sensible time, which is dawn. And secondly, introducing a third division of the day. That's the key thing for me. It's sort of having something in between. You know, the currently got like hours and minutes and there's too many hours of the day. There's too many minutes in an hour. And this divides it up in a totally different way so that you have three. It's a bit more like pounds, shillings and pence. So, I mean, just to say, I think it would be really easy and quite boring of us to weigh in and go, this is absolutely ridiculous. And I don't want I don't know what you're talking about. Right. It kind of invites that. However, let us know. I've sold you. It's the revolution starts here. Well, no, but let us let us cast our mind, our imaginations back if we can to however many years BC with some Babylonian bloke going to another Babylonian bloke. Hey, I've got an idea. And it's to do with time and how we divide that up. Right. And, you know, it'd be that sort of similar sort of thing. Right. So we need to approach. It just might seem unusual to us now because it's so used to the system that is in place. That said, let's tear this apart.

Speaker B: 00:15:53

It's probably a bloke just like you phrasing. That's why we're in such a mess now.

Speaker A: 00:15:57

Yeah, you don't want me coming up with systems of time. So any comments, any sort of any sort of criticisms? I'm sure there are no criticisms. Any thoughts on this, Tom or Peter?

Speaker B: 00:16:09

Well, it's still got messy twelves. It's just not decimal. So it's wrong. You can't you still can't do simple calculations in your head.

Speaker A: 00:16:19

around. So there was exactly: 100000

Speaker B: 00:16:46

No, I mean, the seconds you won't notice, you'll just get used to a second because the second's not long enough to do anything. But a minute being what is it? A roughly a minute and a half of the current standard time. That's not an unusual thing. That's enough time to make a cup of tea. That's enough time to have a quick pee. You know, sort of you can get useful stuff

Speaker A: 00:17:09

done in a minute. It's the problem of being able having to count up to 100 of them, like having to say, oh, I'll see you in, you know, 36 minutes instead of just being able to say, I'll see you in three hecatonychosacrons. Does your system not introduce the problem of what if you want to see

Speaker C: 00:17:25

someone in 30 minutes? And how many minutes is that? Two and a half hecatonychosacrons. It's

Speaker A: 00:17:33

.: 276543

Speaker C: 00:17:56

of time. My position on your suggestion here, Nick, is that I think it has merits. I agree with Peter that it doesn't introduce simplification. But as I established before, I don't think that simplification is necessary. We use the second as the SI unit. We can use that for technical things if we want. And we need units that are useful for our everyday lives, which yours provides. But I don't think they provide any increase in utility over minutes and hours. And I know you think that hours aren't quite right for your purposes, but I find hours pretty convenient. I find minutes pretty convenient. I think in most systems, in most systems which

Speaker A: 00:18:31

are in sort of daily use, subdivisions are normally no more than like 10. Like in real life, people divide things into less. Because the evidence is that people can't even count up really much more than beyond about 10 and visualize it in their heads. That's really my key innovation here is to give people smaller units to deal with and to be able to scale up in approximately even units, given the fact that we have a weird number of minutes in the day. We're scaling up by 12 for the first two levels, and then you have a chunk of 10 at the top. So I think it's easier because you've got too many units if you try and divide it. It's like, well, why not just count the minutes, start at zero and end at 1,440 and do everything like that? Why do we subdivide things in the first place? It's equally as bonkers as the

Speaker B: 00:19:23

current standard time system, so why not? Yeah, I agree. I think, Peter, have you designed your own system? No, the system I sort of rattled off when we initially started discussing this turns out that it was the decimal system proposed in revolutionary France. I'll just outline that because this might make more sense to sort of technical people. So again, we use the solar day as the sort of the benchmark. In a day, there are 100,000 seconds, which you could divide it thus. So you'd have 100 of those seconds in each minute. You'd have 100 of those minutes in each hour, and then you'd have 10 hours per day. So with those comfortable visualising things in hundreds. So we agree on the DECRON. And by all means, introduce more units along the way. So have a DESI hour if you want 10 minutes and have a DESI minute if you want 10 seconds. You could keep dividing it by 10 as much as you want, but only divide by 10. That's the rule. Only 10. What if I want to divide by 12 or something? I can't. Well, by all means, come up with your own. Nobody's going to adopt that because it doesn't make any sense. We've found that the second is slightly shorter than the current second. And the minute is slightly longer than the current minute. But more or less, it feels more adoptable. It feels it's closer to the current system. And everything is is dividable by 10.

Speaker A: 00:20:54

It is representable as a decimal as well. I mean, you've got the time there. And it's one decimal number that you can immediately write down if you know the time.

Speaker B: 00:21:03

Yeah, and you can drop in extra points if you want to spell out minutes and hours. And you can add one time to another and get the next time. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it's really simple. There's one base throughout. So it's a really easy computation. But I would adopt Nick's call for starting the day at six o'clock in the morning. That just makes eminent sense. The intuitive sense of the human brain is that a day starts when the sun rises. I discovered something. Do you want to

Speaker A: 00:21:31

know something intriguing about the Japanese? The Japanese have got obviously the same these days have got the same clock as we have. But what the Japanese do when it's late is they keep counting. So instead of saying one in the morning, they say 25 o'clock and 26 o'clock. And that only ends when you go to bed. I think that's excellent. And I think that's a really good workaround to this ridiculous problem of the clock resetting at midnight, which is the middle of something. It really shouldn't behave like that. So, yeah, I just thought I'd throw that in because I thought it was really good. Yeah, I might start doing it myself. Amazingly, I don't know how, but it's we're quite close to the end here. Well, we've done it. We're nearly at two hecatonicosachrons. We are. I was probably a good length for a podcast. Yeah, quite. I've got a couple of questions, but first, Tom, do you have any alternative system to what's been presented thus far? Well, as I said, I'm fairly happy with what we have at the moment.

Speaker C: 00:22:32

I think Peter's proposal definitely has benefits. It makes things a lot easier in a lot of regards with the decimalisation. I don't think, for me at least, I don't think Nick's system provides any improvement on what we have now. The only thing I might concede is the utility of having something between a minute and an hour. But to my mind, it'd be much easier just to come up with a name for 15 minutes. Just call them quadrants or something like that. You know, you don't need to start messing around with how you split things. Just stick something in the middle. Spoken like a

Speaker A: 00:23:08

true engineer. Well done, Tom. Yeah. 24 hours is wrong, though. The whole basis is wrong. So, look, good news, though, Nick. I've decided that I like your system. Has it got a name? New Time. Nice. Didn't work with New Folk, did it? New Folk, did you say? New Coke. New Coke. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, no, I like it. We're going to do it. Okay. Right. What I'm interested in, how are we going to make this happen? Because I think people might resist this, right? And I think we might have to overcome objections and, you know, naysayers like specific, like Tom, right? So, yeah, I think this is the more interesting question. Well, actually, I'm not sure if it is. But anyway, it's a question. How are we going to make this happen? I want to hear from you, Nick. And Tom, you better get on board. Otherwise, you know,

Speaker B: 00:24:02

need to be part of the solution. The thing with Nick is he comes up with ideas, but doesn't actually want to implement them. So that's left up to me and Tom to work out. So, okay, Tom, we've been handed this mission. How do we make this happen? How are we going to make this

Speaker C: 00:24:13

happen? I, for one, will only lay down my 24-hour days over my cold dead body. But no, it's a tricky one. I reckon you've got to find a community that's willing to buy into it and grow it from there. So, find some kind of, you know, a community that likes changing things for the sake of changing things. It probably means you won't last

Speaker B: 00:24:36

long in that community, though, if you get it adopted. That's a good point. A community that likes changing things for the sake of changing things is transitioning into a crystallized

Speaker C: 00:24:45

state. The trouble is, you know, if one person adopts it, or five people adopt it, you need buy in from a big enough group to then make it sustainable, right? Otherwise, you're just talking about converting between units all the time. And that's even worse than what we have

Speaker A: 00:25:02

at the moment. I think there's two ways to do this. One is the way that you've sort of setting out their grassroots, growing it from an enthusiastic community, and then as it catches on, you know, there'll be a tipping point. That's one way to do it. But that's a bit dull and boring and sort of a bit complicated. I think the only way to do this, we need some sort of overthrow of government is what we need. And maybe the formulation of some sort of world government. That's what probably, I think that sort of top-down approach is what we should be going for. It's a small step, but it might work.

Speaker B: 00:25:34

After the apocalypse, we'll propose Nick's

Speaker A: 00:25:36

Yeah, and I think what would be handy is some kind of form of wiping of people's memory as well. Because otherwise, you know, you're gonna get people sort of saying, Oh, I remember in old time, how it was like that, I can't get used to it, you know, much like sort of, you know, people who are now, unfortunately, dying off a bit. So talk about old money and so on. Maybe submit some videos, which which sort of illustrate the new system with a nice reassuring 70s style narrator. Yeah, I can get involved with that side of things. So everyone's a winner.

Speaker B: 00:26:03

You want a brainwashing ray? And you want some catastrophic world event? Yes. That's, that's, that's how you want it to happen. Okay. If that's what it takes. That's what it takes.

Speaker C: 00:26:15

I'm gonna start buying up old clocks now, because they're gonna be worth so much more money when they'll be, they'll be illegal. You'll be shocked if you find a possession

Speaker A: 00:26:21

ys in hexadecimal, the number: 151000

Speaker B: 00:28:12

From an engineering coding point of view, I can totally get on board with hexadecimal time because that's very easily convertible to base two, which makes computing nice and efficient.

Speaker A: 00:28:22

That is true, actually. Yeah. The Chinese also had a thing where they had a unit called a k, which was 14 and a half minutes, roughly, of which there's 100 in a day. I quite like that one as well, because it fits in well with my system. So it's got precedence anyway, is what I'm saying. I have to say, I quite like this. I think we'd live in a more lyrical, musical, you know, something about if we had no previous knowledge of time from before, that we'd be sort of pleased. It's a bit like when you see Italians talking to one another, that they really revel in their language. Right. And that'd be like us talking about time. We wouldn't be able to stop talking about all the Tim Toms and my ties and whatever.

Speaker B: 00:29:01

There is something quite boorishly functional about time when you say, oh, it's 13 minutes past four in the afternoon. It sounds like you're announcing a train departing, whereas if you had something a bit more lyrical. Mating billabongwingwang kind of thing.

Speaker C: 00:29:17

Yeah, that's why I like to give the parting thought of the attitude to time that I have encountered in Lebanon, which is there's morning, there's lunchtime, there's the afternoon, and inshallah, maybe we'll meet at one of those times.

Speaker A: 00:29:31

I like that. I think that's the appropriate way to finish this and go off and have some lunch. Okay. All right. Okay. Thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer, being here with Tom Spence, Peter Coghill, and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. Until next time, bing bong.