"Seeds, Glen" wrote on 2003-06-04 15:00 UTC: > It's also true that changing to SI units for weight and volume is a lot more > technically tractable than for length. Public opposition would still be a > big barrier, though.
That's what the UK have done. The imperial units of weight and volume are not legally recognized any more in Britain (only pints are still permitted for drinks volume), whereas inch/yard/mile continue to be legally recognized for length and speed. To bring the topic closer back to the scope of this mailing list: One international standard related to time keeping that I would like to advertise for is the international standard numeric date and time notation (ISO 8601), i.e. 2002-08-15 and 14:14:57. Whereas both the modern 23:59:59 and the old fashioned 11:59:59 p.m. are equally widely used in Britain, the modern notation seems to be mostly unknown in the US outside the military and scientific communities (and the US military seem to drop the colon as in "1800" and say strange things like "eighteen hundred hours" instead of "eighteen o'clock"). The uniform modern 00:00 ... 23:59 notation is now commonly used in Britain for almost any publically displayed timetable (bus, trains, cinemas, airports, etc.), and on the Continent they haven't used anything else to write times for many decades. The modern notation is not only shorter and much easier to do mental arithmetic on, it also provides an unambiguous distinction between midnight at the start of day (00:00), noon (12:00) and midnight at the end of day (24:00), whereas the meanings of "12:00 a.m." and "12:00 p.m." are rather ambiguous. I really wonder, why the modern notation doesn't catch on in the US, where even air travel tickets still use the awkward notation (and solve the ambiguity problem by never scheduling any event exactly on noon or midnight). More information on ISO 8601: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html Markus -- Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | __oo_O..O_oo__
