shoot the piano player: What "Dime" Is It?

We have divided our days into twenty-four hours. Each hour contains sixty minutes, each minute contains sixty seconds, and--get this--each second contains septillion yoctoseconds. (If you can believe it, “yoctosecond” is one trillionth of one trillionth of one second.)

We accept this twenty-four hour clock without hesitation, but it is not unrivaled. In 1793, the French--God bless them and their baguettes--introduced a system of decimal time. Midnight became ten o’clock, noon became five, and so on. Needless to say, this system never really caught on. But, like all things unpopular and impractical, decimal time has a substantial cult following. In fact, decimal advocates recently re-proposed this system, which they have now dubbed “Dime.” Each Day contains ten “Dours,” each with 100 “Dinutes,” divided into 100 “Deconds.” (This is not a joke.)

Nor is our clock immutable. In the year 1752, the English-speaking world went to sleep on Wednesday, September 2nd, and awoke, the following morning, on Thursday, September 14th. This leap was implemented in order to align England’s calendar (Julian) with that of Continental Europe (Gregorian). Prior to this transition, a traveler headed from London to Paris had to set his watch ahead by two hundred and sixty-five hours! And so, under the mandate of King George II, eleven days were excised from our calendar. Poof.