Philosophy

Why a second count, and how it is written.

Why

This is not a replacement. The trains, the treaties, and the kitchen timer can keep the classic count. Centimal time sits beside it, the way a second language sits beside the first. You do not have to forget one to speak the other.

Twenty-four is an awkward number to live inside. Eight o’clock is morning or evening, and every page has to say which. Then the hour is cut into sixty, and those into sixty again. Nothing in that stack tells you how much of the day is gone. A hundred does. The time and the percentage are the same figure.

Daylight saving moves the names of the hours by statute. The same sunrise is called two different times in one spring. The arithmetic is not hard. It is needless, and it exists only because the classic count was willing to be edited by a parliament.

The twelve civil months are not sky. They are a convention that drifted. September, October, November and December are the Latin words for seven, eight, nine and ten. They are the ninth through twelfth months, because the year once began in March and nobody renamed them when it moved to January. The solstices and equinoxes fall inside those months wherever they happen to, a little later each year, until a leap day tugs them back.

A month should meet the sun, and it should be the same month everywhere. The year opens the day after the December solstice and runs as four quarters of 91 days: 30, 30, then 31. The winter solstice is written as the 32nd of Hope-Rise, every year. A leap year adds a 32nd of Soul-Forge. The names are not the weather, so the south does not need a second calendar.

How

Sun and earth

The doubled degree, °°, is the sun and the earth. The count lives in the turn of one against the other, so the mark sits in the middle of the time. Midnight, wherever you are, is 00°°00. The digits before the mark are tiks, hundredths of the local day. The digits after it are centitiks — centiks, for short — hundredths of a tik.

A smaller degree opens the hundredth of a centik. Ten of those hundredths are one millitik, a millik. 00°°00°10 is one millik, about one old second. There is a second way to write the same moment, as € is another way to write euro: 12°°33°4 is t12..33.4. The t marks a time. The two dots stand where °° stands. The point stands where the small degree stands.

Midnight stays zero

There are no new time zones. 00 is always your local midnight, the midnight the civil clock already uses, including a daylight-saving jump if your country still keeps one. A tik is a share of that clock-day, not a new length of a second. Step across a border and midnight moves with the border, exactly as it does now. The numbers start again at 00.

The twenty-four hours

Each old hour is four tiks and a sixth. On the hour, the new count is exact.

A few lengths

A tik is about a quarter of an hour. These are rounded, so the size of a tik is easy to feel.

• A kettleAbout three minutes. 0.2 tiks.
• Tea, steepingFour minutes. 0.3 tiks.
• An eggTen minutes. 0.7 tiks.
• Around the blockA quarter of an hour. 1 tik.
• LunchOne hour. 4 tiks.
• A filmTwo hours. 8 tiks.
• Three hours12.5 tiks.
• SleepEight hours. 33 tiks, about a third of the day.

A birthday, rewritten

The civil date stays the day you were born. This only says where that noon sits in the solar year.

The twelve months

The names are not weather, so the month is the same north and south. What changes with the hemisphere is only the season. The length of each month, the four quarters, and the turning days are set out on their own page.