Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Slashdot is running this post with these brave words:

Space.com is reporting that NASA has decided to use the metric system for its new lunar missions.

Finally! Metric system is beautiful and international. Accepting it for an international space program is the right choice in my book. Hopefully, it can help in wider adoption of the system too (although, USA is about the only country in the world that still ignores it).

What we need now is to do something about our time measurements. Programmers do understand what I mean. For everyone else, try to figure out what was the day of week of your birthday. Or what time it was 86,400,000 seconds ago. (Hint: 60 seconds make 1 minute, 60 minutes make one 1 hour, 24 hours make 1 day, 365 days make a year, except for leap years. And they you have the weekday tango. And for the curious among you, factor in some timezone magic.)