Lists

It seems that my love and wonderful person Anjel is making up some lists. Well at least I know what to get her for an engagement ring - I think we have some in the cupboard already!

Which neatly and almost as seamlessly brings me to a place where I can comment on the number 10.

Ok we have 10 finger, 10 toes (at least 'normally' we as humans do) our numerical system has increments of 10. 10 is a good number, it is useful and it doesn't look too bad to boot. So why do we have 60 second to a minute, 60 minutes to an hour and 24 hours to a day. Not to mention the silliness that is 365.25 days to a year. It is just plain stupid. Tad Williams, in his Shadowmarch World has created what I have always thought to be the best Calendar system. 10 days to a week, 3 weeks to a month and 12 months to a year, just to be nice and even the remaining 5.25 days are in the void of 'no month' and are outside of the year. Orphan Day I believe he calls it - kinda like New Years.

He doesn't go into detail - at least in the first book - about hours and such but let us instead here and now make up some hours for Tad's day. Again we will sit in with the 10 theme. I can see us simply having 100 seconds to a minute, 100 minutes to an hour and (well here is the hard part) either 10 hours to a day or two lots of 10 hours (20) to form night and day. I prefer the plainer 10 hours which means that the modern 'noon' would be hour 5 and midnight hour 10/0.

Do you think it will take off? I doubt it as business and the like are probalby adverse to changing. I do think it would make everything better in the world. End poverty and world hunger - maybe even the war in Iraq... Well it might, they'll all be too busy trying to workout what time dinner is to fight!

Ending this madness now...