kilosecond.info

Have you ever been just slightly annoyed by the fact that one minute is 60 seconds and one hour is 60 minutes? Well, you can just stop using these two pseudo-units as they do not add any information. Simply just use the base unit of time (seconds) for time representation. To represent a large amounts of seconds use the standard SI prefixes like kilo (1 kilosecond = 1000 seconds).

This website is dedicated to provide you with all the information and tools you need to abandon the use of minutes and hours.

To support this cause simply stop using minutes and hours, and encourage your friends, family, co-workers, employer (or employees), etc. to do the same. If you meet somebody that still uses minutes and hours ask them the following: “Could you please explain me why you choose to represent time using base 60? Doesn’t it seem kind of illogical and inconsistent when you use the decimal system for all other purposes?”

Show your support by following this site on Twitter and liking it on Facebook. Please share and retweet so that your Facebook friends and Twitter followers will too know that they have a choice of abandoning minutes and hours.

how

So how to represent time using seconds only? Simply by not resetting the second counter every 60 seconds (and not adding one to the unnecessary minute counter). This way you have a simple and clear one-unit-only representation of time. This means that instead of having to represent one day as 24 hours of each 60 minutes of each 60 seconds you can simply represent one day as 86 400 seconds (86.4 kiloseconds). Any time during the day can therefore be represented as a number between 0 and 86.4 ks (kiloseconds). An example of this could be the time 60.21 ks which is equivalent to 16:43:30. In the apps section you will find apps that represents time this way.

However until everybody agrees to stop using minutes and hours you will need to be able to convert time between seconds and hours-minutes-seconds representation. One way would be to do the calculations and use 1 hour = 3600 s = 3.6 ks and 1 minute = 60 s = 0.06 ks. Another way would be to just start using the second-only representation and thereby get a natural intuition and feel for it. This could be done by remembering points during the day in both formats. You might find the figure below helpful to get you started.

00:00

0 ks

Furthermore the following quantities might be helpful:

5 minutes	300 s	0.3 ks
10 minutes	600 s	0.6 ks
15 minutes	900 s	0.9 ks
16 minutes 40 seconds	1000 s	1 ks
20 minutes	1200 s	1.2 ks
25 minutes	1500 s	1.5 ks
30 minutes	1800 s	1.8 ks
33 minutes 20 seconds	2000 s	2 ks
35 minutes	2100 s	2.1 ks
40 minutes	2400 s	2.4 ks
45 minutes	2700 s	2.7 ks
50 minutes	3000 s	3 ks
55 minutes	3300 s	3.3 ks
60 minutes	3600 s	3.6 ks

why

As we can do perfectly fine with just the SI base unit for time and the SI prefixes, dropping the usage of minutes and hours seems like a logical choice. Listed below are some pros and cons of abandoning minutes and hours.

Pros

Time can be represented using just one number.
Doing calculations with time will become much easier. No more illogical use of the base 60 numeral system in an otherwise decimal world.
It will be much easier for children to learn time. They would just need to learn how to count.
Many of todays clocks are just programs on electronic devices like smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc. and changing the representation format would therefore not be a problem.
In this global internet age changing such a standard is much less of problem since the word can be spread worldwide, and if enough people just start adopting it then companies, governments, etc. will have to follow as well as there is no logical reason not to.
Computers already sort of do it. Those who use UNIX time count the number of seconds since January 1st, 1970. So with just one number (although large) they can represent any date and time.
Compared to other proposals for “decimalization” of time no redefining (or creation) of units is needed.
No need to redefine any time units during the colonization of Mars (or other planets for that matter). One day on Mars will just be 88 775.24 seconds long.

Cons

Changing the representation of time will cause some inconvenience during the period of transition.
The beautiful analog clocks and watches will become less useful.
Officially abandoning hours will imply that speed limits should be changed from kilometers per hour (km/h) to meters per second (m/s).

apps

To help you ease the transition from minutes and hours to seconds only, this section introduce you to some helpful apps.

At the moment only two apps are listed, one for Mac OS X and a web app for smartphones. This will hopefully change soon. Have you developed an app for another platform that represents time as just seconds? Send a direct message on Twitter or Facebook and your app will soon be listed here too. The following apps would be nice to have: app/widget for Android, native iOS app, Windows Phone app, Windows (desktop) taskbar indicator, and apps for various Linux desktop environments. Simple code for time conversion can be found on the ArchWiki.

Mac app

This app simply adds a kilosecond clock to the menu bar of Mac OS X. The app is developed for (and tested at) Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion but it might work for older versions as well.

You can customize the app by choosing unit prefix (kilo or none), decimal separator, and number of decimal places.

The app can not yet be downloaded from the Mac App Store and should therefore be downloaded directly from here:

Download

To have the app start up automatically it should be added to your "login items" (System Preferences → Accounts → Login Items).

Please report back any problems and suggestions for improvement via Twitter or Facebook.

Web app

The web app is simply a webpage that shows you the time in seconds only. The development of this app is an ongoing process that hopefully will not end any time soon.

You can access the web app at:
kilosecond.info/app

If you have an iOS device you can add the app to your homescreen for easier access.

how

why

Pros

Cons

apps

Mac app

Web app

disclaimer