DekaClock 4+

Did you ever notice, the time of the day is based on odd numbers? So, a day is split into 24 hours, an hour is split into 60 minutes and a minute is split into 60 seconds. Strange, isn't it? Since in many cultures nowadays our numbering system is based on the base of 10, the usual time structure as stated above, leads to some strange counting artefacts.

DekaClock attempts to solve this by introducing a time-system strictly based on the base 10. The different tiers required will not be named hour, minute, etc. to avoid confusion, but rather "deka-1, "deka-2", ..., at least until a better naming comes up. "Deka" is the greek name for 10, so the name is very suitable.

Since the duration of a second is a very tangible and the shortest time-period in the traditional time scheme, the DekaClock needs to come up with something similar. A traditional day has 24 * 60 * 60 = 86,400 seconds. So, the DekaClock day has 100,000 deka-5 periods, since ist has to be a number by an integer power of 10. Naturally by this, the DekaClock scheme has 5 tiers to give an accurate time of the day: deka-1, deka-2, deka-3, deka-4 and deka-5. A deka-5 period therefore is slightly shorter than a second, concretely 0.864 seconds. But this is close enough to "feel" the ticking of the clock correctly, as the passing of time in DekaClock shows.

To give the full time of the day, consequently 5 single digit numbers from 0 to 9 are required. They are given separated by a colon each. For example midday is 5:0:0:0:0, 6am is 2:5:0:0:0 and 6pm is 7:5:0:0:0.

So, a deka-1 period of time is a tenth of a full day of 24 hours, thus encompasses 2 hours and 24 minutes. The time of day "9 deka-1" as example refers to 9:36pm on our standard clock. A good time to go to bed.