Re: Units

[Richard Wackerbarth]

On Sat, 08 Jul 2000, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> > Hmmm... I don't recall anybody mentioning "time" as the unit of
> > measure... convert to seconds? minutes?  hours?  days?  weeks?  months? 
> > years? I often deal with measurements in nanoseconds...  many things get
> > charged for by unit time... e.g., phone calls, wages, room rents, ...
>
> An excellent example of a commodity whose units are changing.
> Remember when phone calls were charged by the minute?
>
> If we use a common unit of nanoseconds, how many bits will be need to
> account for years or centuries?

This is the fallacy of "unification". There is no accounting reason to 
measure time in only one set of units.

Cell phone calls may be MEASURED to the second. But often, they are billed by 
the minute. The accounting transaction records only the CHARGED MINUTE, 
which, on average, is considerably less than 60 seconds.
On the other hand, hotels bill by the day. You don't get billed for 1 day, 
3.000501999 seconds. Or even 1441 minutes.

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