In Popular Culture
Metric time appears in science fiction writing on occasion. In the novel A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge, the spacefaring Qeng Ho culture is depicted as using metric units such as the kilosecond and megasecond for all time interval measurements.
The novels Accelerando and Glasshouse by Charles Stross have several uses of metric time, including kiloseconds, megaseconds, and megayears. In the second case, humans are living in habitats circling brown dwarfs, with no lingering connection to the Solar System that gave birth to the earlier time scale. In Glasshouse characters use kiloseconds, "megs" etc. to refer to different periods of time, any earlier use of megayears has been dropped.
The Risen Empire by Scott Westerfeld uses metric time to measure time within an empire that extends over many star systems.
In television, the Simpsons episode "They Saved Lisa's Brain" has Principal Skinner saying that, thanks to the city being under Mensa's control, that the city's trains are not only running on time, but they are running on metric time, while looking at an analog clock with numbers 1–10 (which indicates decimal time).
An opening scene of Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis shows a metric clock with ten numbers instead of twelve, illustrating the improved efficiency of future industrial society.
A song off of the 2000 album Veni Vidi Vicious by the Swedish band The Hives is titled "The Hives - Introduce the Metric System in Time".
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Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Like other secret lovers, many speak mockingly about popular culture to conceal their passion for it.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead-drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Why is it so difficult to see the lesbian—even when she is there, quite plainly, in front of us? In part because she has been “ghosted”Mor made to seem invisible—by culture itself.... Once the lesbian has been defined as ghostly—the better to drain her of any sensual or moral authority—she can then be exorcised.”
—Terry Castle, U.S. lesbian author. The Apparitional Lesbian, ch. 1 (1993)