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:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“O, popular applause! what heart of man
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—William Cowper (1731–1800)
“Here in the U.S., culture is not that delicious panacea which we Europeans consume in a sacramental mental space and which has its own special columns in the newspapers—and in people’s minds. Culture is space, speed, cinema, technology. This culture is authentic, if anything can be said to be authentic.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)