It's marketing gack. An engineer would divide the day into 2^10, i.e. 1024, not 1000. Or even better, into 2^16, which would give a basic unit that's 1.32 seconds long. Why? Because the time of day can then be expressed as a 4 figure hexadecimal number in the range 0000 - FFFF. The leftmost digit divides the day into 16 - a unit that's very roughly the same as an hour. The next digit along divides that into 16, and so on. Note how the time of day automatically rolls over when you add a 1. (Could be a bit of a b*gg*r adding leap seconds, i.e. 23:59:60).
Of course, for this to make sense you then have to abandon degrees for use with longitude (what happens to that nice 15 deg = 1 hour, after all?) and introduce yet another unit of angle alongside degrees, radians, and grads. (Gradians? Can't remember, don't care, pointless unit).
The new unit would, presumably, be the binian, or bin, for short, which is pretty much where this whole idea deserves to end up.
[Edited cos the auto-censorship makes it look like you've said something *really* rude.]
Last edited by 25F; 11th October 2002 at 15:48.