8 ms·
Swatch Internet Time
- bluedevil2k 13y agoI've always loved this idea. It just makes sense. People argue against the "circular notation" of a clock face and how it relates to 60 minutes/seconds, but all that analog stuff is dead.
- bluedevil2k 13y agoAnd as long as we're discussing "out there" time notations, I'll throw out my support for a calendar system that makes more sense. 12 30-day months with a 5 (or 6) day "Holiday Month" at the end. Adjusting the "week" to be 10 days instead of 7. 3 weeks a month, 9 weeks a quarter, 36 weeks a year. Work 7 of the 10 days in a week would be the same as a 5-day work week (2 more days off a year actually).
- rolux 13y agoMaybe, but that ship has sailed. No-one is going to reform this. There are many problems with time (see http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2009/04/making_time_saf.html http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2009/04/making_time_...), but the number of hours per day or the number of days per week or month are none of them.
- rhizome31 13y agoWhat you describe sounds a lot like the French Republican Calendar (linked from the See Also section).
- nathos 13y agoYou might be interested in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar I remember it still being used at Kodak when I was a kid and my father worked there.
- Uchikoma 13y agoI honestly ask why?
- bluedevil2k 13y agoDates would be the same day forever. Financial quarters would be even and easily divided. Never print a new calendar. Etc.
- anonymouz 13y agoSeems like all the complexity and special casing of the time keeping is moved into the "holiday month" at the end. E.g., Which financial quarter does it belong to? Moreover only 5 or 6 out of the 10 weekdays will occur in the holiday month, then you have to reset to "Monday" again to have a fixed date->day mapping.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- kybernetikos 13y agoThat's what I have in my time system UIT (linked earlier). I renamed the days to nullday, unday, duoday, triday, quadday, pentday, hexday, heptday, octday, nonday. One nice feature is that if I tell you that it's 1st Unday today, you can see immediately that it's the 12 day of the year (since 0th Nullday is the first day of the year).
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- VLM 13y agoPerhaps a start would be not naming months after dead early roman emperors
- lampe3 13y ago"but all that analog stuff is dead." I still wear a analog Watch
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ValentineC 13y agoJust curious — aesthetics aside, what other advantages do you think an analog watch provides?
- orbitingpluto 13y ago"What exactly does it mean -- to wind a watch?"
- lampe3 13y agoIt's a self-winding Watch so I don't need a Battery. I grew up with analog Watches and reading them is not a problem for me but i understand the point to use Digital Watches. I Personally don't like the aesthetics of Digital Watches ;)
- gumby 13y ago> Just curious — aesthetics aside what other > advantages do you think an analog watch provides? Think of an analogue watch as a 2d graph where one of the dimensions is t. If you have a table of numbers you can compare them by looking at all the cells or you can graph each row one a cartesian (or polar or...) plot. Both contain the same info, and the table probably has higher resolution, but which tells a more illuminating story? On a watch face, the minute hand is the biggest win: you can see at a glance approximately what time it is / approximately how long you have / approximately how far away you are which is what you usually need. I definitely think in terms of it being about "a quarter past fourteen" or "half past seven". The digital watch has too much precision and requires too much parsing. The hour hand gives you similar data on a larger scale, but you typically need that less. And in fact though the watch face shows 2x 12 hours, when I look at it I see the normal 24 hour clock. The second hand is good when you're working out since as you see it sweep to its goal you might push harder to get one more rep in or whatever, but this is a less common need and in fact many analogue watches come without a second hand. === The analogue clock face is an example of more humane design for specific problem domain, sort of the like US & Imperial unit systems. They are utterly useless for engineering (but even in engineering I use both MKS and CGS depending on the problem domain -- and its community). Miles and km / acres and hectares -- it's no big deal to me either way. But when making a staircase, cooking a meal for three people or resizing a dress pattern, the ability to use a system that naturally decomposes into rational factors is appropriate. And that's the beauty of the babylonian time system: despite the annoying (though necessary) primality of the week, there are plenty of factors available for subdividing the intervals.
- 0xEA 13y agoI was a huge fan of this in '98. Was very sad to see it fail. I even wrote custom software for Litestep so you could see what beat time it was.
- gaius 13y agoThe way you experience time most certainly is analogue. Hint: time does not advance in units of seconds, it is continuous.
- pedalpete 13y agoBeats time is no more 'digital' than the 24-hour day. It's 10 base which makes it easier for us to calculate, and without time zones, makes it easier to communicate around the world as we become more global. I think maybe Swatch gave up to early on this? It could have just been another measurement on their watches. Not the main one, but secondary. There's no way this was going to be an overnight change.
- JadeNB 13y ago> Beats time is no more 'digital' than the 24-hour day. It's 10 base which makes it easier for us to calculate, and without time zones, makes it easier to communicate around the world as we become more global. But 'digital' literally means base-10 (as in, like the digits on your hands), so in what sense is it not digital?
- dfc 13y ago> People argue against the "circular notation" of a clock face I have never heard this argument and I am not very sure I understand what it means. What is the argument? Who are these "people"?
- kybernetikos 13y agoActually, a decimal time works really well on a circular clock face: http://kybernetikos.github.io/UIT/ http://kybernetikos.github.io/UIT/ (you need to permit gps to get the correct rotation and drawn on light/dark periods). http://kybernetikos.com/2012/11/26/modern-times-a-new-clock/ http://kybernetikos.com/2012/11/26/modern-times-a-new-clock/
- jamestomasino 13y agoThere's a great collection if decimal time ideas, many of which are linked at the bottom of that wikipedia page. I personally always liked the idea of making 1 day into the base unit. Then 0.5 would give you noon, 0.75 is 6pm. It seemed less arbitrary than making a unit into a 10th of a day, since that has no value except in reference to a day.
- bluedevil2k 13y ago1/10th of a day is just as arbitrary, maybe less so, then 1/24th of a day.
- julioademar 13y agoIt's not arbitrary. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal
- eddieroger 13y agoThe only special thing about Decimal and Base 10 is that we have 10 fingers (for the most part, exceptions exist). If we had 12, then 1/24th of a day would make sense, because it would be twice our then-normal Base 12 system. It is evolutionarily arbitrary. Check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nC8J6YXqdo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nC8J6YXqdo
- throwaway2048 13y agobase 12 (or 24) and base 60 are actually much nicer to work with mentally than 10. 10 divides by 1 5 and 10 so you can easily figure out halves and tenths thats about it. 12 divides by 1 2 3 4 6 and 12 so you can easily figure out halves, thirds, quarters, sixths, and twelths without much of an issue, less non terminating decimal nastyness. 60 is even better, as it divides by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30 and 60 you get a whole wealth of easy fractions, and easy mental division. This is probably the reason why a lot of ancient societies had a preference for base 60 and base 12. you can count to 12 on your fingers aswell, using your individual finger bones on one hand + your thumb as an index. You can extend this system to count to 60 by using the 5 fingers of your other hand seqentially to represent each set of 12. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_12 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_12 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_60 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_60
- adwf 13y agoI remember those, I don't think enough people realised/needed the utility of them at the time for it to gain critical mass. Not that many people in the population at large, have friends all over the world that they need to have accurate timesync with. It also might have benefited from being based on UTC instead of a decimal time. It was awkward to describe any time below an hour as you needed to break down into fractions of a beat to describe regular time intervals like 15 or 30 minutes. Whereas maybe a UTC-beat watch with 86400 seconds/beats in a day could be more relevant? Probably not, it'd still have huge hurdles to overcome with the network effect, apathy and such.
- jber 13y agoIt was a nice idea but I think Swatch made a big mistake by taking their headquarters as the base to calculate it. It needed to be an independant concept to bring other companies/competitors on board.
- Aloha 13y agoIt's an arbitrary choice, just like how Unix time is since 1970, or how UTC is timezone for Greenwich England.
- joezydeco 13y agoGreenwich wasn't arbitrary at all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Meridian_Conference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Meridian_Conferen...
- Aloha 13y agoHistorical precedent and agreement make the choice no less arbitrary - 0 degrees could have been anywhere, there is no technical reason that Greenwich was chosen.
- joezydeco 13y agoIt says so right in the article. Choosing Greenwich as 0-longitude meant that the International Date Line would be located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, avoiding a situation where it could be two dates in the same country simultaneously.
- Aloha 13y agoHave you looked at the map for the IDL? http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/International_Date_Line.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Internati... That not jiggered by politics at all.
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- ComSubVie 13y agoLots of things would be easier if everybody uses the same time. It could stay the 24h/day time format, but timezones are a pain - I always have to recalculate them for local time. Why couldn't everybody work with UTC? And by the way: when will we finally get rid of the daylight savings time?!?
- mertd 13y agoHow would you know if it is appropriate to call someone in some other part of the globe? One way or another you have to do a lookup. A) Everyone uses UTC. Now you have to know the business hours in Tokyo because it is not universally 8-6 anymore. B) Everyone uses local time. Now you have to know their local time.
- 0xEA 13y agoAs an example: I don't know where you are, you don't know where I am. I tell you I am available from @300-@800 if you want to Skype today. Let me know which time is good for you.
- mertd 13y agoWhich would be scenario A. You just did the lookup of finding that 0xEA's business hours are from @300 to @800.
- 0xEA 13y agoSure, you would have to know that. But you have to look up if the business you want to contact is open on Sunday anyway, even if they are local. Or what time they close today. Or you have to try to figure out the whole no work on Friday thing in the middle east and Monday being part of the weekend. You always have to look it up. What made this dream cool in the digital age is I could just have hours that I'm available and if I wanted to work late at night, I could. I considered myself a 'hardcore hacker' in '98 and what appealed was how well this lined up with my natural inclination to hack on code from 10pm to 5am every day, despite being in high school. I didn't care or need to know where my IRC friends were. We could collaborate none the less.
- willholloway 13y agoI think the biggest problem with time keeping systems is that they counts up, but our lives are not infinite. For us, time is really counting down. After trying to reconcile the solar year with decimal time in a way that made sense, I abandoned my effort and created a time keeping system with 1095 units of time of time per year (1098 in leap years). The units are 8 hours long, because no progress on hard problems is made in an hour. I call it Maker Time: The web site is @ http://willholloway.net/makertime.html http://willholloway.net/makertime.html A JSON API is @ http://makertime.willholloway.net/api/current http://makertime.willholloway.net/api/current Checking the current Maker Time reminds me that I have 1060 - 349 (for sleep) = 711 opportunities to make cool things this year.
- gerbal 13y agoJan 1 is a entirely arbitrary demarcation that's not actually terribly useful to the way we actually experience time and the year. IMO a better place would be one of the solstices or equinoxes (I'm partial to the spring equinox). Also breaking the year into quarters, from equinox to solstice would be a better match for to scale we live an think on. Also it's just the right amount of time for a good portion of a large one-man project.
- willholloway 13y agoI agree with you cosmically, but January first has real meaning for me because its the start of a new tax year. Feel free to create your own fork: https://github.com/willholloway/makertime https://github.com/willholloway/makertime
- leocassarani 13y agoOn the other hand, 6th April is the first day of the tax year in the UK, so that would work out quite well.
- mprovost 13y agoIt's only the spring equinox on your half of the planet! You'd have to call it the March equinox which is arbitrary again. Or maybe the Northward equinox.
- 2400 13y agowow I just nostalgia'd really hard now.
- mmahemoff 13y agoWhen people say Bitcoin is a money standard for the internet, it reminds me of this. A time standard for the internet, similar to UTC but human-friendly. A few things worked against its adoption. First, it was too proprietary. A modern initiative based on open standards would have a much better chance of gaining a foothold in niche communities, much like Bitcoin. Second, it was before its time (no pun intended). The web was already popular, but not very real-time. There was some chat, but it was pretty geeky, not like Skype or Facebook IM now. And hardly any videoconferencing or live-streaming. And not as much distance working as happens now. So there wasn't that much demand for syncing time. Third, digital phones were locked down by the manufacturers and carriers (watches too). It would be hard for a grassroots movement to grow if no-one could make apps supporting the new time standard.
- VLM 13y ago"grassroots movement" Having lived thru it, it was astroturf at most. It was a marketing gimmick to solve a problem that still doesn't exist. "Here, try this, its just like things that work perfectly such as UTC or Eastern Time, but way more confusing"
- DanBC 13y agoEastern time means nothing to me. How many hours do I go forward or back? How do I know if you're in daylight savings? What if I'm in saylight savings? Sensible time for wod wode use is still a problem for casual users.
- VLM 13y agoThat's kind of the point. NASDAQ trading hours are 0930 to 1600 eastern. At a former job thats what mattered, although we were not in the eastern zone and had sites spread across 5 or 6 timezones. Live where you want but production hours on the production boxes were 0930-1600 eastern. A large chunk of financial world workers live in eastern standard time. They might live anywhere in the world, but that doesn't matter. With the almost sole exception of the financial world, the rest of the world wide users stick with UTC.
- xxcode 13y agoI was a 14 year old who attended the initial launch at MIT. I remember at the time thinking: why have a random synthetic time, perhaps we can just accept GMT as internet time. I still don't understand why you'd have Beil Mean Time - perhaps I haven't grown.
- dfc 13y agoWhat would the internet time be when GMT areas are on BST? Surely you mean accept UTC time.
- clintonc 13y agoHandy tip: one .beat (or a milliday, if you like) is about 1.5 minutes. This means that one percent of one day is about fifteen minutes. Try thinking of tasks in terms of percentages of a day. You spend about 30 percent, give or take, sleeping. You spend 30-40% working most days. How does one spend the remaining 30-40%? One percent showering. Three or four percent preparing meals. Adds up.
- awakeasleep 13y agoGod this system would have been beautiful.
- ahoge 13y agoIt should have been based on UTC ("zulu time"), not UTC+1. Zulu Beats. There, I fixed it.
- epx 13y agoLisa Simpson would like this
- neur0mancer 13y agohttp://deadhomersociety.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/theysavedlisasbrain3.png http://deadhomersociety.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/theysave...
- lionhearted 13y agoEver since I heard about this, it became an exciting idea to me. 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day is just a mess for doing math and analyzing how long things take and what of our life they make up. Eliminate all the timezone conversion nonsense and you've got another huge plus... the time system will eventually change, sooner or later. Coordinating the change will be difficult, but it's too obvious not to happen.
- kybernetikos 13y agoActually, I don't think you can have a sensible humane time and a sensible scientific time measure use the same unit. For science you want every hour to be just like every other hour. For people, it's probably way more important that an hour is a fixed proportion of a solar day. I think it's best to just leave the scientists with second and strike out on our own for humane time. I also have a time system that eliminates timezone conversion nonsense by being based around UTC, however to make that feel a bit more 'humane', I rotate the clock face so that local solar midday is always at the top of the face and local solar midnight is always at the bottom. You can see it here http://kybernetikos.github.io/UIT/ http://kybernetikos.github.io/UIT/ if you're interested.
- jimmytidey 13y agoI've always found it funny that PHP has this built in, I think it's nice when tech is weirdly political and opinionated, obviously in ways that don't screw things up.
- quantumpotato_ 13y agoTime zones are kind of arbitrary.. there are infinite ones, for each horizontal movement around the earth.
- elwell 13y agoI for one welcome our new logical programmer-sanity-saving standard.
- kawera 13y agoRelated: http://thepresent.is/ http://thepresent.is/