Simple Universal Time

http://www.nico.schottelius.org/blog/introducing-simple-universal-time/

by telmich • 13 years ago

6 15 13 years ago

nico.schottelius.org

attheodo• 13 years ago

Is it only me or this sounds like a terrible idea? Maybe it will eventually be more productive but during the transition phase, there'll be mayhem. Not to mention all the unusable clocks, hardware etc that'll have to be completely scraped.

telmich5• 13 years ago

Hardware is actually easy - you can keep the clock in UTC and display the time in SUT.

claudius5• 13 years ago

First of all, there is already the Swatch Internet Time[0], which is a very similar concept (and similarly underused).

But more importantly, you would have to redefine the length of a second in order to keep days the same length. Redefining the length of a second is not good. Really, no.

Then there is the problem that this is not really a sensible metric time – 10 hours, 100 minutes and 100 seconds each? Frankly, that's stupid – ideally, you want the conversion factors to always be the same, ideally 10³. The swatch time mentioned above got this right with 1000 minutes (‘.beats’)/day, if absolutely necessary, you could probably also go with 100 quarter-hours/day and 100 seconds/quarter-hour, with 1 new second = 8.64 old seconds, or 1 old second ~ 0.12 new seconds.

The underlying problem here is that time lengths are intrinsically non-metric and there is little to no way to consistently make a year and a day both ‘metric’, simply because nature doesn’t require them to be. The same goes for nearly all other SI units – the equator is 40 Mm, the average height of a human is ~2m, a human weighs 80kg, not 100kg (and really, kg as the base unit?!).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

kmasters2• 13 years ago

I agree its a little bizarre, but as for the length of days, changing to a metric equivalent wouldnt really require changing the length of a second would it?

We have a fixed system right now and when its off we just say this day is a minute longer and clocks synchronize.

There's nothing inherently accurate about 60 60 24.

What I cant wrap my head around is the lack of timezones. If I switched to UTC or something based on UTC right now would I be waking up every day at 5 PM? I dont know and I dont much care.

But it seems like there is tension between local/global requirements and right now we favor local because its where we live.

claudius5• 13 years ago

The point is that at the moment, a day has 86400 SI seconds. If you want to keep it that way, i.e. change neither the length of a day nor change the length of a second, you will have to either divide these 86400 SI seconds up into some sensible pieces (60 60 24, e.g.) or have some remainder left (one day of 10 hours and some weird stuff at the end).

The problem here is not the one-off second, but the length of the second per-se which would have to change. Unfortunately, the length of the second is so deeply tied into the SI system that I’d rather have a non-metric day than a change in the length of seconds.

Timezones are somewhat orthogonal to this, and while there is some advantage to having a global time (‘let’s meet at 17:00, okay?’), local timezones are also somewhat helpful – you can expect shops to open around 8:00 all over the world and wouldn’t expect them to be open at 22:00; similarly, local authorities can change the time (and hence the time when shops open/close, e.g.) without everyone having to reprint their opening times signs (as happens for DST or during WWI/II).

greensand• 13 years ago

Even if this was well thought out it would never catch on.

telmich5• 13 years ago

If you think something is impossible, you've just made it impossible for you.

Thus my approach is to do - time will show if it was impossible or not.

claudius5• 13 years ago

And if you refuse to accept that the optimal solution is impossible to implement, you will forever try to build a perpetuum mobile rather than go with the second-best solution.

nathan_long• 13 years ago

Previously tried in the late 1700s:

"Decimal time is the representation of the time of day using units which are decimally related. This term is often used to refer specifically to French Revolutionary Time, which divides the day into 10 decimal hours, each decimal hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds"

It sounds quite practical, but one reason we have 60-based time and 360 degrees in a circle is that they divide evenly so many ways. Eg, 60 minutes divides evenly by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, so it's easy to measure a third of an hour or 1/6 of a circle.

telmich5• 13 years ago

claudius, you are right, there is swatch beat. It actually tries to solve the problem different. The problem with beat is that humans are used to hours/minutes/seconds. That's why SUT reuses this principle.

telmich5• 13 years ago

I've just discovered the C implementation of SUT at https://github.com/benkaiser/sut.c - nice to see it working on the commandline :-)

Simple Universal Time

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