Swatch Internet Time

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

by alexis-d • 13 years ago

103 96 13 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

bluedevil2k5• 13 years ago

I'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.

bluedevil2k5• 13 years ago

And 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• 13 years ago

Maybe, 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_...), but the number of hours per day or the number of days per week or month are none of them.

rhizome31• 13 years ago

What you describe sounds a lot like the French Republican Calendar (linked from the See Also section).

nathos• 13 years ago

You might be interested in 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• 13 years ago

I honestly ask why?

kybernetikos5• 13 years ago

That'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).

VLM4• 13 years ago

Perhaps a start would be not naming months after dead early roman emperors

lampe32• 13 years ago

"but all that analog stuff is dead."

I still wear a analog Watch

ValentineC• 13 years ago

Just curious — aesthetics aside, what other advantages do you think an analog watch provides?

0xEA3• 13 years ago

I 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• 13 years ago

The way you experience time most certainly is analogue. Hint: time does not advance in units of seconds, it is continuous.

pedalpete• 13 years 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.

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.

JadeNB2• 13 years 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?

dfc4• 13 years 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"?

kybernetikos5• 13 years ago

Actually, a decimal time works really well on a circular clock face:

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/

jamestomasino• 13 years ago

There'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.

bluedevil2k5• 13 years ago

1/10th of a day is just as arbitrary, maybe less so, then 1/24th of a day.

julioademar• 13 years ago

It's not arbitrary. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal

archangel_one2• 13 years ago

Having worked at a software company whose internal date format was indeed based on days as the base unit, I suggest that this is an extremely bad idea. 0.75 may be 6pm, but what is 7pm? 0.7916666666666666 is as close as computers will generally come, but of course it's lossy; try adding increments of an hour and sooner or later you've got an irritating rounding issue.

This is solvable using arbitrary-precision decimal libraries, but relying on one of those for just dealing with general time stuff is a Bad Idea.

dickfickling• 13 years ago

I think the idea is that, switching to a decimal system, we would no longer have a use for 7pm - we would just do things at 0.8d

rgj• 13 years ago

Isn't that what MS Excel does, internally?

kybernetikos5• 13 years ago

This is basically Julian Day, which astronomers use.

But yes, any humane 'decimal' time system is just optionally giving names to different places in the fractions of a day decimal (I say 'humane' because days have varying lengths, and so should not be used as the basis for a unit used for scientific measures).

I still think naming the fractions might be useful (like 'satoshi').

adwf• 13 years ago

I 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.

jber2• 13 years ago

It 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.

Aloha4• 13 years ago

It's an arbitrary choice, just like how Unix time is since 1970, or how UTC is timezone for Greenwich England.

joezydeco3• 13 years ago

Greenwich wasn't arbitrary at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Meridian_Conferen...

chmars2• 13 years ago

It was probably mainly a PR idea, though a good one … on the other hand, from a neutral point of view, Biel/Switzerland is not really different from Greenwich/UK as a zero point.

bluedevil2k5• 13 years ago

Not to be too US centric, but the time standard should be set around New York City. Bankers in London and San Fran all work on NYC time.

rmc• 13 years ago

What about non-bankers in London or the rest of Europe?

jber2• 13 years ago

Do you mean that only bankers can afford a watch ? ;-)

ComSubVie2• 13 years ago

Lots 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?!?

mertd2• 13 years ago

How 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.

0xEA3• 13 years ago

As 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.

Tomdarkness• 13 years ago

Consider this. Suppose I want to phone someone who lives in Japan and I live in the UK. Japan is +9 hours ahead of UK local time (GMT). Therefore I know if I phone slightly before lunch then I'll be phoning them in the evening.

Now suppose we all had the same time. If I phoned them just before lunch, which would mean shortly before 12:00 in the UK then I'd have to try and figure out what Japan would be doing at that time. Would 12:00 in Japan be early morning, late at night, would they be eating a meal, would they be at work? Now I have to remember where in the day different times are for different counties. However, with timezones all I need to remember is a numerical value and I can easily figure out where Japan is in the progression of a day (i.e morning, evening, night).

coldtea• 13 years ago

You need to remember the exact same bits of information in both cases, so I don't see the problem. In one case you remember it as "time difference" ("now is 12:00 +9 there"), in the other case you remember it as earlyness/lateness compared to you ("12:00 here is LIKE 12:00 +9 there").

So that would need the same exact effort.

The man benefit would be for the "let's meet at the same time online" etc coordination stuff -- where's its brain-dead easy when everybody has the same time.

ComSubVie2• 13 years ago

Ok, but I know a lot of people who are available at work at times which do not match the "usual" work hours. Also shops have no universal opening times, some open at 7, some at 10, so you always have to check if the other side is available before calling (or just try).

I guess calling would also be easier if the used system can show if the other side is available like Skype or even better when she is available.

chmars2• 13 years ago

Where it matters, UTC is widely used, for example in aviation. And local times - based on time zones – are representations of UTC too.

philh2• 13 years ago

If I say something like "I had to catch a 6am flight", that means something to you without knowing what time zone I'm in. Absolute and relative times are both useful.

JadeNB2• 13 years ago

If I say something like "I had to catch a 6am flight", that means something to you without knowing what time zone I'm in.

But it's really meaningful only in the sense that it's early morning, so that the same information could be conveyed by saying "I had to catch an early-morning flight." (More precise information than that could always be conveyed: "I had to catch a flight 1 hour before sunrise", or whatever.)

willholloway3• 13 years ago

I 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 A JSON API is @ 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• 13 years ago

Jan 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.

willholloway3• 13 years ago

I 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

mprovost• 13 years ago

It'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.

k-mcgrady• 13 years ago

I really like this idea of maker time. Counting down in general seems like a good way to encourage me to get things done.

acron0• 13 years ago

I love this concept, but it's not really granular enough. Although I agree with the premise that 8 hours is 'problem-sized', it doesn't lend itself well to humans. What would I call an eighth of one unit?

willholloway3• 13 years ago

Hours.

I still have to be on Manager time (standard time) when I'm interfacing with the rest of the world. But for flow states in a pure building mindset, I switch to Maker Time.

martin-adams• 13 years ago

I think that once you attach a finite resource to time, you get an inherent feeling of counting down. For example, attach a battery to a laptop and you start to feel the count down (power left, rather than power used).

For us humans, we could associate it with energy left before sleep, decreasing account balance until next pay day, work days left until project end, pages left until book complete.

I do however like the idea of 711 opportunities to make cool things this year though.

fsiefken2• 13 years ago

Very nice, I thought i was the only one creating my own personal time system! I really like the counting down part, haven't thought about that. The 8 hour block is nice, but I thought it better to carve up the day in 12 parts, locked to midday, but perhaps local sunset is a better option. If you like a modern fairytale about time go see the movie 'Momo' (in german, but subtitled) or read the book.

2400• 13 years ago

wow I just nostalgia'd really hard now.

mmahemoff• 13 years ago

When 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.

VLM4• 13 years 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"

DanBC2• 13 years ago

Eastern 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.

aaron695• 13 years ago

Personally the arrogance of making it based on Swatch's headquarters in Biel ruined it for me.

Plus why would any other watch company now support a time system based on another companies 'headquarters'

It's a shame since it was a good idea.

pstack• 13 years ago

After sixteen years, it remains a silly novelty and nothing more (I'm surprised to discover it is still even a thing). People aren't going to keep track of two separate times - especially one that is so different from the normal time they keep. All people really need is for us to adopt one universal time, do away with timezones, and deal with the "horrible" fact that some of us will be 9-5ers and some will be 12-8ers and so on.

It seems it would be a far simpler adjustment to make than inventing a new "time".

xcode• 13 years ago

I 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.

dfc4• 13 years ago

What would the internet time be when GMT areas are on BST? Surely you mean accept UTC time.

KC8ZKF• 13 years ago

GMT doesn't change twice a year. GMT doesn't mean "the time people in Greenwich observe", it means, roughly, the solar mean time of Greenwich.

clintonc• 13 years ago

Handy 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• 13 years ago

God this system would have been beautiful.

ahoge• 13 years ago

It should have been based on UTC ("zulu time"), not UTC+1.

Zulu Beats.

There, I fixed it.

epx• 13 years ago

Lisa Simpson would like this

neur0mancer• 13 years ago

http://deadhomersociety.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/theysave...

lionhearted• 13 years ago

Ever 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.

kybernetikos5• 13 years ago

Actually, 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/ if you're interested.

jimmytidey• 13 years ago

I'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_• 13 years ago

Time zones are kind of arbitrary.. there are infinite ones, for each horizontal movement around the earth.

elwell• 13 years ago

I for one welcome our new logical programmer-sanity-saving standard.

kawera• 13 years ago

Related: http://thepresent.is/

Swatch Internet Time

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