
Swatch Internet Time - alexis-d
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
======
willholloway
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](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
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.

~~~
willholloway
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](https://github.com/willholloway/makertime)

~~~
leocassarani
On the other hand, 6th April is the first day of the tax year in the UK, so
that would work out quite well.

------
mmahemoff
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.

~~~
VLM
"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
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.

~~~
VLM
That'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.

~~~
DanBC
Sure, professionals use real time. We're not talking about anything where time
is critical.

We're talking about kids wanting to meet each other on a Minecraft server, or
a band releasing a video, or simar casual online meetings.

~~~
VLM
One example is the ham radio guys scheduling a contact/net on a certain freq
and UTC time.

Live "events" like superbowl and the endless self-congratulatory entertainment
industry awards. I'll meet you on IRC during the superbowl and we'll comment
on the commercials.

To some extent computers and the internet are a tool for making time not so
critical. We both need to be available for a phone call, but not for email. To
watch the same network TV show we both need to watch about the same time, but
we can watch youtube videos anytime. Thats the other oddity of "internet
time". If we're going to make obsolete concepts, why not "internet distance"
or even worse "internet long distance"

------
bluedevil2k
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.

~~~
bluedevil2k
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).

~~~
Uchikoma
I honestly ask why?

~~~
bluedevil2k
Dates would be the same day forever. Financial quarters would be even and
easily divided. Never print a new calendar. Etc.

~~~
anonymouz
Seems 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.

------
jber
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.

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

~~~
joezydeco
Greenwich wasn't arbitrary at all.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Meridian_Conferen...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Meridian_Conference)

~~~
Aloha
Historical 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
It 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
Have you looked at the map for the IDL?

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Internati...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/International_Date_Line.png)

That not jiggered by politics at all.

~~~
joezydeco
I thought we were talking about the "arbitrary" choice of Longitude 0. What's
the political (and not economic) basis for the later IDL modifications?

~~~
Aloha
That fails to make the first choice any less arbitrary - the choice was made
to line up with existing sea charts - which of course used the Greenwich as 0
- but Greenwich as 0 was an arbitrary choice in the first place - not all
arbitrary choices are bad ones, that was the crux of my argument in the first
place.

------
clintonc
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
God this system would have been beautiful.

------
ComSubVie
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?!?

~~~
Tomdarkness
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
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.

------
jamestomasino
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.

~~~
archangel_one
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
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

~~~
archangel_one
Sure, but trying to persuade billions of people to switch to a new system with
unclear benefits and no backwards compatibility is not a recipe for success.

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

Zulu Beats.

There, I fixed it.

------
adwf
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.

------
xxcode
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.

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

~~~
KC8ZKF
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.

~~~
dfc
Who uses GMT in the summer? My bigger point is that metrologists and/or people
that care about time use UTC not GMT.

------
lionhearted
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.

~~~
kybernetikos
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/](http://kybernetikos.github.io/UIT/) if
you're interested.

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

------
kawera
Related: [http://thepresent.is/](http://thepresent.is/)

------
epx
Lisa Simpson would like this

~~~
neur0mancer
[http://deadhomersociety.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/theysave...](http://deadhomersociety.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/theysavedlisasbrain3.png)

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

------
2400
wow I just nostalgia'd really hard now.

