Swatch Internet Time(en.wikipedia.org) |
Swatch Internet Time(en.wikipedia.org) |
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.
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.
Feel free to create your own fork: https://github.com/willholloway/makertime
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.
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.
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.
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"
Sensible time for wod wode use is still a problem for casual users.
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.
It seems it would be a far simpler adjustment to make than inventing a new "time".
It needed to be an independant concept to bring other companies/competitors on board.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Meridian_Conferen...
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?!?
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.
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').
Zulu Beats.
There, I fixed it.
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.
I still don't understand why you'd have Beil Mean Time - perhaps I haven't grown.
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.
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.
I still wear a analog Watch
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"?
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.
I remember it still being used at Kodak when I was a kid and my father worked there.
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/
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.
But 'digital' literally means base-10 (as in, like the digits on your hands), so in what sense is it not digital?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nC8J6YXqdo
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.
I would say binary is the best base, and perhaps the least arbitrary of all bases since it is the simplest.
EDIT: whoops, bad formatting.
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.
With the almost sole exception of the financial world, the rest of the world wide users stick with UTC.
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.
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"
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.
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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.
Funny, my stance on analogue clocks is they have too little precision and require too much parsing. If I'm tired or stressed it can take me seconds to read one, while digits practically beam the numbers into my head simply through the act of glancing at them.
I do have to admit, though, most digital watches are monstrous things, with tiny displays to leave room for all the trademarks and other nonsense they feel the need to plaster everywhere. I seriously don't understand why they're almost universally awful.
* Appreciation of craftsmanship. Look at a watch with 10+ complications and try not to be impressed. Do not get me started on the Patek Philippe Calibre 89.
* Sentimental attachment/Nostalgia, e.g. the family heirloom.
* EMP resistance
* Permitted inside testing room during LSAT administration
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 ;)
- if you are using a 24h sovjet analog clock or a pocket sundial (as i do), you are more in tune with the cosmos on which our time, day and night schedule is based
- it associates time more with quality then with quantity
- can be purely mechanical, no electricity or batteries
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.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Internati...
That not jiggered by politics at all.
