I don't think global time would be a problem like many people suggest. If you talk to somebody in Australia you will quickly develop an intuition that time @X is night (or whatever it happens to be) over there, just like our other intuitions about how many things (weather, season, how long are sunsets, etc.) are different in different places.
Timezones are failing at all of their jobs. Getting time to correspond to sun position? It can be 7pm here and 7pm there but here it will be fully dark and there it will be still mid-evening. Knowing working hours of shops and government? Everything is all over the place. Everything is fluid and changes with seasons.
Plus, there is this unfair specialness that some countries are at UTC and others have offsets. With global time, everybody gets @0, just for different places it will be at a different sun position. (As long as we find a political way to pick something neutral, instead of saying "that's when the sun is highest in London".)
I used to think this, but mirroring the sun position makes a lot of sense. If I wanted to meet / someone in Australia, I would still need to know extra information (what their equivalent 9-5 working hours are).
It's worth noting that technically London uses GMT for 5 months and BST for 7 months.
The GMT offset is zero, but it's important to note the difference especially when configuring servers to avoid nasty daylight savings surprises kicking in at at end of March.
There has been talk of moving to a +1 offset all year round for lighter evenings in winter, albeit at the cost of some very dark morning, but given we couldn't even manage Metrication without people still complaining 20 years later, I can't see it ever happening.
I’ve heard about it, from time to time. It’s interesting, but don’t see it going anywhere.
From the official Swatch page:
> The BMT Meridian was inaugurated on October 23rd, 1998, in the presence of Nicholas Negroponte, founder and director of the media laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
That’s an oddly-phrased sentence. I wonder what “in the presence of” looks like.
Hover the timestamp here on HN and you'll see it at least once in your life time :) I'm guessing it's mostly developers, especially ones working internationally, who come across it every day. Others seem to prefer to convert between people's timezone, while we just send UTC+00:00 to each other.
I was about to comment that it's not UTC, it's in my local time. Then I remembered my local time (Europe/London) is currently equivalent to UTC, so I have no idea what it's actually displaying (it's not indicated in any way).
It's actually a problem in these parts that it's not obvious to us whether a time is in UTC or local time. I've found so many things displayed in UTC that people have assumed is local time then summer comes around and everything is off by an hour.
Since humans still prefer to work in daylight and sleep in darkness, even without timezones you still need to have extra information in addition to "what time is it" to figure out if Steve in Australia will be awake at @700 or asleep...
Maybe when the nuclear winter makes it dark all the time, or forces us all to live underground, then we can abolish timezones.
To be fair, I still have to look up what is the time zone difference to Australia and do mental maths, which is the exact same effort as looking up whether @700 is day or night time over there.
Wait is that available? Best clock would be UTC + decimal time anyway, netric time is a good name for that.
Decimal time: you divide the day into powers of tens, a 'deci' is 2.4 hours, a 'centi' is 14.4 ~= 15 minutes, a 'mili' is 1.44 minutes ~= 86 seconds and so on.
Great system with convenient lengths, and easy to add duration + date, and convert between different units.
Swatch® Internet Time, or .beat time, is a decimal time concept introduced in 1998, dividing the day into 1,000 ".beats" rather than hours and minutes. It eliminates time zones by anchoring to "Biel Mean Time" (UTC+1). One beat equals 86.4 seconds, with the time written as @000 to @999
I don't think global time would be a problem like many people suggest. If you talk to somebody in Australia you will quickly develop an intuition that time @X is night (or whatever it happens to be) over there, just like our other intuitions about how many things (weather, season, how long are sunsets, etc.) are different in different places.
Timezones are failing at all of their jobs. Getting time to correspond to sun position? It can be 7pm here and 7pm there but here it will be fully dark and there it will be still mid-evening. Knowing working hours of shops and government? Everything is all over the place. Everything is fluid and changes with seasons.
Plus, there is this unfair specialness that some countries are at UTC and others have offsets. With global time, everybody gets @0, just for different places it will be at a different sun position. (As long as we find a political way to pick something neutral, instead of saying "that's when the sun is highest in London".)
I used to think this, but mirroring the sun position makes a lot of sense. If I wanted to meet / someone in Australia, I would still need to know extra information (what their equivalent 9-5 working hours are).
It's worth noting that technically London uses GMT for 5 months and BST for 7 months.
The GMT offset is zero, but it's important to note the difference especially when configuring servers to avoid nasty daylight savings surprises kicking in at at end of March.
There has been talk of moving to a +1 offset all year round for lighter evenings in winter, albeit at the cost of some very dark morning, but given we couldn't even manage Metrication without people still complaining 20 years later, I can't see it ever happening.
Fun fact, PHP has built in support for Swatch Internet Time with it's "B" format token.
https://www.php.net/manual/en/datetime.format.php
What a blast from the past. I added that!
Oh really? Hah, you are the reason I've known about Swatch Internet Time for the last 20+ years.
I read the PHP docs and wondered "What in the heck is that?" before Googling it.
I’ve heard about it, from time to time. It’s interesting, but don’t see it going anywhere.
From the official Swatch page:
> The BMT Meridian was inaugurated on October 23rd, 1998, in the presence of Nicholas Negroponte, founder and director of the media laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
That’s an oddly-phrased sentence. I wonder what “in the presence of” looks like.
> I wonder what “in the presence of” looks like.
That is what an artificial intelligence would say, unable to comprehend the existence of the physical world :-)
(I've also just finished reading the novel Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which revolves around a similar plot point, but it's aliens)
This always felt like a marketing gimmick. I've never seen it actually used for anything, unlike UTC.
The Sega Dreamcast online RPG "Phantasy Star Online" displayed the current time in beats.
Most definitely marketing. It’s got the company name in it. I’m surprised other watch makers didn’t come up with their own time standards as gimmicks.
Even UTC+-0 I have seen rarely. AoE seems more common, especially for deadlines
> Even UTC+-0 I have seen rarely
Hover the timestamp here on HN and you'll see it at least once in your life time :) I'm guessing it's mostly developers, especially ones working internationally, who come across it every day. Others seem to prefer to convert between people's timezone, while we just send UTC+00:00 to each other.
I was about to comment that it's not UTC, it's in my local time. Then I remembered my local time (Europe/London) is currently equivalent to UTC, so I have no idea what it's actually displaying (it's not indicated in any way).
It's actually a problem in these parts that it's not obvious to us whether a time is in UTC or local time. I've found so many things displayed in UTC that people have assumed is local time then summer comes around and everything is off by an hour.
Since humans still prefer to work in daylight and sleep in darkness, even without timezones you still need to have extra information in addition to "what time is it" to figure out if Steve in Australia will be awake at @700 or asleep...
Maybe when the nuclear winter makes it dark all the time, or forces us all to live underground, then we can abolish timezones.
To be fair, I still have to look up what is the time zone difference to Australia and do mental maths, which is the exact same effort as looking up whether @700 is day or night time over there.
related
https://qntm.org/abolish
This website:
> There are no confusing time zones ordaylight savings time shifts to worry about.
Also this website (and in the very next sentence - emphasis mine):
> There are exactly 1,000 .Beats in a day, making each .Beat precisely 1 minute and 26.4 seconds long.
Having a laugh.
I'm assuming this cannot be serious, otherwise get thee hence!
The swatch.com website still shows @beats in the upper left corner.
I am unsure whether Swatch still markets watches with digital displays.
This was a missed opportunity to call it netric time.
Wait is that available? Best clock would be UTC + decimal time anyway, netric time is a good name for that.
Decimal time: you divide the day into powers of tens, a 'deci' is 2.4 hours, a 'centi' is 14.4 ~= 15 minutes, a 'mili' is 1.44 minutes ~= 86 seconds and so on.
Great system with convenient lengths, and easy to add duration + date, and convert between different units.
Internet time is already that: it’s UTC with the day divided into a 1000 beats/metric minutes.
See French Decimal Time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time
Not to be confused with Metric Time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time
Timekeeping units of measurement:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_of_time
Fun!
Not sure if it's a bug, but for the date+time permalink at the bottom, the displayed link changes but the underlying href is locked to 7 months ago
Swatch® Internet Time, or .beat time, is a decimal time concept introduced in 1998, dividing the day into 1,000 ".beats" rather than hours and minutes. It eliminates time zones by anchoring to "Biel Mean Time" (UTC+1). One beat equals 86.4 seconds, with the time written as @000 to @999
How does it handle leap seconds?