[HN Gopher] Swatch Internet Time
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Swatch Internet Time
Author : ghgr
Score : 85 points
Date : 2022-09-23 05:33 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.timeanddate.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.timeanddate.com)
| MiscIdeaMaker99 wrote:
| I remember running the official app in Windows 95/98 that ran in
| the system tray showing Internet Time. I can't say that I used it
| once for anything ever, but I really liked the novelty of it back
| then.
| sen wrote:
| I also had a .beat watch and absolutely loved it. I even had the
| program that changed your Windows system clock to use .beat time.
| I was convinced they were onto something huge and it was going to
| be the future... it was fun while it lasted.
|
| I still think the way we do time/date is archaic and ridiculous,
| and absolutely ready to be replaced with something better.
| [deleted]
| aravindet wrote:
| Internet Time is what sent me down the decimal time and calendar
| reform rabbit holes!
|
| One idea I wrote up was to divide the year and the day in a
| consistent way, rather than having separate reform proposals for
| the clock and the calendar.
|
| https://aravind.rs/clock
|
| (It relies on the coincidence that the ratio of the length of the
| year to day, 365.2422, can be very, very closely approximated by
| the fraction 46,751 / 128.)
| kqr wrote:
| Year to day is 365 + 1/4 - 1/100 + 1/400 = 365.2425, is it not?
| vikingerik wrote:
| A Gregorian calendar year is 365.2425 days, yes. A solar year
| of one equinox/solstice cycle is currently 365.2422 days.
| [deleted]
| aravindet wrote:
| The 365 + 1/4 - 1/100 + 1/400 is an approximation, not an
| exact value. The best value* is 365.24217. 46,751 / 128 is
| actually a better approximation.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_year
|
| * This is the ratio of the mean tropical year to the mean
| solar day; We use means because both the length of the day
| and the length of the year vary.
|
| The period of rotation (day) of the planet varies due to
| tidal friction (the moon "drags" oceans against the earth's
| rotation) and other shifts in mass (e.g. earthquakes) that
| change the moment of inertia.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second#Slowing_rotation_o.
| ..
|
| The period of revolution (year) varies mainly due to
| precession of the equinoxes.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_precession
| amenghra wrote:
| Great Twitter thread on how weird our time keeping systems are:
|
| https://twitter.com/foone/status/1572260363764400129
| SllX wrote:
| I laughed at the religious leader/no universal religion bit.
|
| Something these threads don't consider is if the aliens land
| somewhere else they could end up encountering a different
| calendar depending on who they talk to. In Japan the era
| changes with the reigning emperor, so while they follow
| Gregorian for International Business and Holidays, locally when
| the Emperor came to power is still often referenced for the
| purposes of counting years.
|
| Here's a primer:
| https://homepages.cwi.nl/~aeb/go/misc/jdate.html
| gillesjacobs wrote:
| I quite like the idea of decimal time [1] and the swatch proposal
| uses the most simple implementation with only 1 unit for a whole
| day (1000 beats in a day). The day-to-day practical implications
| of having only one unit instead of the usual three (24 hours, 60
| minutes, 60 seconds) are hard to gauge. It might be more
| difficult to communicate approximate points in time: 525 vs. half
| past twelve.
|
| Then again these conventions are social and with wide-adoption
| should become second nature too. But as the French Revolution
| showed, overcoming the network effect of commonly used time-
| standards is near impossible.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time
| [deleted]
| _trampeltier wrote:
| I like the concept from htime.
|
| https://htime.io/
| tao_oat wrote:
| I love seeing .beats pop up occasionally; it's always fun. And
| every time I link to this article: [So You Want To Abolish Time
| Zones](https://qntm.org/abolish)
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| This article seems to assume the removal of time zones did not
| come with any other changes to human behaviour to accommodate
| these things...
| KMnO4 wrote:
| I don't understand the dot in ".beats". How is that pronounced?
| "Dot-beats"?
|
| And it really makes it awkward to add in an English sentence,
| especially if you use it at the start. .beats could just be
| "beats".
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| "dot beats trademark"
| saurik wrote:
| Clearly, you don't understand the .com boom.
| nightpool wrote:
| I did a web design project in college where I made a combination
| reminder / clock app based around internet beats. You could mark
| down when you started working on something and then set down
| reminders for when things needed to happen, in relative minute or
| best measurements, and you'd get an automatic countdown that
| would repeat every day, all backed by Firebase so I could share
| it between my desktop and my phone. It's probably not around
| anymore, but it was really fun to use for the few weeks where I
| was using it full time to help keep track of things.
|
| I did use a slightly different implementation of beats compared
| to Swatch's though--I found it more elegant and natural to base
| the "day" of the beats on the UTC timezone, rather then the GMT+1
| timezone that Swatch chose for themselves to represent their
| headquarters in Switzerland.
| emacsen wrote:
| Why does this not surprise me that you'd do something like the
| above?
|
| Why was UTC more convenient though?
|
| (also good to see you active online)
| amelius wrote:
| What does the internet have to do with it?
| delecti wrote:
| A single consistent way to synchronize time is handy when you
| don't know where the other party is, and it's rare to not know
| the other party of a conversation is without the internet.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I wonder how this time system would have dealt with things like
| leap seconds and Daylight Saving Time.
| Hasu wrote:
| Swatch Internet Time has no timezones or conversions - it's
| always the same time everywhere - so DST doesn't and can't
| exist in this time system.
| toast0 wrote:
| No DST, that wouldn't make sense on a single time zone system.
|
| I haven't seen anything specific written about leap seconds,
| but I imagine you just have one beat a little longer than the
| others. Realistically, you're probably keeping unixtime under
| the covers and translating.
| jordemort wrote:
| Hm, but what calendar does it pair best with? French Republican,
| for maximal decimalization, or Discordian, for maximal weirdness?
| gerikson wrote:
| The Swatch home page still shows beats (upper left)
|
| https://www.swatch.com/en-us/homepage
|
| I implemented it in Javascript for this page
| https://gerikson.com/cgi-bin/eternal.cgi [1], but it's off from
| the official page by 1
|
| [1]
| https://github.com/gustafe/EternalTime/blob/master/templates...
| warp wrote:
| PHP still has support for it in its date formatting functions
| ("B"): https://www.php.net/manual/en/datetime.format.php
| donatj wrote:
| Came here to say this. I fell down this rabbit hole years ago
| trying to figure out what they were.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Decimal Internet Time_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32045573 - July 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _Swatch Internet Time_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31642887 - June 2022 (2
| comments)
|
| _Swatch Internet Time_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29564119 - Dec 2021 (2
| comments)
|
| _Swatch Internet Time (or .beat time)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26671343 - April 2021 (2
| comments)
|
| _Swatch Internet Time_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24348915 - Sept 2020 (2
| comments)
|
| _Swatch Internet Time_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22528768 - March 2020 (1
| comment)
|
| _Swatch Internet Time (1998)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16307725 - Feb 2018 (78
| comments)
|
| _Swatch Internet Time_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7046178 - Jan 2014 (96
| comments)
|
| _Ask HN: Why did this idea of Internet Time not work?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=520004 - March 2009 (28
| comments)
| bugmen0t wrote:
| I had a "beats" watch in the late 90s. Something with "internet"
| in the name was super appealing to me, when I knew I couldn't
| have the actual internet with me.
|
| I guess back then, as a teenager I didn't even know how much of a
| nerd I was :-)
| gillesjacobs wrote:
| Was it a secondary mode on the watch so you could tell the
| actual time?
| abestic9 wrote:
| Outside of the timezone-agnostic advantages, .beats are about
| what I'd expect single notable tasks to resolve to and seem to be
| a great notation for that purpose. Retrieving an item I know the
| rough location of might take 1 .beat, disinfecting a kitchen
| countertop might take 2 .beats, resolving a P1 service outage I
| know the cause of might take 4 .beats to correct, verify and push
| into production. That ease is what makes it a viable replacement
| for me.
|
| So after widespread adoption it could be used effectively as
| second nature and improve communication without the wasted
| thought cycles it takes to consider seconds/minutes, just to end
| up supplying poor ETAs. For example, from, "just a second,"
| really meaning anywhere between 5 and 300 seconds, to a moment
| being hopefully less than 15 minutes, instead we hear, "need to
| grab something from the garage, back in... 2 beats," to mean
| around 3 minutes and parallelise our own movements appropriately.
|
| With that edge, I'm optimistic that .beats wouldn't become
| arbitrary language after a few decades, that its use would be
| more thoughtful, but I'm ignorant to the psychology.
|
| If decimal time of any description were to catch on, all systems
| should be updated, right down to the instruments requiring
| microsecond accuracy. Similarly, while we propose reformed
| timekeeping, can we decimalise the calendar year?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_reform
| akira2501 wrote:
| > Outside of the timezone-agnostic advantages
|
| Timezones are not agnostic to clocks, though. There are
| timezones that are offset by 30 minutes or 45 minutes. You'd
| have to convert those to "beat" differences and then absorb
| them into this system.
| elijaht wrote:
| I think you are giving this too much credit. A .beat is a
| scalar multiple of a minute. Retrieving an item takes one
| minute, disinfecting a counter takes three minutes, resolving a
| P1 takes five minutes.
|
| The issue is really the imprecision of language IMO.
| akira2501 wrote:
| Human processes are imprecise. Our language just reflects
| this. You could improve the language to the point that no one
| would use it, but this wouldn't have any actual impact on the
| "issue."
|
| Take, for example, the way people actually use SI. The
| distance to the sun, most accurately is "93 gigameters." Yet,
| everyone says "93 million km." Why?
|
| If you're just going to drop the accuracy, then you should
| switch bases to reflect this; however, people want language
| that matches their everyday experiences and not one that
| conveys a lot of additional information through the units
| themselves.
|
| Language is a tool to express ourselves, not to constrain our
| expressions.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| "Metric" sounds great on the surface, but there is a reason that
| 12-based numbers are often used, especially in the old days. They
| are very easy to split into halves, thirds, quarters, and sixths,
| without rounding.
| CorpOverreach wrote:
| My first interaction with this was with Phantasy Star Online on
| the Nintendo GameCube. (Yes, it did have online connectivity!)
|
| PSO would display the current time in .beats - a concept I
| thought was amazing at the time, showing the same time for
| everyone in an MMORPG made total sense. Sadly that's the only
| real-life application I remember seeing of it.
| marban wrote:
| Early 90s, I got a Swatch -- The Beep, which was basically a
| numeric pager in a watch. Needless to say that it was the
| ultimate flex in school. Vintage ad:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEMwc70iCKM
| funnybeam wrote:
| Clearly we should all just use unixtime with seconds from
| midnight if you want a relative local time of day
|
| SI units can then be used instead of minutes, days, etc
|
| Makes much more sense
|
| https://www.decimalisetime.org/
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Needs a progress bar.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| It's an obfuscated way of telling people to use the same
| timezone.
| myself248 wrote:
| I'm so annoyed that they based their zero on Biel time (GMT+1)
| instead of on GMT itself.
|
| That cemented it as a joke rather than a serious attempt at
| universal time, and I think poisoned the idea in a lot of places
| that it otherwise might've taken off.
| elliotpage wrote:
| I love Swatch Internet Time - as others have mentioned, I used it
| constantly via Phantasy Star Online on Dreamcast. I used the
| .beats watchface on my Pebble until it died, too.
|
| A second run at .beats with a clear mind and an open standard
| could nail down the awkward parts (Set 000 as midnight UTC for
| example) but I doubt there is the motivation to try the exercise
| again.
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(page generated 2022-09-25 23:01 UTC)