4 ms·

I'm Swiss. Back in the day, the Swatch group had an experiment where they tried to invent a new unit for time. They came up with the `beat`, also known as Swatc

by SeoxyS 15y ago

I'm Swiss. Back in the day, the Swatch group had an experiment where they tried to invent a new unit for time. They came up with the `beat`, also known as Swatch Internet Time. The unit represented a 1000 beat cycle centered around midnight on the Swiss meridian, ie. UTC+1. There'd be no daylight savings time. All in all, it's a really cool idea, and I owned a watch for many years that reported beat time, but it was essentially useless. This is perhaps the most gigantic of chicken-and-egg problems, the mere fact that it is currently useless ensures that it will forever be useless. More at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

edzme 15y ago
Love the metric system. While stuff like this is cool it's too bad it'll never catch on.
randall 15y ago
Beats were actually used in a dreamcast game called Shenmue. Talk about useless trivia.
StavrosK 15y ago
There would also be no timezones. I have that watch, it's cool.
- mseebach 15y ago
  No, there will always be timezones, even if we call them something else. Even on swatch time, I still have to keep track of which one-hour window I can schedule a multi-continent conference call in, because my colleagues in New York aren't going to be in the office three hours before sunrise, no matter what their clocks say. Also, with no timezones you lose the language to speak about time. Now "he usually gets up before 2pm" means one thing, and "gets up before 4am" means another. If you abolish timezones those statements become strongly location bound, to the extent where I imagine people would start to develop language based on local time, such as "he sleeps into the early afternoon". The majority of people live each individual day inside one (perhaps two adjacent) timezone. The system should support that by far most common usecase.
  - slowpoke 15y ago
    > No, there will always be timezones, even if we call them something else. Even on swatch time, I still have to keep track of which one-hour window I can schedule a multi-continent conference call in, Your missing the point. The fact that there are no timezones would mean everyone is on the same time, so it's much easier to schedule said hour. It makes coordination much easier. mseebach 56 minutes ago | link No, there will always be timezones, even if we call them something else. Even on swatch time, I still have to keep track of which one-hour window I can schedule a multi-continent conference call in, because my colleagues in New York aren't going to be in the office three hours before sunrise, no matter what their clocks say. > Now "he usually gets up before 2pm" means one thing, and "gets up before 4am" means another. It's still highly arbitrary. The only thing that would change is that the sun position per hour would change depending on where you are. I don't see the problem, honestly. The advantages of much easier global coordination would far outweigh this.
    - mseebach 15y ago
      > The fact that there are no timezones would mean everyone is on the same time, so it's much easier to schedule said hour. It makes coordination much easier. No, everybody would not be on the same hour. I would still have to apply location knowledge to know when colleagues in other time zones get to the office, are likely to be out for lunch and leave in the evening. Example: It is now 13:00 in London. Let's pretend it's not Saturday, it's a perfectly good time for a catch-up chat, so I call my colleague in Silicon Valley, but he doesn't pick up. The fact that we might have decided that his watch should say 13:00 does not change the fact that he's probably just getting out of bed, as it's one hour and 40 minutes to sunrise there (or 6:00 with time zones applied). > It's still highly arbitrary. The only thing that would change is that the sun position per hour would change depending on where you are. But sun position is roughly how we organise our days. It's not like 2/3 of the worlds population is going to start sleeping through a significant portion of daylight hours to make global coordination easier. Time is an abstraction of sun position to make coordination easier. Changing the abstraction doesn't change the thing it's an abstraction of - so in computer science terms, you could say you're making the abstraction leaky.
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zyfo 15y ago
One can be optimistic, perhaps there's certain applications were it doesn't matter that its not conventional, and it could spread from there. For example online gaming communities over different time zones and (nerdy) teams collaborating over time zones.
chrisfarms 15y ago
I used to have a watch that gave beats. Totally useless other than annoying friends by constantly converting any meeting time into beats. I think it will take colonising other planets before the world is ready for a new unit of time and at that point the whole concept of 'day' is kind of out the window.
- cpeterso 15y ago
  Colonizers on new planets will probably still use minutes and hours because that's what they're used to culturally. Especially if they have to collaborate with people on Earth. This Wikipedia artile about timekeeping on Mars is fun reading. The Mars rover operation teams used work schedules (and watches!) based on Martian time because they need to be available when the rover had daylight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timekeeping_on_Mars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timekeeping_on_Mars
  - deleted 15y ago
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by SeoxyS 15y ago

edzme 15y ago

Love the metric system. While stuff like this is cool it's too bad it'll never catch on.

randall 15y ago

Beats were actually used in a dreamcast game called Shenmue. Talk about useless trivia.

StavrosK 15y ago

There would also be no timezones. I have that watch, it's cool.

mseebach 15y ago
No, there will always be timezones, even if we call them something else. Even on swatch time, I still have to keep track of which one-hour window I can schedule a multi-continent conference call in, because my colleagues in New York aren't going to be in the office three hours before sunrise, no matter what their clocks say. Also, with no timezones you lose the language to speak about time. Now "he usually gets up before 2pm" means one thing, and "gets up before 4am" means another. If you abolish timezones those statements become strongly location bound, to the extent where I imagine people would start to develop language based on local time, such as "he sleeps into the early afternoon". The majority of people live each individual day inside one (perhaps two adjacent) timezone. The system should support that by far most common usecase.
- slowpoke 15y ago
  > No, there will always be timezones, even if we call them something else. Even on swatch time, I still have to keep track of which one-hour window I can schedule a multi-continent conference call in, Your missing the point. The fact that there are no timezones would mean everyone is on the same time, so it's much easier to schedule said hour. It makes coordination much easier. mseebach 56 minutes ago | link No, there will always be timezones, even if we call them something else. Even on swatch time, I still have to keep track of which one-hour window I can schedule a multi-continent conference call in, because my colleagues in New York aren't going to be in the office three hours before sunrise, no matter what their clocks say. > Now "he usually gets up before 2pm" means one thing, and "gets up before 4am" means another. It's still highly arbitrary. The only thing that would change is that the sun position per hour would change depending on where you are. I don't see the problem, honestly. The advantages of much easier global coordination would far outweigh this.
  - mseebach 15y ago
    > The fact that there are no timezones would mean everyone is on the same time, so it's much easier to schedule said hour. It makes coordination much easier. No, everybody would not be on the same hour. I would still have to apply location knowledge to know when colleagues in other time zones get to the office, are likely to be out for lunch and leave in the evening. Example: It is now 13:00 in London. Let's pretend it's not Saturday, it's a perfectly good time for a catch-up chat, so I call my colleague in Silicon Valley, but he doesn't pick up. The fact that we might have decided that his watch should say 13:00 does not change the fact that he's probably just getting out of bed, as it's one hour and 40 minutes to sunrise there (or 6:00 with time zones applied). > It's still highly arbitrary. The only thing that would change is that the sun position per hour would change depending on where you are. But sun position is roughly how we organise our days. It's not like 2/3 of the worlds population is going to start sleeping through a significant portion of daylight hours to make global coordination easier. Time is an abstraction of sun position to make coordination easier. Changing the abstraction doesn't change the thing it's an abstraction of - so in computer science terms, you could say you're making the abstraction leaky.

deleted 15y ago

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zyfo 15y ago

One can be optimistic, perhaps there's certain applications were it doesn't matter that its not conventional, and it could spread from there. For example online gaming communities over different time zones and (nerdy) teams collaborating over time zones.

chrisfarms 15y ago

I used to have a watch that gave beats. Totally useless other than annoying friends by constantly converting any meeting time into beats. I think it will take colonising other planets before the world is ready for a new unit of time and at that point the whole concept of 'day' is kind of out the window.

cpeterso 15y ago
Colonizers on new planets will probably still use minutes and hours because that's what they're used to culturally. Especially if they have to collaborate with people on Earth. This Wikipedia artile about timekeeping on Mars is fun reading. The Mars rover operation teams used work schedules (and watches!) based on Martian time because they need to be available when the rover had daylight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timekeeping_on_Mars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timekeeping_on_Mars
- deleted 15y ago
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