4 ms·

Except it would be absolutely impractical to actually use in practice by any species/societies that have to sleep on a regular basis and in general need cycles.

by krick 4y ago

Except it would be absolutely impractical to actually use in practice by any species/societies that have to sleep on a regular basis and in general need cycles. If all your "natural cycles" happen to fit well into base-10, well, that's great. Otherwise, you need to base your cycles on something else, which is exactly what calendars do. And, just by the way, the Gregorian calendar is bad and messy, but the ideas it's built upon are absolutely great and are not results of shower-thinking and twitter-shitposting, but arise from pure practicality. They suit Earth, and humans are earthlings, their cycles are defined by the Earth. A year is a crucial cycle, because it defines weather so much. A day is a crucial cycle, because it defines when it's dark outside. A lunar month is a natural and pretty good cycle, because Moon cycles do actually affect life on Earth, but it isn't crucial, which is exactly the reason, why Gregorian calendar happens to get away with pretty much ignoring this one, unlike a day and a year. Still, it explains why most calendars through history prefer months being close to 27.3 days, and why weeks are 7 days (a quarter of 28). Both cycles also are both long enough and short enough to be useful for practical reasons, like organizing work schedules even without relying on celestial bodies. Furthermore, it even appears they are not enough, which is why the year is divided into "quarters" for business purposes like accounting. And these happen to be fairly close to 30 days, which happens to be a very neat divider of 360, which is close enough to a year on the one side, and a very neat number that naturally divides all small numbers up to 6 on the other side, which makes it easy to work with (unlike base-10, BTW, since that cannot be divided by 3). All of which explains, why French Republican calendar is actually a great idea and unfortunately failed (for a fairly stupid reason, IMO), and base-10 day is not so great (although it has merit, since modern digits are base-10) and naturally failed. Now, these totally imaginary and having nothing to do with reality aliens of yours may not have earth-like and human-like cycles, but they surely have cycles of their own. So it is unlikely that magnitude-1000 time measurement with no cycles in-between can work for them either.

db48x 4y ago
> So it is unlikely that magnitude-1000 time measurement with no cycles in-between can work for them either. Oh, maybe I didn’t describe it very well. They use precise scheduling whenever possible, and use kiloseconds and megaseconds in casual conversation. For example, you might be scheduled to go on–shift at 1664204400, and every shift is 30 kiloseconds, meaning you go off–shift at 1664234400. Of course the book never gave exact timestamps like that, it only discussed shifts and watches in general terms. In casual conversation they use “kiloseconds” or “thousand seconds” the same way we use phrases like “half an hour”. For example: “We got the same scut-work shift starting in two thousand seconds. I thought we could go down to the bactry together, trade gossip.” They also use shorter approximations, like “hundred seconds” the way we might use minutes: ‘In his huds, he could see his ships climbing slowly up the sky, still hidden from the naked eye by the nearest tenement. “Another four hundred seconds sir, and you’ll see them come out past the roof just about there.” He pointed at the spot.’ They just don’t have a calendar based on astronomical cycles. When your STL ship needs 400 years to complete a single journey, and each crewmember spends a very small percentage of that time awake and on watch, you don’t need to care about cycles or calendars. And since each of the hundreds of star system that humans have colonized has a completely different calendar based on whatever astronomical cycles are available locally, so Earth’s calendar just doesn’t matter very much.
gibspaulding 4y ago
100 ksecs works out to roughly 27 hours. That's a bit long for a day, but probably not too infeasible to adapt to.
- krick 4y ago
  It's not about the length. It might be a perfect day for them, it's not the point. It's about the fact that you have to use 100 ksec instead of a "day". "Each day" is not the same thing as "each 100 ksecs", since the latter has much more implicit precision. So, practically speaking, your either have a concept of 1-day cycle (because of sleep, sun, or whatever — doesn't matter why they need it and how long must it be for their purposes), or you are stuck with thinking in Unix-time. And if it isn't bad enough for you to fill your calendar in unix-time without "days" or "months" (I can actually believe you might get used to it, somewhat) it makes organisation-level planning and communication hell, if not impossible. Heck, let's even assume their comfortable "day" cycle is 1ks (after all, they had to chose the length of their second based on something". It still means that their next comfortable MUST be EXACTLY 1 Ms (in their numeric system) to be able to use it as a cycle. If it's off even by 0.1 s, it still will get unusable for thinking and planning sooner or later. So, yeah, long story short: just think about having all your schedules (like work shifts, payday, train schedules, everything) in Unix-time. I guess this is enough of a clue to arrive by yourself to the conclusion, that calendars (any calendar, that is — not necessarily Gregorian one) are not some "silly tradition of ours", but a really, really useful invention, which is almost for sure a necessity for any civilization, even if it isn't bound to an earth with yearly weather-cycles. The only way this could work out is if ALL their cycles happen to fit PERFECTLY to orders (degrees) of some number — then they could choose the length of 1 second and their numeric system base accordingly, and I can imagine it being somewhat usable without introducing explicit cycles. But to happen it must be one Math-Wonderland of a Universe they live in. I don't even dare to say it's "implausible". It's... ridiculous.
  - db48x 4y ago
    It’s so ridiculous that you have invented something completely unlike what is in the book. They don’t try to force anything to line up to powers of ten, they haven’t changed the length of the second, and they have wearable computers to eliminate any and all annoyances associated with communicating long timestamps. Although the book only hints at how things are implemented, the result is apparently really flexible. They regularly schedule things that will happen far in the future. Since they make liberal use of suspended animation, their plans need to cover very long periods of time at varying levels of precision. Most of the events of the book take place over approximately a gigasecond (with the average character being awake less than a quarter of that), but the prolog takes place several centuries earlier, and the backstory of one of the main characters covers at least several millenia.

by krick 4y ago

db48x 4y ago

> So it is unlikely that magnitude-1000 time measurement with no cycles in-between can work for them either. Oh, maybe I didn’t describe it very well. They use precise scheduling whenever possible, and use kiloseconds and megaseconds in casual conversation. For example, you might be scheduled to go on–shift at 1664204400, and every shift is 30 kiloseconds, meaning you go off–shift at 1664234400. Of course the book never gave exact timestamps like that, it only discussed shifts and watches in general terms. In casual conversation they use “kiloseconds” or “thousand seconds” the same way we use phrases like “half an hour”. For example: “We got the same scut-work shift starting in two thousand seconds. I thought we could go down to the bactry together, trade gossip.” They also use shorter approximations, like “hundred seconds” the way we might use minutes: ‘In his huds, he could see his ships climbing slowly up the sky, still hidden from the naked eye by the nearest tenement. “Another four hundred seconds sir, and you’ll see them come out past the roof just about there.” He pointed at the spot.’ They just don’t have a calendar based on astronomical cycles. When your STL ship needs 400 years to complete a single journey, and each crewmember spends a very small percentage of that time awake and on watch, you don’t need to care about cycles or calendars. And since each of the hundreds of star system that humans have colonized has a completely different calendar based on whatever astronomical cycles are available locally, so Earth’s calendar just doesn’t matter very much.

gibspaulding 4y ago

100 ksecs works out to roughly 27 hours. That's a bit long for a day, but probably not too infeasible to adapt to.

krick 4y ago
It's not about the length. It might be a perfect day for them, it's not the point. It's about the fact that you have to use 100 ksec instead of a "day". "Each day" is not the same thing as "each 100 ksecs", since the latter has much more implicit precision. So, practically speaking, your either have a concept of 1-day cycle (because of sleep, sun, or whatever — doesn't matter why they need it and how long must it be for their purposes), or you are stuck with thinking in Unix-time. And if it isn't bad enough for you to fill your calendar in unix-time without "days" or "months" (I can actually believe you might get used to it, somewhat) it makes organisation-level planning and communication hell, if not impossible. Heck, let's even assume their comfortable "day" cycle is 1ks (after all, they had to chose the length of their second based on something". It still means that their next comfortable MUST be EXACTLY 1 Ms (in their numeric system) to be able to use it as a cycle. If it's off even by 0.1 s, it still will get unusable for thinking and planning sooner or later. So, yeah, long story short: just think about having all your schedules (like work shifts, payday, train schedules, everything) in Unix-time. I guess this is enough of a clue to arrive by yourself to the conclusion, that calendars (any calendar, that is — not necessarily Gregorian one) are not some "silly tradition of ours", but a really, really useful invention, which is almost for sure a necessity for any civilization, even if it isn't bound to an earth with yearly weather-cycles. The only way this could work out is if ALL their cycles happen to fit PERFECTLY to orders (degrees) of some number — then they could choose the length of 1 second and their numeric system base accordingly, and I can imagine it being somewhat usable without introducing explicit cycles. But to happen it must be one Math-Wonderland of a Universe they live in. I don't even dare to say it's "implausible". It's... ridiculous.
- db48x 4y ago
  It’s so ridiculous that you have invented something completely unlike what is in the book. They don’t try to force anything to line up to powers of ten, they haven’t changed the length of the second, and they have wearable computers to eliminate any and all annoyances associated with communicating long timestamps. Although the book only hints at how things are implemented, the result is apparently really flexible. They regularly schedule things that will happen far in the future. Since they make liberal use of suspended animation, their plans need to cover very long periods of time at varying levels of precision. Most of the events of the book take place over approximately a gigasecond (with the average character being awake less than a quarter of that), but the prolog takes place several centuries earlier, and the backstory of one of the main characters covers at least several millenia.