Swatch Internet Time
en.wikipedia.org
Swatch Internet Time
1–10 of 103 posts
Re: Swatch Internet Time
#2I've always loved this idea. It just makes sense. People argue against the "circular notation" of a clock face and how it relates to 60 minutes/seconds, but all that analog stuff is dead.
Re: Swatch Internet Time
#3There's a great collection if decimal time ideas, many of which are linked at the bottom of that wikipedia page. I personally always liked the idea of making 1 day into the base unit. Then 0.5 would give you noon, 0.75 is 6pm. It seemed less arbitrary than making a unit into a 10th of a day, since that has no value except in reference to a day.
Re: Swatch Internet Time
#4I remember those, I don't think enough people realised/needed the utility of them at the time for it to gain critical mass. Not that many people in the population at large, have friends all over the world that they need to have accurate timesync with.
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.
Re: Swatch Internet Time
#5There's a great collection if decimal time ideas, many of which are linked at the bottom of that wikipedia page. I personally always liked the idea of making 1 day into the base unit. Then 0.5 would give you noon, 0.75 is 6pm. It seemed less arbitrary than making a unit into a 10th of a day, since that has no value except in reference to a day.
1/10th of a day is just as arbitrary, maybe less so, then 1/24th of a day.
Re: Swatch Internet Time
#6I've always loved this idea. It just makes sense. People argue against the "circular notation" of a clock face and how it relates to 60 minutes/seconds, but all that analog stuff is dead.
And as long as we're discussing "out there" time notations, I'll throw out my support for a calendar system that makes more sense. 12 30-day months with a 5 (or 6) day "Holiday Month" at the end. Adjusting the "week" to be 10 days instead of 7. 3 weeks a month, 9 weeks a quarter, 36 weeks a year. Work 7 of the 10 days in a week would be the same as a 5-day work week (2 more days off a year actually).
Re: Swatch Internet Time
#7There's a great collection if decimal time ideas, many of which are linked at the bottom of that wikipedia page. I personally always liked the idea of making 1 day into the base unit. Then 0.5 would give you noon, 0.75 is 6pm. It seemed less arbitrary than making a unit into a 10th of a day, since that has no value except in reference to a day.
1/10th of a day is just as arbitrary, maybe less so, then 1/24th of a day.
It's not arbitrary. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal
Re: Swatch Internet Time
#8It was a nice idea but I think Swatch made a big mistake by taking their headquarters as the base to calculate it.
It needed to be an independant concept to bring other companies/competitors on board.
Re: Swatch Internet Time
#9I've always loved this idea. It just makes sense. People argue against the "circular notation" of a clock face and how it relates to 60 minutes/seconds, but all that analog stuff is dead.
"but all that analog stuff is dead."
I still wear a analog Watch
Re: Swatch Internet Time
#10I've always loved this idea. It just makes sense. People argue against the "circular notation" of a clock face and how it relates to 60 minutes/seconds, but all that analog stuff is dead.
And as long as we're discussing "out there" time notations, I'll throw out my support for a calendar system that makes more sense. 12 30-day months with a 5 (or 6) day "Holiday Month" at the end. Adjusting the "week" to be 10 days instead of 7. 3 weeks a month, 9 weeks a quarter, 36 weeks a year. Work 7 of the 10 days in a week would be the same as a 5-day work week (2 more days off a year actually).
Maybe, but that ship has sailed. No-one is going to reform this.
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.