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Swatch Internet Time

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Re: Swatch Internet Time

#71

Post by acron0 »

willholloway wrote: post #29

I think the biggest problem with time keeping systems is that they counts up, but our lives are not infinite. For us, time is really counting down. After trying to reconcile the solar year with decimal time in a way that made sense, I abandoned my effort and created a time keeping system with 1095 units of time of time per year (1098 in leap years). The units are 8 hours long, because no progress on hard problems is…

I love this concept, but it's not really granular enough. Although I agree with the premise that 8 hours is 'problem-sized', it doesn't lend itself well to humans. What would I call an eighth of one unit?

Re: Swatch Internet Time

#72

Post by willholloway »

acron0 wrote: post #71
willholloway wrote: post #29

I think the biggest problem with time keeping systems is that they counts up, but our lives are not infinite. For us, time is really counting down. After trying to reconcile the solar year with decimal time in a way that made sense, I abandoned my effort and created a time keeping system with 1095 units of time of time per year (1098 in leap years). The units are 8 hours long, because no progress on hard problems is…

I love this concept, but it's not really granular enough. Although I agree with the premise that 8 hours is 'problem-sized', it doesn't lend itself well to humans. What would I call an eighth of one unit?

Hours.

I still have to be on Manager time (standard time) when I'm interfacing with the rest of the world. But for flow states in a pure building mindset, I switch to Maker Time.

Re: Swatch Internet Time

#74

Post by lionhearted »

Ever since I heard about this, it became an exciting idea to me.

60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day is just a mess for doing math and analyzing how long things take and what of our life they make up.

Eliminate all the timezone conversion nonsense and you've got another huge plus... the time system will eventually change, sooner or later. Coordinating the change will be difficult, but it's too obvious not to happen.

Re: Swatch Internet Time

#75

Post by rgj »

jamestomasino wrote: post #3

There'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.

Isn't that what MS Excel does, internally?

Re: Swatch Internet Time

#76

Post by kybernetikos »

bluedevil2k wrote: post #2

I'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.

Actually, a decimal time works really well on a circular clock face:

http://kybernetikos.github.io/UIT/ (you need to permit gps to get the correct rotation and drawn on light/dark periods).

http://kybernetikos.com/2012/11/26/modern-times-a-new-clock/

Re: Swatch Internet Time

#77

Post by kybernetikos »

bluedevil2k wrote: post #6
bluedevil2k wrote: post #2

I'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).

That's what I have in my time system UIT (linked earlier). I renamed the days to nullday, unday, duoday, triday, quadday, pentday, hexday, heptday, octday, nonday. One nice feature is that if I tell you that it's 1st Unday today, you can see immediately that it's the 12 day of the year (since 0th Nullday is the first day of the year).

Re: Swatch Internet Time

#78

Post by martin-adams »

willholloway wrote: post #29

I think the biggest problem with time keeping systems is that they counts up, but our lives are not infinite. For us, time is really counting down. After trying to reconcile the solar year with decimal time in a way that made sense, I abandoned my effort and created a time keeping system with 1095 units of time of time per year (1098 in leap years). The units are 8 hours long, because no progress on hard problems is…

I think that once you attach a finite resource to time, you get an inherent feeling of counting down. For example, attach a battery to a laptop and you start to feel the count down (power left, rather than power used).

For us humans, we could associate it with energy left before sleep, decreasing account balance until next pay day, work days left until project end, pages left until book complete.

I do however like the idea of 711 opportunities to make cool things this year though.

Re: Swatch Internet Time

#80

Post by kybernetikos »

lionhearted wrote: post #74

Ever since I heard about this, it became an exciting idea to me. 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day is just a mess for doing math and analyzing how long things take and what of our life they make up. Eliminate all the timezone conversion nonsense and you've got another huge plus... the time system will eventually change, sooner or later. Coordinating the change will be difficult, but it'…

Actually, I don't think you can have a sensible humane time and a sensible scientific time measure use the same unit. For science you want every hour to be just like every other hour. For people, it's probably way more important that an hour is a fixed proportion of a solar day. I think it's best to just leave the scientists with second and strike out on our own for humane time.

I also have a time system that eliminates timezone conversion nonsense by being based around UTC, however to make that feel a bit more 'humane', I rotate the clock face so that local solar midday is always at the top of the face and local solar midnight is always at the bottom. You can see it here http://kybernetikos.github.io/UIT/ if you're interested.

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