Swatch Internet Time • Hacker News Board

Re: Swatch Internet Time

#101

Post by JadeNB » Mon, Jan 13, 2014, 3:15 PM UTC

pedalpete wrote: post #56

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.

Beats time is no more 'digital' than the 24-hour day. It's 10 base which makes it easier for us to calculate, and without time zones, makes it easier to communicate around the world as we become more global. I think maybe Swatch gave up to early on this? It could have just been another measurement on their watches. Not the main one, but secondary. There's no way this was going to be an overnight change.

> Beats time is no more 'digital' than the 24-hour day. It's 10 base which makes it easier for us to calculate, and without time zones, makes it easier to communicate around the world as we become more global.

But 'digital' literally means base-10 (as in, like the digits on your hands), so in what sense is it not digital?

Re: Swatch Internet Time

#102

Post by JadeNB » Mon, Jan 13, 2014, 3:19 PM UTC

philh wrote: post #50

ComSubVie wrote: post #17

Lots of things would be easier if everybody uses the same time. It could stay the 24h/day time format, but timezones are a pain - I always have to recalculate them for local time. Why couldn't everybody work with UTC? And by the way: when will we finally get rid of the daylight savings time?!?

If I say something like "I had to catch a 6am flight", that means something to you without knowing what time zone I'm in. Absolute and relative times are both useful.

> If I say something like "I had to catch a 6am flight", that means something to you without knowing what time zone I'm in.

But it's really meaningful only in the sense that it's early morning, so that the same information could be conveyed by saying "I had to catch an early-morning flight." (More precise information than that could always be conveyed: "I had to catch a flight 1 hour before sunrise", or whatever.)

Re: Swatch Internet Time

#103

Post by Aloha » Mon, Jan 13, 2014, 10:35 PM UTC

joezydeco wrote: post #100

Aloha wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you looked at the map for the IDL? http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Internati... That not jiggered by politics at all.

I thought we were talking about the "arbitrary" choice of Longitude 0. What's the political (and not economic) basis for the later IDL modifications?

That fails to make the first choice any less arbitrary - the choice was made to line up with existing sea charts - which of course used the Greenwich as 0 - but Greenwich as 0 was an arbitrary choice in the first place - not all arbitrary choices are bad ones, that was the crux of my argument in the first place.