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From the official Swatch page:
> The BMT Meridian was inaugurated on October 23rd, 1998, in the presence of Nicholas Negroponte, founder and director of the media laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
That’s an oddly-phrased sentence. I wonder what “in the presence of” looks like.
This was a missed opportunity to call it netric time.
Wait is that available? Best clock would be UTC + decimal time anyway, netric time is a good name for that. Decimal time: you divide the day into powers of tens, a 'deci' is 2.4 hours, a 'centi' is 14.4 ~= 15 minutes, a 'mili' is 1.44 minutes ~= 86 seconds and so on. Great system with convenient lengths, and easy to add duration + date, and convert between different units.
Edit: Swatch internet time
Fun fact, PHP has built in support for Swatch Internet Time with it's "B" format token. https://www.php.net/manual/en/datetime.format.php
What a blast from the past. I added that!
I read the PHP docs and wondered "What in the heck is that?" before Googling it.
I’ve heard about it, from time to time. It’s interesting, but don’t see it going anywhere. From the official Swatch page: > The BMT Meridian was inaugurated on October 23rd, 1998, in the presence of Nicholas Negroponte, founder and director of the media laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That’s an oddly-phrased sentence. I wonder what “in the presence of” looks like.
That is what an artificial intelligence would say, unable to comprehend the existence of the physical world :-)
(I've also just finished reading the novel Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which revolves around a similar plot point, but it's aliens)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even UTC+-0 I have seen rarely. AoE seems more common, especially for deadlines
> Even UTC+-0 I have seen rarely Hover the timestamp here on HN and you'll see it at least once in your life time :) I'm guessing it's mostly developers, especially ones working internationally, who come across it every day. Others seem to prefer to convert between people's timezone, while we just send UTC+00:00 to each other.
It's actually a problem in these parts that it's not obvious to us whether a time is in UTC or local time. I've found so many things displayed in UTC that people have assumed is local time then summer comes around and everything is off by an hour.
I don't think global time would be a problem like many people suggest. If you're in US and talk to somebody in Australia, you will quickly develop an intuition that time @X is night (or whatever it happens to be) over there, just like our other intuitions about how many things (weather, season, how long are sunsets, etc.) are different in different places. Timezones are failing at all of their jobs. Getting time to c…
The GMT offset is zero, but it's important to note the difference especially when configuring servers to avoid nasty daylight savings surprises kicking in at at end of March.
There has been talk of moving to a +1 offset all year round for lighter evenings in winter, albeit at the cost of some very dark morning, but given we couldn't even manage Metrication without people still complaining 20 years later, I can't see it ever happening.
Since humans still prefer to work in daylight and sleep in darkness, even without timezones you still need to have extra information in addition to "what time is it" to figure out if Steve in Australia will be awake at @700 or asleep... Maybe when the nuclear winter makes it dark all the time, or forces us all to live underground, then we can abolish timezones.
related https://qntm.org/abolish
Since humans still prefer to work in daylight and sleep in darkness, even without timezones you still need to have extra information in addition to "what time is it" to figure out if Steve in Australia will be awake at @700 or asleep... Maybe when the nuclear winter makes it dark all the time, or forces us all to live underground, then we can abolish timezones.
I don't think global time would be a problem like many people suggest. If you're in US and talk to somebody in Australia, you will quickly develop an intuition that time @X is night (or whatever it happens to be) over there, just like our other intuitions about how many things (weather, season, how long are sunsets, etc.) are different in different places. Timezones are failing at all of their jobs. Getting time to c…
How does it handle leap seconds?