Hacker News Reader

Comment by SeoxyS | Hacker News Reader

I'm Swiss. Back in the day, the Swatch group had an experiment where they tried to invent a new unit for time. They came up with the `beat`, also known as Swatch Internet Time. The unit represented a 1000 beat cycle centered around midnight on the Swiss meridian, ie. UTC+1. There'd be no daylight savings time.

All in all, it's a really cool idea, and I owned a watch for many years that reported beat time, but it was essentially useless. This is perhaps the most gigantic of chicken-and-egg problems, the mere fact that it is currently useless ensures that it will forever be useless.

More at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

View on HN

Beats were actually used in a dreamcast game called Shenmue.

Talk about useless trivia.

I used to have a watch that gave beats. Totally useless other than annoying friends by constantly converting any meeting time into beats.

I think it will take colonising other planets before the world is ready for a new unit of time and at that point the whole concept of 'day' is kind of out the window.

Colonizers on new planets will probably still use minutes and hours because that's what they're used to culturally. Especially if they have to collaborate with people on Earth.

This Wikipedia artile about timekeeping on Mars is fun reading. The Mars rover operation teams used work schedules (and watches!) based on Martian time because they need to be available when the rover had daylight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timekeeping_on_Mars

Love the metric system. While stuff like this is cool it's too bad it'll never catch on.

There would also be no timezones. I have that watch, it's cool.

No, there will always be timezones, even if we call them something else. Even on swatch time, I still have to keep track of which one-hour window I can schedule a multi-continent conference call in, because my colleagues in New York aren't going to be in the office three hours before sunrise, no matter what their clocks say.

Also, with no timezones you lose the language to speak about time. Now "he usually gets up before 2pm" means one thing, and "gets up before 4am" means another. If you abolish timezones those statements become strongly location bound, to the extent where I imagine people would start to develop language based on local time, such as "he sleeps into the early afternoon".

The majority of people live each individual day inside one (perhaps two adjacent) timezone. The system should support that by far most common usecase.

> No, there will always be timezones, even if we call them something else. Even on swatch time, I still have to keep track of which one-hour window I can schedule a multi-continent conference call in,

Your missing the point. The fact that there are no timezones would mean everyone is on the same time, so it's much easier to schedule said hour. It makes coordination much easier.

mseebach 56 minutes ago | link

> Now "he usually gets up before 2pm" means one thing, and "gets up before 4am" means another.

It's still highly arbitrary. The only thing that would change is that the sun position per hour would change depending on where you are. I don't see the problem, honestly. The advantages of much easier global coordination would far outweigh this.

> The fact that there are no timezones would mean everyone is on the same time, so it's much easier to schedule said hour. It makes coordination much easier.

No, everybody would not be on the same hour. I would still have to apply location knowledge to know when colleagues in other time zones get to the office, are likely to be out for lunch and leave in the evening.

Example: It is now 13:00 in London. Let's pretend it's not Saturday, it's a perfectly good time for a catch-up chat, so I call my colleague in Silicon Valley, but he doesn't pick up. The fact that we might have decided that his watch should say 13:00 does not change the fact that he's probably just getting out of bed, as it's one hour and 40 minutes to sunrise there (or 6:00 with time zones applied).

> It's still highly arbitrary. The only thing that would change is that the sun position per hour would change depending on where you are.

But sun position is roughly how we organise our days. It's not like 2/3 of the worlds population is going to start sleeping through a significant portion of daylight hours to make global coordination easier.

Time is an abstraction of sun position to make coordination easier. Changing the abstraction doesn't change the thing it's an abstraction of - so in computer science terms, you could say you're making the abstraction leaky.

>No, everybody would not be on the same hour.

Yes they would. That's the whole point, which you still seem to miss completely. With a global coordinated time, you will no longer have to care whether someone is in New York, Tokyo, Berlin or Moscow (or has, for example, an irregular sleep schedule). The only information you need is "when is this person available", and that time will not change no matter where you are.

>It's not like 2/3 of the worlds population is going to start sleeping through a significant portion of daylight hours to make global coordination easier.

Where did I say that people would need to adjust their sleep schedule? I've said that "the sun rises at 6, peaks at 12 and sets at 19 hours" is completely arbitrary. We could just as well say that sunrise is at 0, noon at 6 and evening at 11. Or any other numbers, really. It doesn't matter.

>Time is an abstraction of sun position to make coordination easier.

It's not an abstraction over sun position, it's an abstraction over the availability of a person. The sun position is merely the means which we used to anchor that abstraction. This made sense in a period where the world of most people extended from between the next three towns to maybe their neighboring countries at the utter maximum. In a globalized world with near-instantaneous communication, this anchoring no longer makes sense, so we should choose another (still arbitrary) anchoring, but one that's the same for every single person on this planet.

Pretty much every argument I've ever heard against this is a status quo bias or an appeal to tradition, and your post is sadly no exception.

> Pretty much every argument I've ever heard against this is a status quo bias or an appeal to tradition, and your post is sadly no exception.

Status quo bias and appeal to tradition are only fallacious arguments if they stand on their own ("you proposal is bad because it's something new replacing something old"). I'm arguing that the benefit of the proposed change is in no way proportional to the suggested change, and since change has a cost, status quo is better.

Re. cost: Solar-anchored (roughly) 24 hour/day time is one of the few thing the entire world actually agrees on. And the vast, vast, vast majority of the people in this world have no cross-time zone dealings in their everyday lives. The sheer number of people who'd flat out refuse to adopt global time would alone make this project still-born.

> The only information you need is "when is this person available"

And that's the only information I need as it is today, and I have no trouble getting that information and keeping track of it. Yes, there is a single extra integer addition modulo 24 involved, but I just about deal with that.

Also, if your organisation is of a kind where even this is unacceptable, you're of course free to adopt a single time zone. The military ("Zulu time" = UTC+0) and airlines (they also run everything on UTC) does this.

Mind you, I'm entirely behind getting rid of DST. Had fun and games this week discovering which meetings are anchored in Europe and which in the US.

> I've said that "the sun rises at 6, peaks at 12 and sets at 19 hours" is completely arbitrary. We could just as well say that sunrise is at 0, noon at 6 and evening at 11. Or any other numbers, really. It doesn't matter.

It's not arbitrary, and it does matter - it's how it's been done since the beginning of time (put intended).

With timezones, there's two pieces of information that one needs to be aware of: the given time, and the offset from your local time.

Without timezones, the only information needed is the given time. Each party knows their local context, so everyone just deals with the absolute times.

The latter is only problematic if you're “cold calling”, a situation which in reality would probably not be that big of an issue (you might know that your colleagues in LA are likely to be out for lunch at around 7500 beats just as you might know they're out around 12 local time which is N your time).

…

The swatch time is neat; I at some point also made a quick http://decimalti.me (the difference is that it's 0'd on UTC and it's divided into 100 000 units, rather than the 1000 beats).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com