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Swatch Internet Time

timeanddate.com

97 pointsghgr48 comments

Great Twitter thread on how weird our time keeping systems are:

https://twitter.com/foone/status/1572260363764400129

I laughed at the religious leader/no universal religion bit.

Something these threads don't consider is if the aliens land somewhere else they could end up encountering a different calendar depending on who they talk to. In Japan the era changes with the reigning emperor, so while they follow Gregorian for International Business and Holidays, locally when the Emperor came to power is still often referenced for the purposes of counting years.

Here's a primer: https://homepages.cwi.nl/~aeb/go/misc/jdate.html

This is my favorite JavaDoc https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/17/docs/api/java.base...

Btw. - and maybe this is mentioned somewhere in the twitter thread - the reason we add the extra day to February is because that used to be the last month of the year, hence months september, october, november, december having names that reference 7, 8, 9, 10.

My first interaction with this was with Phantasy Star Online on the Nintendo GameCube. (Yes, it did have online connectivity!)

PSO would display the current time in .beats - a concept I thought was amazing at the time, showing the same time for everyone in an MMORPG made total sense. Sadly that's the only real-life application I remember seeing of it.

I also had a .beat watch and absolutely loved it. I even had the program that changed your Windows system clock to use .beat time. I was convinced they were onto something huge and it was going to be the future... it was fun while it lasted.

I still think the way we do time/date is archaic and ridiculous, and absolutely ready to be replaced with something better.

I wish someone would write some "watch faces" for smart watches to include/use .beat time.

This seems like a super simple way to spread the idea and have it available to anyone.. put it on phones and smartwatches...

Internet Time is what sent me down the decimal time and calendar reform rabbit holes!

One idea I wrote up was to divide the year and the day in a consistent way, rather than having separate reform proposals for the clock and the calendar.

https://aravind.rs/clock

(It relies on the coincidence that the ratio of the length of the year to day, 365.2422, can be very, very closely approximated by the fraction 46,751 / 128.)

Year to day is 365 + 1/4 - 1/100 + 1/400 = 365.2425, is it not?

The 365 + 1/4 - 1/100 + 1/400 is an approximation, not an exact value. The best value* is 365.24217. 46,751 / 128 is actually a better approximation.

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

* This is the ratio of the mean tropical year to the mean solar day; We use means because both the length of the day and the length of the year vary.

The period of rotation (day) of the planet varies due to tidal friction (the moon "drags" oceans against the earth's rotation) and other shifts in mass (e.g. earthquakes) that change the moment of inertia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second#Slowing_rotation_o...

The period of revolution (year) varies mainly due to precession of the equinoxes.

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

A Gregorian calendar year is 365.2425 days, yes. A solar year of one equinox/solstice cycle is currently 365.2422 days.

Decimal Internet Time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32045573 - July 2022 (1 comment)

Swatch Internet Time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31642887 - June 2022 (2 comments)

Swatch Internet Time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29564119 - Dec 2021 (2 comments)

Swatch Internet Time (or .beat time) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26671343 - April 2021 (2 comments)

Swatch Internet Time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24348915 - Sept 2020 (2 comments)

Swatch Internet Time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22528768 - March 2020 (1 comment)

Swatch Internet Time (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16307725 - Feb 2018 (78 comments)

Swatch Internet Time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7046178 - Jan 2014 (96 comments)

Ask HN: Why did this idea of Internet Time not work? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=520004 - March 2009 (28 comments)

The Swatch home page still shows beats (upper left)

https://www.swatch.com/en-us/homepage

I implemented it in Javascript for this page https://gerikson.com/cgi-bin/eternal.cgi [1], but it's off from the official page by 1

[1] https://github.com/gustafe/EternalTime/blob/master/templates...

PHP still has support for it in its date formatting functions ("B"): https://www.php.net/manual/en/datetime.format.php

Came here to say this. I fell down this rabbit hole years ago trying to figure out what they were.

Outside of the timezone-agnostic advantages, .beats are about what I'd expect single notable tasks to resolve to and seem to be a great notation for that purpose. Retrieving an item I know the rough location of might take 1 .beat, disinfecting a kitchen countertop might take 2 .beats, resolving a P1 service outage I know the cause of might take 4 .beats to correct, verify and push into production. That ease is what makes it a viable replacement for me.

So after widespread adoption it could be used effectively as second nature and improve communication without the wasted thought cycles it takes to consider seconds/minutes, just to end up supplying poor ETAs. For example, from, "just a second," really meaning anywhere between 5 and 300 seconds, to a moment being hopefully less than 15 minutes, instead we hear, "need to grab something from the garage, back in... 2 beats," to mean around 3 minutes and parallelise our own movements appropriately.

With that edge, I'm optimistic that .beats wouldn't become arbitrary language after a few decades, that its use would be more thoughtful, but I'm ignorant to the psychology.

If decimal time of any description were to catch on, all systems should be updated, right down to the instruments requiring microsecond accuracy. Similarly, while we propose reformed timekeeping, can we decimalise the calendar year? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_reform

I think you are giving this too much credit. A .beat is a scalar multiple of a minute. Retrieving an item takes one minute, disinfecting a counter takes three minutes, resolving a P1 takes five minutes.

The issue is really the imprecision of language IMO.

Human processes are imprecise. Our language just reflects this. You could improve the language to the point that no one would use it, but this wouldn't have any actual impact on the "issue."

Take, for example, the way people actually use SI. The distance to the sun, most accurately is "93 gigameters." Yet, everyone says "93 million km." Why?

If you're just going to drop the accuracy, then you should switch bases to reflect this; however, people want language that matches their everyday experiences and not one that conveys a lot of additional information through the units themselves.

Language is a tool to express ourselves, not to constrain our expressions.

> Outside of the timezone-agnostic advantages

Timezones are not agnostic to clocks, though. There are timezones that are offset by 30 minutes or 45 minutes. You'd have to convert those to "beat" differences and then absorb them into this system.

I'm so annoyed that they based their zero on Biel time (GMT+1) instead of on GMT itself.

That cemented it as a joke rather than a serious attempt at universal time, and I think poisoned the idea in a lot of places that it otherwise might've taken off.

I did a web design project in college where I made a combination reminder / clock app based around internet beats. You could mark down when you started working on something and then set down reminders for when things needed to happen, in relative minute or best measurements, and you'd get an automatic countdown that would repeat every day, all backed by Firebase so I could share it between my desktop and my phone. It's probably not around anymore, but it was really fun to use for the few weeks where I was using it full time to help keep track of things.

I did use a slightly different implementation of beats compared to Swatch's though—I found it more elegant and natural to base the "day" of the beats on the UTC timezone, rather then the GMT+1 timezone that Swatch chose for themselves to represent their headquarters in Switzerland.

Why does this not surprise me that you'd do something like the above?

Why was UTC more convenient though?

(also good to see you active online)

Easier to write (new Date() - new Date(d.getUTCFullYear(), d.getUTCMonth(), d.getUTCDate())) / (24 * 60 * 60) and not have to worry about timezones :)

I suppose also means this is some kind of Free Decimal Time, vs Swatch Time, which has the hint of proprietary. Thx.

I had a "beats" watch in the late 90s. Something with "internet" in the name was super appealing to me, when I knew I couldn’t have the actual internet with me.

I guess back then, as a teenager I didn’t even know how much of a nerd I was :-)

Was it a secondary mode on the watch so you could tell the actual time?

Yup. Like on a casio. If I remember correctly the modes were normal time, stop watch, timer and .beats

Clearly we should all just use unixtime with seconds from midnight if you want a relative local time of day

SI units can then be used instead of minutes, days, etc

Makes much more sense

https://www.decimalisetime.org/

Needs a progress bar.

I quite like the idea of decimal time [1] and the swatch proposal uses the most simple implementation with only 1 unit for a whole day (1000 beats in a day). The day-to-day practical implications of having only one unit instead of the usual three (24 hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds) are hard to gauge. It might be more difficult to communicate approximate points in time: 525 vs. half past twelve.

Then again these conventions are social and with wide-adoption should become second nature too. But as the French Revolution showed, overcoming the network effect of commonly used time-standards is near impossible.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time

I like the concept from htime.

https://htime.io/

I love seeing .beats pop up occasionally; it's always fun. And every time I link to this article: [So You Want To Abolish Time Zones](https://qntm.org/abolish)

This article seems to assume the removal of time zones did not come with any other changes to human behaviour to accommodate these things...

Early 90s, I got a Swatch — The Beep, which was basically a numeric pager in a watch. Needless to say that it was the ultimate flex in school. Vintage ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEMwc70iCKM

“Metric” sounds great on the surface, but there is a reason that 12-based numbers are often used, especially in the old days. They are very easy to split into halves, thirds, quarters, and sixths, without rounding.

I might be the only Swatch employee on HN, so I believe this deserves my comment. The concept of Internet Time is genius. Swatch even wanted to send a satellite to space and with that be able to synchronize the time on all the watches.

As others have said, I also think the issue was basing the time on Biel (GMT+1). If it had been done on another timezone, it would have worked better.

Mr. Hayek (the Swatch founder) was a genius ahead of his time.

I love Swatch Internet Time - as others have mentioned, I used it constantly via Phantasy Star Online on Dreamcast. I used the .beats watchface on my Pebble until it died, too.

A second run at .beats with a clear mind and an open standard could nail down the awkward parts (Set 000 as midnight UTC for example) but I doubt there is the motivation to try the exercise again.

What does the internet have to do with it?

A single consistent way to synchronize time is handy when you don't know where the other party is, and it's rare to not know the other party of a conversation is without the internet.

I remember running the official app in Windows 95/98 that ran in the system tray showing Internet Time. I can't say that I used it once for anything ever, but I really liked the novelty of it back then.

Hm, but what calendar does it pair best with? French Republican, for maximal decimalization, or Discordian, for maximal weirdness?

I wonder how this time system would have dealt with things like leap seconds and Daylight Saving Time.

No DST, that wouldn't make sense on a single time zone system.

I haven't seen anything specific written about leap seconds, but I imagine you just have one beat a little longer than the others. Realistically, you're probably keeping unixtime under the covers and translating.

Swatch Internet Time has no timezones or conversions - it's always the same time everywhere - so DST doesn't and can't exist in this time system.

It's an obfuscated way of telling people to use the same timezone.

I don’t understand the dot in “.beats”. How is that pronounced? “Dot-beats”?

And it really makes it awkward to add in an English sentence, especially if you use it at the start. .beats could just be “beats”.

Clearly, you don't understand the .com boom.

"dot beats trademark"

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