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Swatch Internet Time

en.wikipedia.org

61 pointsredbell39 comments

Back then swatch really blew it by not synching the zero with UTC. If the days had been UTC based, this might have taken off. This way, it was just a joke and that’s why it died quickly.

It was also not even a round number of “beats” off if UTC, it was like UTC+1 so midnight UTC was like @41.67

I suspect it was intentionally trying to be free from any association/baggage connected to traditional time. Since the 'beat' time has no relation to anything physical/relate-able other than day-length, why bother keeping the baggage of UTC?

Ultimately Swatch Internet Time is tied to UTC, since it's Zurich time and not universal or entirely disconnected from the past.

If the time had been entirely separate or arbitrary that argument would hold, but the time was a normal "24 hour clock" that synced up to the standard day rotation, but centered on Zurich.

Because of that, the choice not to use UTC, but instead to UTC+1 meant that to do a calculation of UTC, which is the standard time measurement for earth, you had to subtract 41.6 beats, which was silly.

I vaguely recall there being a project that essentially used the Swatch algorithm, but switched to UTC, and removed the Swatch name for trademark reasons.

I wish I could find it now, since it did exactly what we're discussing.

maybe you're thinking of sensor watch ? it's beat watch face seems to be set to whatever timezone you configure which defaults to UTC :

https://github.com/joeycastillo/Sensor-Watch/blob/main/movem...

To me, the issue is that you can’t divide days and years evenly in the way that one would want to with metric time, so you haven’t achieved true metric time. You’ve just achieved even 1,000 even units within a single day, so it’s not worth the inconvenience.

One of my first experience with open source was an old OSX app that put the Swatch time into the menubar. But it didn't work on my Mac for some reason so I downloaded the source code and Xcode then I was tinkering around (not sure I knew what I was doing) and managed to compile it and run it successfully.

Internet Time from Yellosoft https://web.archive.org/web/20080509010856/http://yellosoft....

Found a screenshot, it was a dead simple app https://i.imgur.com/yHlAlZY.jpeg

I think I still have the source code somewhere even though the original Github repo is gone. I might reupload it.

I actually have it on my Apple watch and use it with some of my international friends.

Can you link app?

It being totally uncorrelated to the standard time format makes it inconvenient/unintuitive, but it does mean it never gets misinterpreted as local time, which sometimes happens when UTC is used. interesting.

also interesting to see it find its niche use in an MMO

A long time ago, there was a good writeup of criticism of this, but I don't see it linked from the Wikipedia page, and can't immediately find it.

You may be thinking of "So You Want To Abolish Timezones" [1]. It's not specifically about .beat time, but it has a pretty thorough explanation of why a universal time would be terrible (specifically, worse than timezones) for day-to-day communication

1: https://qntm.org/abolish

Most who have lived overseas will have had experience with relatives or friends calling at ungodly hours because they forgot about the different time zone, made a mistake, or simply weren't aware to begin with. A universal standard time wouldn't change that, people who care not to wake you up would still need to remember the conversion or look it up just like they do now.

It's a nonsense argument against a unified time zone. It's pretty much guaranteed to happen sooner or later, it just makes sense as globalization progresses, communication is instant and global and the world grows closer and closer.

It's not guaranteed, because McDonald's has to stop serving breakfast sometime. Whatever they choose becomes the defacto local time zone. And so, what have you saved over just using UTC when you need to talk to someone on the other side of the world?

You can still have McDonald's Tokyo open at a different time than McDonald's London. Just have everyone label their opening and closing times in UTC and be done with it.

So, the way it works now?

"I'm in Berlin, my working hours are 7:00 UTC to 15:00 UTC, and I'll be reachable until 20:00 UTC".

Arguably, without timezones, it's much harder to figure out when its daylight in a particular region, so when someone should be reachable.

"Well it's 06:40 UTC, but what time does the sun rise in New York? Has the sun set in Bangkok?". Meanwhile having googled that it's 02:40 AM in NY means I can be assume a normal-working person would be asleep at this time.

If you know someone in a different time zone the first thing you establish is when it's ok to call. Nobody cares about sunlight. There are more important things like when do they work, when do they get home etc.

> Nobody cares about sunlight.

Perhaps that's cultural. Most people in my social circles care quite a bit about sunlight. At home, the evening routines that we do with our children are based on a combination of season and sunrise/sunset. I find it somewhat surprising in fact that this is not at least partly the case for others, excepting of course people that work 3-11 or 11-7 or what have you.

I didn't mean people don't care about sunlight in general, of course they do. Just that people don't consider it when phoning someone in a different time zone. If I'm contacting someone in a different time zone I just think "It's before 11:00 so I can ring them" not "it's daylight there so I can/cannot ring them".

Thanks, but the writeup I'm thinking of was contemporary with the Swatch Beats time, and specifically about it. I guess it was likely a student page at MIT or some other university, so it might no longer exist.

Interesting observations...

1 hour is 41.6 'beats' (Round to 42, the answer to the universe)

Unrelated to the article, but apropos to the discussion:

Why is a second one second long? (How should one divide a DAY?)

This is entirely an informal hypothesis of mine so I'd like to lay it out somewhere and this is as good a place as any.

Timekeeping probably started with passive mechanisms, sundials. Very imprecise across the year, and there's a need to divide the time into useful segments. Humans happen to have 4 fingers and 1 thumb per hand, or 10 digits across both hands. However if half of something is considered a given natural sub-division, the only prime factors of 10 are 5 (and 2, which is ignored for this). Yet 12 usefully has prime factors of 2, 2, and 3 which allow for far more combinations. Additionally the five fingers on any given hand can align between the marks on either side of the noon point on the dial.

Mechanical clocks can have a face that covers the 12 day and 12 night hours, time reused, and a very imprecise mechanism. Gear ratios of 2 and 3 are probably easy to manufacture.

Metal and machine technology improves to the point that another hand can be added to divide the clock. At this point it'd be nice to add a prime factor of 5, and one ratio set to do so might be annoying but isn't too economical to add. Thus the hour can be divided by 2, 2, 3, and 5 for 60 min. Further, for the highest end models with the most precision timekeeping it is possible to make one more set of the same gears and add a third (or 'second' precision) hand.

Thus my hypothesis, a rough logical outline of how the number of hours in the day may have been selected, and how that lead to the duration of a second as we know it.

I wonder if a more universal size / duration scalar can be selected for SI-2 values if we ever leave Earth and thus have reasonable reason to want numbers that are more convenient to work with than a day being 83400 units long.

The Sumerians and Babylonians used base 60 numbering (probably for its divisibility). That led to our time system (also angle measurement)

While trying to consider why they might have selected 60 I started to wonder where the prime factors went, or rather might have come from; since it's already clear why they were useful for divisions.

Dividing a circle into quadrants consumes 2 and 2, and is similar to folding. Similarly 3 (like the thirds letter for envelope technique) could be the next granularity of folding. Finally the 5 is short enough that some straw or string bent enough times to divide it into fifths could approximate sufficiently useful precision.

What we really should start to think about is the Interplanetary Time and how to handle time properly across different planets and moons in our system, namely Mars and Moon, as there's extensive robotic presence already and soon human colony, hopefully.

I also think it’s interesting to build more concise language around how speed/gravity impacts time. It might be nice to assume a central reference point such as London and say “This probe experienced 1000 days, but 1010 days passed in London” with shorthand similar to current timezone notation.

Oh that's easy, you give up because of relativistic effects and transmission time. :p

Or anyway, you give up asking questions like "It's a nice morning here on Earth, I wonder if now is a good time to send a hollow message to Europa station?"

I think it is too early to spend much time thinking about time standards for Mars/etc, because whatever we may cook up now, by the time humans actually get there, those humans may discover that what we thought they would need isn’t what they actually need

Every watch everywhere displays 2 times: local solar time (with time zones) and UTC. Earth too. After a while people get used to UTC and we can have global time.

Mars has had a prime meridian longer than the earth has, and I think most people just take the L on not being able to divide each sol evenly into hours.

Anyone who's worked with hardware that's on mars runs on mars time already, so they can make the most of when the sun's up there.

Related kind of thing recently:

White House wants Moon to have its own time zone, Coordinated Lunar Time (CLT)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39916102

Hopefully we get it done before the French get involved, otherwise it'll end up being LTC.

Can anyone find more information about the satellite "Sputnik-99" aka "Beatnik"? Specifically, which ham radio frequencies were they trying to (ab)use? This Wikipedia article is all I can find, repeated a few different times in various places on the internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_99

I had one of these monstrosities. V1 even. I loved it. Its hard to describe how big and heavy these things were.

I literally never used the beat time, because it was completely useless.

But I felt prepared for the emergence of the new internet time zone the second anyone else started using it.

I loved mine too, and thought you were exaggerating about how big and heavy they were, but I saw a photo and wow, they were ugly as hell as well! I forgot about that, I can't believe I liked this.

I had a .beats watch and found it never really achieved its aim of abstracting timezones — I’d wake up at @895 and head to bed at @580. I’d cross the 1000 boundary each day, which did nothing but highlight the international timezone difference.

I remember flying from Sydney to London and seeing big clocks with Swatch Internet Time in both cities. It seemed both silly and kind of cool at the same time.

Some more discussion 2 years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32948420

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Swatch Internet Time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32948420 - Sept 2022 (48 comments)

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)

It’s time to revive .beats, the Swatch Internet Time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8015210 - July 2014 (5 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)

Others?

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