Anyone heard about this?

Swatch decided to make meeting on the Internet a bit easier by introducing a new time concept: Instead of 24 hours, you have 1000 ".beats". One .beat is thus 1.44 min or 1 min 26.4 sec.

(A small digression: In Norwegian, we have a word for 24 hours. A day is called "dag", usually referring to the time we spend awake, but 24 hours is called "døgn" (doegn). Someone should invent such a word in English, too.)

This new time, called Internet Time (IT) is the same all over the world, regardless of time zones. The meridian is located in Biel, the Swiss home town of Swatch, and thus called Biel Mean Time (BMT). The notation is an "@" followed by three digits. 12 midnight in Biel is written @000, 12 noon is @500. And then it's also @500 all over the rest of the world.

The advantage of this becomes apparent when you want to make an appointment in, for example, RinkChat. Instead of saying "I'll be back around 9 pm EST tomorrow," you'll say "Ill be back around @125 tomorrow." Instead of calculating how many hours difference there is between their own time zone and EST and doing a whole lot of addition/subtraction in their head, everyone instantly knows how many .beats will pass before you return.

You'll still have to do some calculation to convert the .beats to hours and minutes, but it'll be easier with practice, and the calculation will be the same regardless of where you and the other person are located.

An hour is about 40 .beats (41.67).

100 .beats is about two and a half hours (2 hrs 24 min).

One thing IT is not very good at, since it's a global time, is showing what time of day it is where you are located. If you say "I'm in NY, and it's @500", you'll know that it's high noon in Biel, Switzerland, but you'll not have a very clear idea of whether it's morning or evening in NY without doing some extra thinking back and forth between Biel and NY. So we'll still need standard time. "I'm in NY, and it's 6:00 am" will surely give you the idea that it's early in the morning there.

IT is a new, unusual and somewhat difficult concept to grasp right away, but I think it'll be quite useful when it starts to "settle in" in everybody's real life. You get watches, small PC/Mac system extensions and even mobile phones capable of showing IT. The snowball has started rolling.


Trav"just into enlightenment of the public nowadays"holt