(2024-07-01) Time needs to be reformed
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As much as I love watches, I can't help thinking about how imperfect our
overall system to display time and dates is. Some efforts to fix both appear
in the world from time to time. I was reminded of this topic by seeing the
article about the "Swatch Internet Time" when the normal (24-hour) day is
just divided into its 1/1000th parts called .beats, and those .beats can
optionally be divided into 1/100 units for greater precision. All this
relative to Swiss standard (non-DST) time, not UTC. Some digital Swatches in
late 1990s and early 2000s were displaying both traditional time and this
"Internet time", which by the way, was deemed convenient by some
international gamers of that period.
The approach is rather radical, and I'll return to something similar at the
end of the post. But let's start from the bottom up with what we can do to
the traditional timekeeping. The first and most obvious thing we can get rid
of is DST, daylight saving time. Nowadays, it's no longer justified to make
people switch their life rhythms every half a year. Just let them live in
the time natural for the area. Those who need to fully utilize the daylight
will do so anyway, without any artificial limitations, and those who don't,
will live healthier when those limitations are lifted. For now, I feel that
DST is more of a political decision than a really useful one. And with more
and more work being done remotely, different areas can just coordinate via
UTC if they need to.
Which brings me to the next point: abolish timezones. Completely. Timezones
are an absolute mess, and you can look at the map to see why. The opponents
of this idea might say that it would totally twist the way of how we
perceive time. So what? We've evolved for a reason. If you live somewhere
where the morning starts at 21:00 UTC, so be it. It's not as big of a
problem as you might think. Those who live and work close to the poles
(Northern or Southern) already have the nights and days longer than anyone
else is used to, yet their clocks and watches count the same 24 hours as for
the rest of us. So the connection between the sunlight part of the day and
the time displayed on your clocks can be broken far more easily, especially
if you travel a lot or work near the poles like I mentioned.
And yes, please also get rid of that stupid AM/PM notion and stop calling
24-hour time designations "military time". It's not about the military, it's
the only actual time we have right now. Newsflash: we don't have 12 hours in
a day, we have 24. The reasons to divide it in half are purely historical
and don't make much sense in the modern world.
Finally, let's talk about the calendar. It's a mess almost the size of the
timezone mess. Just like the length of the day is essentially determined by
one Earth rotation about its axis, a year is determined by one revolution of
Earth around the Sun. Throughout the history, people tried to simplify this
number as far as they could, but it fought back. Essentially, what I would
propose is to set the day and the week as the baseline and, given that the
notion of week already is culturally universal, abolish the concept of
months altogether and settle on something like the "ISO week calendar" with
the year always starting on Monday and having an integer amount of weeks
every single time. Which means, most years would have 364 days (52 weeks)
and once per 8 years there would be one with 371 (53 weeks). When enough
days from the would-be leap years have accumulated, another 53-week year is
inserted into the next cycle. That would, however, happen once per 28 years
on average. Anyway, I would also change the year numbering as well, but
that's definitely a discussion for another time.
But back to the beginning of the post with the Swatch's radical proposal.
Like, is there any better way to divide the day than into the traditional
hours, minutes and seconds? I think there is but it would take a lot of
getting used to in comparison to any calendar reform. While I also like the
initial .beats idea (except I'd use UTC as the baseline as opposed to CET),
I have heard another proposal recently. In essence, the day is divided into
3 parts (8 hours each) and each of those parts is divided into 256 units.
The size of one unit turns out to be 1.875 of a standard minute. And, when
displayed in hex, not only does it take only 2 indicator positions (within a
part), but also the 0x10 value maps to 30 standard minutes. So, the first
hex digit essentially measures 30-minute intervals, and the second one
measures 1/16 parts of those intervals. If we go even further, we can reduce
each "day" to 8 (standard) hours and thus completely get rid of the sunlight
dependency when it comes to time measurement, which would justify UTC
unification even better. And one week would have 21 of these neodays instead
of 7 standard days. And, e.g. the date and time I'm writing this paragraph
would be described not as 2024-07-01 08:25 UTC, but 2024-27-02-0D (27th
week, 2nd neoday, time unit 13). If we need greater precision, we can
further divide those units into 256 parts again, but I think you get the
idea. Kudos to wd for sharing this interesting proposal with me.
