Decimal Time and Internet Time

in #decimaltime7 years ago


"The main advantage of a decimal time system is that, since the base used to divide the time is the same as the one used to represent it, the whole time representation can be handled as a single string. Therefore, it becomes simpler to interpret a timestamp and to perform conversions. For instance, 1:23:00 is 1 decimal hour and 23 decimal minutes, or 1.23 hours, or 123 minutes; 3 hours is 300 minutes or 30,000 seconds. This property also makes it straightforward to represent a timestamp as a fractional day, so that 2017-09-20.534 can be interpreted as five decimal hours and 34 decimal minutes after the start of that day, or 0.534 (53.4%) of a day through that day. It also adjusts well to digital time representation using epochs, in that the internal time representation can be used directly both for computation and for user-facing display." - Wikipedia

"In 1788, Claude Boniface Collignon proposed dividing the day into 10 hours or 1000 minutes, each new hour into 100 minutes, each new minute into 1000 seconds, and each new second into 1000 tierces (Latin for "third"). The distance the twilight zone travels in one such tierce at the equator, which would be one-billionth of the circumference of the earth, would be a new unit of length, provisionally called a half-handbreadth, equal to four modern centimetres. Further, the new tierce would be divided into 1000 quatierces, which he called "microscopic points of time". He also suggested a week of 10 days and dividing the year into 10 "solar months".

Decimal time was officially introduced during the French Revolution. Jean-Charles de Borda made a proposal for decimal time on November 5, 1792."- Wikipedia

Minutes and hours would be longer and seconds a little shorter. It's possible to install an app for a smartphone to see this time - it's called Decimal Clock. SillyClocks is a free program for computers, it also has Internet time and many other clocks.

Internet Time:

"Swatch Internet Time (or beat time) is a decimal time concept introduced in 1998 by the Swatch corporation as part of their marketing campaign for their line of "Beat" watches.

Instead of hours and minutes, the mean solar day is divided into 1000 parts called ".beats". Each .beat is equal to one decimal minute in the French Revolutionary decimal time system and lasts 1 minute and 26.4 seconds (86.4 seconds) in standard time. Times are notated as a 3-digit number out of 1000 after midnight. So, @248 would indicate a time 248 .beats after midnight representing 248/1000 of a day, just over 5 hours and 57 minutes.

There are no time zones in Swatch Internet Time; instead, the new time scale of Biel Meantime (BMT) is used, based on Swatch's headquarters in Biel, Switzerland and equivalent to Central European Time, West Africa Time, and UTC+01. Unlike civil time in Switzerland and many other countries, Swatch Internet Time does not observe daylight saving time." - Wikipedia

Too bad Internet time is not used a lot anymore because Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is used, that's based on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). But it's possible to install an app for a smartphone, that's called Internet Time.
Swatch Touch Zero 2 smart watch has an Internet time mode. But their watches are not very popular, they have strange designs.
References: Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time#Decimal_hours
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time