This attempt at a timezone-less Internet time might’ve succeeded if they had been a li’l bit better at openwashing. It was too blatantly their corporate thing, with the day starting not based on anything astronomical but on Swiss standard time (i.e. where the sun is gonna be over Greenwich an hour later). To promote their own factory.
If they had tied it to 刻 time notches or to the revolutionary calendar, but emphasized the new timezoneless nature of “beats”, we coulda had something great. The original pitch that this wasn’t meant to replace normal time but just used as a separate tool to coordinate stuff online was good. Maybe we’d have moved over entirely after a while. And they woulda been first to market, which would’ve been even more appealing if it had been (or looked like) more of an “open standard”.
The fact that they also illegally planned to broadcast over ham bands was also a pretty bad nail in the coffin, along with the hypermedialized and dorky overuse of @ and dot prefixes.
As many 180˚s and life-changing, opinion mind blows as I’ve experienced in my life as an old, this isn’t one of them because I had the exact same take then: really liked it and felt it was a missed opportunity squandered by the same two criticism I have now: The UTC+1 thing is dumb (it’s not that big of a deal—and great for Swedes) and it’s too blatantly corporate and the “.beat” (dot beat) unit name is embarrassing. I was a teenager, more critical and less gullible than I am now. We all saw that it was just a dorky watch ad campaign, quickly abandoned by its own makers.
Meanwhile, here we are in a mess of timezones and DST and I have to say “it starts in three hours” instead of being able to list a specific time. Or specific day, even, since current clock system needs a date line which wouldn’t be necessary with decimal time. (On the other hand, it would mean that having both systems in parallel would be difficult west of the date line and east of whatever point becomes the “new Greenwich”.)
The fact that it didn’t map up to normal minutes & hours was kind of an advantage because it helped disambiguate those time stamps from normal timestamps. @500 didn’t look like 12:00.
I wish the amount of seconds in a day would’ve matched the old system so that a second is still a second. It takes five “beats” to make an integer amount of seconds: 432 seconds. But maybe we can work with that. Or 864 seconds for ten beats or 86.4 seconds for one beat. So we have a timekeeping system based on beats and seconds.
First of all, it’s not called “Biel” Mean Time any more because we don’t want to promote Swatch. It’s the Basic Mediterranean Time. A geographical feature not ruled by a single polity. Or, Boring Meridian Time if you want to go even neutraler. Still compatible with the old beats; it’s just a name change not a spec change. Which sucks for people near the dateline. That was an advantage of UTC over BMT; it placed the dateline in a less populated area, which becomes extra important in a no-timezones system. But all in the name of compatible with the original beats.
Second of all, there are two display modes. First is the traditional
beats view (a.k.a. mode 1) that still looks like @255, an at sign
and the number of beats since midnight BMT. The same beats you know
and love, no need to upgrade any old clocks, no need to trot out
xkcd://927, it still works.
Then mode 2 is the decabeats view which shows the current decabeat and
the number of seconds since that decabeat began. One decabeat,
abbreviated 刻 is ten beats which is 864 seconds. So @255 is
25#432 (no @ sign, separated by a # character). That example means
it’s 432 seconds since @250. Good for cooking and sports and for
conversion between traditional time keeping and decabeats, since each
h:m:s timestamp has an integer 刻#s equivalent and vice versa. Unlike
traditional beats which can’t represent exactly 12:06 for example, nor
can traditional h:m:s represent @11 without resorting to tenths of a
second.
Watches can combine both modes and that looks like this: 25.5#432.
They must not only show mode 2. If they can only show one mode, it
needs to be mode 1 or the combined mode. The .5 and the #432 are
redundant. Also they don’t tick up at the exact same time; only at
.5#432 and .0#0, twice per decabeat, creating a nice li’l
syncopation. Don’t just have 25#432 if there’s no way of showing
that last digit.
Mode one is still gonna be the main mode! It’s better to say 30 beats than 3 decabeats!
…of “decimal” time instead of base 60 time if you’re gonna have a base 864 number, isn’t that going from the ashes into the frying pan? The point is if we want to ditch time zones, one good way to do that is alongside a radically different time representation. And the optional seconds view make things more backwards compatible and is good when we need finer granularity. And coarser granularity: one decabeat is just under a a quarter of an hour and ergo four of them almost make an hour. (Although 41 beats is even closer.)
BMT either mode is a concise time-zone–independent representation that your attendees then can convert to their own local time in HH:MM:SS using apps or whatever. If that’s the only use for BMT, even if no-one actually tries to look at a BMT clock, that’s still valuable to me.
XXIIVV have their own proposal: Neralie time.
It’s this format 255:000, that’s the equivalent of what in BMT mode
2 would be 25#432. One thousand pulses in Neralie time is one
beat, and 625 pulses is 54 seconds. Their Neralie system preceded my
proposal by many years. I just didn’t know about it. It’s good that
they chose NNN:NNN with a colon infix because then there’s no
confusion with BMT mode 2 which uses a # infix nor with BMT mode 1
which uses the @ prefix.
So if there’s an event announced in BMT you can use your Neralie watch
to attend it! Especially since BMT mode 1 is the main mode. @255 in
BMT mode 1 is easy to understand for a Neralie user.
Any old analog watch already works with BMT: just look at the small hand (the hours hand) and know that one revolution is 500 beats.
And if the small hand has moved 12 “minutes” (2⅖ hours) that’s one hundred beats. Each “minute” (each fifth of an hour) that the short hand moves is 8⅓ beats. And six “minutes” on the short hand (1⅕ hours) is 50 beats and three “minutes” is 25 beats.
So only looking at the small watch hand it’s easy to see the beats go by.
The long hand (the minute hand) isn’t as useful but there’s a beautiful correspondence of sorts: each 12 minutes the long hand (the minute hand) moves is also 8⅓ beats.
So dividing the watch circle into fifths, each fifth being twelve “minutes”, has two purposes; it takes the short hand a hundred beats to move that distance and the long hand, it takes 8⅓ beats; the same time it takes the short hand to move 1 “minute”. A beat is very roughly one and a half minutes and more precisely it’s 1.44 minutes.
Warning: thanks to “time zones”, this division of the revolution into fifths doesn’t start at midnight/noon most places of the world. Only in the Boring Meridian it does that. So you might have to look at your watch sideways and imagine a new starting point for the short hand.
The seconds hand is great if your watch has one but then you’re in decabeat territory a.k.a. BMT mode 2! Good for precise timings like cooking, sports, speedrunning. Just count seconds normally. Each tick is one second, each rotation is 60 seconds, two rotations is 120 seconds, three is 180 seconds etc and your goal is 864 seconds which is one decabeat and 14⅖ rotations.
So let’s say you’re waiting for an event that starts at say @911 and all you have is your mom’s old analog watch. You can first learn to see whether you’re in the right half of the day or if you have to wait until the second revolution. The short hand does two revolutions in one day. Then okay you know it’s in the second revolution and it’s 411 beats into it so you know the short hand needs to have passed at least four fifths of the way around. @911 means the short hand should be past the 49th “minute”.
The unhelpful and confusing long hand doesn’t do much but can at least keep you company as you know the short hand will tick up one “minute” (8⅓ beats) each time the long hand moves a fifth around (12 minutes).
In old-school hh:mm time, a “step” for the short hand is a twelfth of the way around, five “minutes”, and indicates one hour, and a full rotiation of the long hand. Each of those five “minutes” is five minutes on the long hand, 7⅕ beats.
In BMT, a “step” for the short hand is a fifth of the way around, twelve “minutes”, and indicates 100 beats (and 2⅖ rotations of the long hand). Each of those twelve “minutes” is twelve minutes on the long hand, 8⅓ beats.
So their mental model is: long goes one rotation = short goes one click which is five “minutes”. This is an hour to them.
To us in the BMT world, long goes one fifth = short clicks one “minute”, and after twelve such clicks we’ve had hundred beats.
You can see how the old-school clock had it backwards; a twelfth for five where we have a fifth for twelve.
Oh this is great, the long hand is the useful one in mode 2 because roughly one quarter rotation (14⅖ minutes) is a decabeat! And then a second is a second is a second. Yeah, yeah, calling 14⅖ minutes a quarter is a li’l loosy-goosy but if you want precision, mode 2 is still your friend since every mode 2 time has an integer scaled mapping to hh:mm:ss! We want old tech to be useful in the solarpunk world.♥︎