GOODIES TO GO! ™
November 15, 1999 — Newsletter #54
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Please visit https://www.htmlgoodies.com
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Greeting, Weekend Silicon Warriors,
Did you hear…
>Amazon is suing Barnes and Noble online over BN’s new
one-click ordering procedure. Amazon said they own the patent
on the one-click method of purchasing while BN claims Amazon
is just trying to set up a monopoly. The courts will have to
sort it all out. I didn’t know you could patent a click.
>And you thought eBay had some goofy stuff up for sale? Try
http://www.ronsangels.com/. Site owner Ron Harris is a fashion
photographer who will auction the ovarian eggs of fashion
models on his site for up to $150,000. Yep, you heard right.
Mom can be a model for a tidy sum. It’s only a matter of time
before the tables are turned for male models. Hopefully the
auctioned items will be sent overnight. Of course, that might
cost a couple of bucks extra. Nah, just send them regular
mail.
>The first of what is expected to be an annual study by
Middleberg/Ross titled “The Broadcast Media in Cyberspace
Study” found broadcast houses in the U.S. are just not taking
to the Web like other businesses. The study found only 25% of
radio and TV station are online. The authors of the study say
that unless the broadcast media gets on the ball, they could
be left behind or beaten out by smaller companies already
streaming video and audio.
Now, on to today’s topic…
Happy birthday to you…
Happy birthday to you…
Happy birthday, dear Internet Time…
Happy birthday to you!
On October 23rd of this year, the brainchild of Swatch and
MIT, Internet Time, turned one year old. It was a messy party
that left cake and ice cream on the walls and carpet. Not
really, but it’s fun image, don’t you think?
What? You’ve never heard of Internet time?! Well, you’re not
alone. It hasn’t been popular or overly used by the Weekend
Silicon Warrior. A few colleagues I talked to knew about it,
basically knew what it was, but didn’t pay it much more
attention than that.
I’ll admit I don’t use it myself, but I think it’s a good
idea so I thought I’d tell you about it, give you a method of
finding out the Internet Time where you sit and let you
decide for yourself.
First off, what is Internet Time?
On October 23rd, 1998, the watch company Swatch and MIT Media
Laboratory’s Nicholas Negroponte instituted a new method for
looking at time. The method sees time without hourly time
zones, or without doubling time for night and day (i.e., 9am
and 9pm).
The closest example I could think of was the 24-hour military
time format, but that still doesn’t do the concept justice.
You might already know that the world’s time zones basically
begin and end at a point near London, England, called
Greenwich. All time zones are set off of that point on the
earth gaining hours as you travel west and losing hours as
you travel east. The format breaks the world into 24 unequal
sections representing the 24 hours of the day.
Internet Time does much the same thing except it does not
use Greenwich. The zero point, or starting point, of Internet
Time is at the Swatch headquarters in Biel, Switzerland.
(Okay, okay, yes, there’s some commercialism to this, but I
still think it’s a good idea.) That point on the earth is
known as “000.”
The world is then broken into 1000 sections, or “beats,” as
they’re called, wrapping around and coming back to “000.”
Remember also that any time you denote a specific beat (or
point), you start it with the @ insignia. So, that point in
Biel, Switzerland, is shown as @000 in Internet Time.
So, how much is a beat? Well, it’s measured in time and the
world still works on a 24-hour system so immediately we should
know that noon is halfway, thus @500. With me? So, we take 12
hours (or 720 minutes) and divide by 500 (plus some fancy
math/time stuff) and we get a beat coming in at 1 minute 26.4
seconds.
I’ve tried doing this on a calculator and it gets rough because
a minute is 60 units. I got correct answers when I took
everything to seconds. Remember that since there are no time
zones, this is all relative to the meridian. I keep it somewhat
straight thinking of a grid across the world broken into 1000
beats. You look up as the earth turns and watch the number
increase.
Let’s say it’s 1 pm. What does that mean in Internet Time?
Well, we know that noon is @500 and 1 PM is 60 minutes, or
3600 seconds, after noon, so let’s divide 1 minute 24.4, or
86.4 seconds into 3600 seconds. That gives us 41.66666666,
so the Internet Time must be @541.67, or somewhere in that
general area. I used a converter and it kept rounding off to
about 42 beats an hour.
Yes, it gets rough to figure out. The best method is to have
a conversion chart, or better yet, a running Internet Time
clock. I happen to have one of those for you to view here:
https://www.htmlgoodies.com/InternetTime.html
It’s done with an applet. If you’d like a copy, the applet
is freeware and I offer a link to the page where you can
download it from the page above.
The real sales pitch for Internet Time (at least what I saw)
was that it is a time structure that can be used to set up
chats and contacts around the globe because the time is the
same all around the world. It’s also fairly precise thanks to
1000 beats rather than 24 hours that are then broken down into
60 minutes and on and on.
Maybe we can stop getting into the conversations that go
something like, “Okay, I’ll call you at 10. That’s 10 your
time, which is 8 my time. Okay? So, it’s 10, but 8 for me.
Or would you rather I called at 9? My time, I mean.”
I think we’ve all had one of those.
I think the only downfall of the time, in my opinion, is that
it has those points. The time can actually be @224.45. That
just doesn’t sit right in my brain. I’m not sure why, but it
doesn’t. I guess I’d just rather wait for the beat to change.
Heck, it’s only 84.4 seconds.
So, will it work? Swatch sure hopes so. CNN has the Internet
Time available on their home page every time I pop in. Swatch
also has a full line of “Beat Watches” that digitally show
both the actual time and the Internet Time.
I don’t know that it will replace good old round-face clocks,
but I think it’s an interesting concept nonetheless.
What I’m interested in is leap beat. And daylight savings
beat. I couldn’t find anything that even showed Internet Time
would be affected. That would be too bad. I love being allowed
to sleep an extra 42 beats once a year. It lets me know Winter
will be here soon. ;->
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
And that’s that. Thanks again for reading.
Joe Burns, Ph.D.
And Remember: Since I dealt with time, here’s a couple to keep
in mind. January 1st, 2000, will not be the first day of the
new millennium. That honor belongs to January 1st, 2001. There
was no year 0, we started with 1. A thousand years must pass
for a full century to be complete. Do the math.
Also, there is no such thing as 12 pm or 12 am. Noon (meridian,
pm means “post meridian”) is the dividing point of the clock
and midnight is the dividing point of the days. Picky, yes,
but that’s my job….
There is a system of timekeeping in Saudi Arabia where one
resets the clocks to midnight each day at sunset. Imagine
keeping things straight following that method.