Good friend and fellow potpourri blogger, Nate Kizer, calls my attention to the mind-blowing Swatch.beat time:
Swatch gets my vote for most ingenious, yet useless invention/innovation of the year. In order to work around time zones & the like, Swatch divided the day up into 1000 beats. The equivalency is something like this:1 beat = 1 minute, 26.4 seconds
The Swatch website states:
Internet time exists so that we do not have to think about timezones. For example, if a New York web-surfer makes a date for a chat with a cyber friend in Rome, they can simply agree to meet at an "@ time" - because Internet time is the same all over the world.Ingenious. My only problem is the same one I have with my walkie-talkie phone - I don't know anyone else who uses it. The Swatch site has downloads for clocks that you can put on your server, your desktop, or your webpages. I want desperately to achieve this level of geekhood. If you, faithful reader, can find it in your heart to put down your Dungeons & Dragons game for a few minutes & check this out, I would be eternally grateful. It would be like a secret code to a secret club that meets at a secret hideout that no one else cares about. If that appeals to you, let me know...
One interesting thing about the @ time is that by it's nature there's a lag window of nearly 1.5 minutes. Extending that, I'm thinking there should be an entirely different conversion for parents with children. Say:
100 beats / day means 1 beat = 14 minutes & 24 seconds
It'd be way more useful if you could be nearly 15 minutes late, but on still on beat.
@977, I'm still trying to wrap my head around the impact of such a paradigm shift.