Beat Time, The way of speaking of specific times on the internet ?

A time system introduced by the Swiss Watch company in 1998, back then it sort of become very popular, it had a short period of time where it seemed like it might actually be a thing that could be.

But eventually life got in the way, turns out there is a lot of resistance to letting go of system as ingrained as our way of keeping time. It is very central, ever since railways made it so important to be on the right time, otherwise you would possibly miss your connection, and have to wait for another train.

So what they proposed was a time keeping system for the internet that goes by either beat time, or Swatch Internet Time. The proposed system works by dividing a day into 1000 pieces each of which is called a beat, each beat then happens to be the same length as a metric minute (time measure used a few years after the french revolution in France), to learn about metric time https://timeity.com/metric-time/

But this is only the first part of what was proposed by the beat time system, it is essentially changing our current system completely, since with this time system time zones is a thing of the past, and no more daylight savings time, meaning that 500 beats which would be written @500 would be noon in the timezone it is based in (Biel, Switzerland) but any clock anywhere in the world would show @500 even though it is not locally noon, this was one issue that probably prevented this from becoming more wide spread.

Now I would like to share a little code to help with any difficulty converting to or from beat time. I like the idea of beat time.

First just getting the required information seems like a good start.

import time
t = time.localtime()

_a,_b,_c,hour,minute,second,_d,_e,_f = t

return(hour,minute,second)

I think the first useful thing would be some table to show the hours in both common time (UTC+1) and in beat time, I did not do anymore work and figure out the times in other timezones you can check out SwatchClock for a more complete listing

hour,_,_=T
def clock_to_beat(h,m,s):
        return((m*60+h*3600)/86.4)
beats = []

hours = range(1,24)

for hour in hours:

beats.append(clock_to_beat(hour,0,0))
return(beats)

So I did a little massaging of the output to produce this table, well reformatting.

I thought it would be difficult to convert back, but the following seems to be good enough.

def beats_to_clock(b):
        return((b*86.4)/3600)
return(beats_to_clock(510))

12.24

hour,minute,second=T
def clock_to_beats(hours,minutes,seconds):
        return((hours*3600+minutes*60)/86.4)
return(clock_to_beats(hour,minute,second))

885.4166666666666

Yes this would be the beat time right now.