[vaughan]

.beat time or Swatch Internet Time is way better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

[technothrasher]

My favorite is traditional Japanese time. Breaks day and night into 6 equal time periods each, and adjusts them as the seasons change. I made a Sahku Dokei (19th century Japanese pillar clock) simulator to play with it.

https://www.tdcmotorsports.com/clock/

[jhbadger]

In a way, China kind of has something like the Swatch gimmick for real. There's just one time zone in the whole country (which is roughly the size of the Continental US). This has benefits (easy to coordinate video conferences in different cities) and drawbacks (the official time is far off from what the sun would indicate in much of China).

[blululu]

It only works because the overwhelming majority of the population and all of the political and economic power lies on the east coast of China in a single time zone. I doubt that the people in Urumqi are happy to have the sun rise at 10 am, and I doubt that anyone cares about their opinions.

[robobro]

Making it oriented on UTC+0100 is dumb

[aeyes]

They used CET as a reference, the local timezone of the Swatch headquarters.

[eps]

No, it's not.

Dividing one day into just 1000 units is way less precise unless one uses decimals, in which case it's just plain inconvenient.

[xyzzy123]

I think the idea is that for most human uses of time we don't specify start or end times to a precision of more than about 5 minutes. Stuff like train timetables you might want to go down to about a minute. So one could argue that we have at least 60 times the resolution we really need for day-to-day use.

If you absolutely need more precision (accurate timestamping) then decimals are available.

[y04nn]

"way less precise" ? There are only 1440 minutes in a day, so a beat is 1 minute and 26.4 seconds, precise enough. And then, if you you want more precision, like we use seconds for minutes, you can divide a beat by 100 (@500.12), not less inconvenient than using seconds.