Posts tagged Time

Happy Hexadecimal New Year!

:: Time

By: John Clements

Happy Hexadecimal New Year!

Actually, I missed it. It’s now

57:00:40:6d

… so the new year, the 88th since the epoch, was a full 4 hexadecimal hours ago.

All of you TAI64 log watchers can put on your party hats and blow your tooters.

One additional handy attribute of Hexadecimal new year is that it doesn’t generally happen in the middle of the night.

Yahoo!

Decimal Time Zones

:: Time

By: John Clements

What? There are no decimal time zones?

Okay, backing up.

I love time-wasting hard-to-learn idiosyncrasies. I use the dvorak keyboard, I run in sandals I make myself, I run my own mail server (surely the stupidest of my habits).

About two years ago I “invented” decimal time. Which is to say: I did in fact think of it myself. Unfortunately, there’s a bit of prior art here, going back to the French Revolution.

Short version: Our current day has 86,400 seconds in it. This is not really very far from 100,000. So… what if we just designated a decimal second as being 1/100,000 of a day? then we could have all of our hours and minutes be decimal divisions. More specifically: the day is divided into 10 decimal hours, each hour into 100 decimal minutes, and each minute into 100 decimal seconds. Works great! The decimal hours are quite long, but the decimal minutes are pretty close to our existing ones.