Re: <nettime> What is @XXX? [Re: Stop the G8: Online Demonstration Scheduled]

[scotartt <scot@systemx.autonomous.org>]

On Tue, Aug 07, 2001 at 01:15:37AM +0200, sebastian@rolux.org wrote:

> want to read more? "biel meantime (bmt) is the universal reference for
> internet time. a day in internet time begins at midnight bmt (@000 swatch
> .beats) (central european wintertime). the meridian is marked for all to
> see on the façade of the swatch international headquarters on
> jakob-staempfli street, biel, switzerland. so, it is the same time all
> over the world, be it night or day, the era of time zones has disappeared.
> the bmt meridian was inaugurated on 23 october 1998 in the presence of
> nicholas negroponte, founder and director of the massachusetts institute
> of technology's media laboratory."

what i like especially about 'swatch time' is that it seems to appeal to
idiots who haven't heard of GMT. so, we swap the greenwich meridian for
one in switzerland, and invent some hopeless metricized time to go with
it. naturally 360 is a good number for time; it dives by 2, 3, 6, 9, 12
etc. 365 days in a year, 360 degrees in a circle, 24 hours, an accidental
but nonetheless excellent match. who needs base 10 for everything? another
micro-fascism to add to the pile.

of course, the world time standard (now called Universal Coordinated Time,
there are several variants based on solar and sidereal measurements, but
for human purposes it's all essentiall stil GMT) is based on a meridian
drawn in Greenwich simply because it was the Royal Navy that finally
solved the 'problem of longtitude' -- by having a clock that accurately
kept the time as it was at the Greenwich Observatory.

if you want a constant time worldwide for some reason, what's the problem
with UCT?

But the internet is without history, we can reinvent and reinvent over and
over and it's still ALL NEW. This is it's truly revolutionary invention,
the final ahistoricism, a return to cyclical time. Time to abolish time as
if it never existed?

regs
scot.

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