Tired of old-fashioned time keeping? 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, and 60 seconds in a minute? Arbitrary units. Great if you like writing fractions, I suppose. Not so great for math. And unintuitive in both the human world of decimal units and in a computer world of binary and hex.
I suggest something more interesting. "Hextime." The clock below is a Hextime clock. This one shows the current time (UTC or "Greenwich Mean Time" if you prefer).
In my scheme, there are FF16 (25610) hex ticks in a day. Midnight is still 00.000, as in any base. After the decimal, any number of digits of precision can be expressed and it all just flows together seemlessly like numbers should. Looks good and makes it all very easy to add and subtract any quantity of time. Round where you need to.
You'll notice the second decimal place (1/256th of a tick) feels a bit like a second. Just slightly slower. Nice.
- Examples:
- "I wake up at 7:45 AM" becomes "I wake up at 53." That's precise to within a couple of minutes.
- Need a few minutes? Don't say, "Gimme 5." Say, "Gimme 1." (That's actually 5.625 minutes.)
- "Movie starts at 10:30 PM" becomes "Movie starts at F0." That's exactly the same time.
- "The bullet train arrives at 0A5" expresses a time to within 10.5 seconds.
- The 5 digits of precision you see in the clock above (e.g. "D4.A31") expresses the time of day to within 42 milliseconds. That level of precision would normally require 9 digits and something that looks like "11:32:49.018 PM".
The duration of the first digit to the left of the decimal is 5.625 minutes. So if you're comfortable expressing the time of most of your daily events to plus or minus 2.8 minutes then Hextime lets you express that precision in just 2 digits instead of 4. Add one decimal place for 3 digits of Hextime and you're now expressing times to within 10.5 seconds which would otherwise require a full 6 digits.
On the topic of time zones... Maybe it makes sense to divide the globe into 16 or 256 timezones under Hextime. Or maybe we all just pin ourselves to UTC. Either way, I suggest we all grow up and drop the Daylight Saving Time silliness.
Alternatives
The Decimal time and Metric time advocates make some good points also. Base10 is more finger friendly. But Base16 is 60% more compact to read or write or speak. And it's Hacker Chic.
Update: After I conceived of Hextime, I became aware of Hexidecimal time which is slightly different in division than Hextime but identical in its in its base of 16. Apparently it didn't catch on in 1863. But maybe what Nystrom was lacking 145 years ago was a wide world of Base16 devices to deliver such elegant timekeeping. I can almost guarantee you're reading this page on a device built for Base16 right now. So what time is it?