INTERNET TIME

«In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.»
«A Itàlia durant 30 anys, sota els Borja, van patir guerres, terror, assassinats i matances però van produir en Miquel Àngel, en Leonardo de Vinci i el Renaixement. A Suïssa van tenir amor fraternal; van tenir 500 anys de democràcia i pau, i què va produir això? El rellotge de cucut.»
Harry Lime (Orson Welles), "The Third Man", 1949

Well, 49 years after he said this and 248 years after they have invented the cuckoo clock, Swiss have amended the great Orson Welles - they have invented the at-clock, too.

On October 23rd, 1998, Nicholas Negroponte, founder and director of the media laboratory at the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), inaugurated the BMT (Biel Meridian Time), thus giving birth to Internet time.

This meridian is marked on the city of Biel (Mittelland, Swiss), on the Jakob Stämpfli Straße, specifically on the facade of Swatch International headquarters, and it gives the common unique time all over the Internet. That is, there aren't timezones with Internet time and all the world runs the same time.

Besides, and working on rationalizing, they have divided the Sun mean day, instead of in 24 hours of 60 minutes of 60 seconds each, in 1000 units that they called '.beats'. Each beat is equivalent to 1 minute with 26.4 seconds.

The formula is:

        B = (H x 3600 + M x 60 + S + T x 60 + 3600) x 1000 / 86400

        H: current local hour
        M: current local minute
        S: current local second
        T: timezone measured in minutes of difference referred to the GMT time
        B: current beat (ignoring decimals)

For example:

         = ( x 3600 +  x 60 +    x 60 + 3600) x 1000 / 86400

Very important note: do not fool around and tell to a German the cuckoo clock was invented by Swiss because he will get cross - the Kuckucksuhr was invented by Franz Anton Ketterer from Schönwald (Baden-Württemberg, Germany) in 1750, such as a variation of the Black Forest clock or Schwarzwalduhr that, in its turn, was invented in the Glashof farm, near Titisee-Neustadt (Baden-Württemberg, Germany), about year 1640. Basically Herr Ketterer took one of those clocks and changed the chimes that stroke the hours for bellows that simulated an asthmatic birdie that obsessively repeated 'cuckoo' (kuckuck, in German). Anyway, his most important contribution to the World's History is that it was the origin of a memorable episode of The Pink Panther, In The Pink Of The Night.

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7/23/2015 09:46:19 GMT+0000