Tuesday, June 15, 2004

The Hex Clock

Hex clockDividing time into unwieldy units (24 hours per day, 60 minutes to the hour, 60 seconds to the minute) seems to bother a lot of folks who would prefer that we use more "natural" number bases. People who are fond of base ten insist that we move to Internet Time. Internet Time divides the day into 1000 "beats" (and no time zones). Folks who are fond of hexadecimal want us to switch to Hex time which is expressed as a hexadecimal fraction (from 0 to 1) showing how much of the day has passed.

Proponents of Internet or Hex time seem to imagine the rest of us as backwards as Grandpa Simpson:
The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!
But the truth is, messy and difficult as the current time system is, so far we're unimpressed with these alternatives. Not to mention the cost of switching over.
posted by Bob at 6/15/2004 11:00:00 AM  | | digg | del.icio.us | reddit