Time II, New Babylonian Time

Tempora igitur a temperando nomen accipiunt, sive quod unumquodque illorum spatium separatim temperatum sit: seu quod momentis, horis, diebus, mensibus, annis, saeculisque et aetatibus omnia mortalis vitae curricula temperentur

Times take their name from "measure", either because every unit of time is separetely measured in moments, hours, days, months, years, ages, and epochs.¹

As you can see I was recently reading about time. In that last time related post I mentioned some of the fun to be had from alternative ways of reckoning time. Towards the end I said the following:

On the internet one can find advocates for pretty much anything, including temporal reform. The last time anyone seriously attempted to change the way we measure time was the french revolution. The French indulged their fetish for the metric by giving us a ten day 'week', and a metric system of hours (etc). Whilst for scientific, and many technical purposes the metric system is admirable, for many practical purposes it is useless, although not as useless as a system when every day of the year has its own name. Nonetheless metric time has some enthusiastic proponents. There are other people who suggest time to be told in binary or hexadecimal format.

Most of these systems are pretty hopeless, for practical purposes. Metric time has some advantages from a mathematic point of view, fitting in with the rest of the base-10 world. binary or hexadecimal time have other advantages - especially in terms of co-ordinating with computers etc. "Binary" clocks already exist, but they just use systems of on/off lights to denote duodec/sexages-imal time. Binary degrees are used by some programs for 3D graphics, under this system the circle is cut into 256 degrees. 256 being the largest number that can be represented by 8 bits, or 1 byte. Most people don't really get the binary systems, most people readily admit to being mystified as to the units used in computing, why 256 colours, why is a gigabyte not actually a thousand bytes etc. The system does have a beauty though, and it would be pretty impressive if one could learn to count binary on ones fingers, but alternative ways of counting on your fingers is for another day, maybe for never. Anyway, lots of people have proposed several different time counting systems, mainly provoked by the flimsy reasoning that the current system is antiquated (as if antiquity alone were a bad thing - I will have to blog about tradition some time as well), and that the metric/decimal system has a shiny modernist newness to it. (not that it is any newer than, say the sexagesimal, or octal or any counting system used by humans over the last 12,000 years.)

Anyway, I continue with the following:

I must admit to being fascinated by alternative ways of measuring time, partly because they destabilise cosy notions of regularity and order, but mainly because they seem so damn sci-fi. If we take man into space, it doesn't matter how long his day is, never mind how it is divided. Kim Stanley Robinson's otherwise excellent Mars books, deal with martian time by sticking 39 minutes, and 35.244 seconds, onto the end of a day, which seems an unimaginative way of doing things. Surely there could be better solutions? I like the idea of returning to our Sumerian heritage and dividing the day into 360 equal portions (of four minutes), and (orbit of the earth be damned), cutting the year into 360 days.

Having said that, I suppose I felt like fleshing the idea out, for the sci-fi epic I will never write.

New Babylonian Time

So here, I present New Babylonian Time. A system based on 360.

The day will last for 360 degrees NBT, for a period lasting 24 hours Old Time (OT). A degree will therefore be four old minutes long. I think four minutes is a neat length of time for most of our purposes. The degree will be the main unit used for both duration, e.g. "Just popping in the shower, be out in a degree", and also for scheduling, e.g. "Meet me for lunch at one-eighty". In terms of duration it may be printed normally, e.g. "The exam will last for twelve degrees", but in scheduling the zeros will always be used, e.g. "I didn't go to bed till naught-thirty", where ones alarm clock would read "030". I propose the time, for scheduling purposes, be told in the form "naught-ninety", "one-eighty", "two-seventy two", rather than the cumbersome "Two hundred and seventy two". The symbol for a degree is, obviously, °. Midnight will be 000, not 360.

The day will be divided, as now, into morning and afternoon, colloquially, but we will have an exact definition of early, mid and late morning/afternoon. This is because the day will be cut into six "watches" which make more sense than morning/afternoon in a sunless/dayless environment. The watches will each last for sixty degrees, they will either be referred to as early morning, mid morning etc, or (more formally) first, second and third watch etc. The new watches will begin at 000°, 060°, 120°, 180°, 220°, and 300°. So 120 will be the first degree of the third watch. Occasionally a unit called the Span will be used. One span lasts 6°, and whilst much scheduling will occur in six and its multiples they will not be used as much as hours are. The span will remain largely in colloquial use, and to describe approximate or metaphorical duration. "She went on for spans!"

The degree does not need to be subdivided for most every day use, the only time I can think of when I use seconds is when I am programming a microwave, then I do it in units of thirty seconds. For such purposes one can either use NBT "Minutes" - based on the arc minute, and lasting 4 old seconds, e.g. 60' = 1°, or fractions of a degree, usually sixths. One could further propose that rather than using 1/6, 1/3, 1/2, 2/3, 5/6. one use 1/6, 2/6, 3/6. One could refer to these as degree-watches, as opposed to day-watches. An NBT second, for rare scientific purposes, would be sixtieth of an NBT minute - based on the arc second. It would last for 0.0666... of a second.


Why 360?

I will admit to lifting the system wholesale from the compass, the advantage being that we can already instinctively divide 360 into fractional chunks. Half is 180, a third 120, a quarter is 90 a sixth is 60, easy. NBT minutes and seconds are based on arc minutes and seconds. It is also a pleasing nod to our sumerian forebears. It has a high number of divisors. (The same advantage that sixty and 12 have). It is s a fairly manageable number, avoids having to use two different units for most purposes. (Nearly everything is in degrees instead of hours and minutes). Most of all it sounds pleasingly sci-fi. I can imagine my space explorers with their big 360 clocks on the bridge.

Variations

Of course I initially suggested that this is a unit for people not tied to earth, so one variation would be to abandon the 24 hour OT day. Martians could adopt a 360 degree day for their 1475 minute (and 35.244 second) OT day. In which case every degree would be fractionally longer than four minutes. One could adopt a horribly long day of approximately 36 hours. (Although there are people out there who have tried to adopt bizarre cicadian patterns, based around, amongst other things, 36 hour days.) in a 36 hour OT day a degree would be 6 minutes OT long.

A more advanced step would be, however long ones day was, to also redivide the year. Firstly one could jettison any attempt to key the year to the orbit of the earth, something that is increasingly irrelevant to us, and would be even more irrelevant to people not dwelling on earth at all. A 360 day year could be divided into six months of sixty days, and sixty weeks of six days. Each month would be exactly ten weeks long, alternatively one could have 12 months of five weeks/30 days. - But I would advise keeping the symmetry with the division of the year. A six day week is kind of cosy as well, but demonstrates the biggest problem with any such a reckoning, which is that it entirely messes up the religious year, as I have moved up the candle I have become increasingly more interested in sacred time, and that includes the significance of the seven day week. It would be sad, from a selfish point of view, to lose the connection between sacred and profane time completely, although our brethren the Orthodox, as well as those of other faiths, demonstrate that one can keep to separate calendars for religious reasons perfectly well.

Conclusions

All I have really done is have a bit of a play with numbers, make a system which would work for sci-fi, even though I know that focusing on daft novelties is a hallmark of bad sci-fi, it is a thing most famously done by the first Battlestar Gallactica. Really I know that the whole thing is a fond thing vainly invented. But the process of inventing it was fun, and I hope I poked fun at some of those who are (I think) more seriously proposing temporal reform.

Ready Reckoner

The Year
360 Days
6 Months of 60 days
60 Weeks of 6 days

The Day
360 Degrees
6 Watches of 60 degrees
60 Spans of 6 degrees (rare)

NBT - OT
Day - 1 day/24 hours
(Day-)Watch - 4 hours
Span - 24 minutes
Degree - 4 minutes
Degree-watch - 40 Seconds
Minute - 4 seconds
Second = 0.0666... seconds.

Converting duration.

(Hours * 60) + (Minutes) + (Seconds/60) = Time in OT minutes.
OT minutes/4 = NBT minutes

e.g. 4 Hours 14 minutes and 40 seconds.
= 240 + 4 + 0.666... = 244.666 Seconds
= 244.666.../4 = 61.1666...° OR 61°4/6 Or 61°40'

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1 Bede, On the Reckoning of Time. Latin, Liverpool Texts Translation.