Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

WTF? World Time Format!

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A guy developed it at the Diesel Cafe and posted a link to his AlphabetClock.com site on the Diesel's wifi bulletin board.  I got really into the idea and changed the code so it could do microseconds, and then I converted it to use the Julian Day so I could have a more compact way to pass timestamps in JSON AJAX calls.  Julian Day is a standard way to store time and date in a sqlite database, as the number days since January 1, 4713 BC Greenwich noon, with the time stored as the fraction of the day gone by after the decimal place (now it ia about 2455156.49) which results in my version being 12 hours off from his original version, but I think that's better (especially for us, since A is at 8AM at the start of the day here, instead of at 8PM).  Then I recognized the creator from his picture on the Diesel board and excitedly showed him my code, which he was impressed by, but I may have offended him a little bit, or discouraged him, or freaked him out.  He has said he wants to incorporate my code and agrees that we should flip the clock 12 hours to use the Julian Day, but he hasn't had time to do it yet (and he's probably reluctant to, having gotten used to :A being in the evening).  I hope we get them in sync so we can move on to pushing the standard.

I put my version up here, to show you guys, but his version is still the official version, since he invented it.  Oh yeah, my version has the full date part of the Julian Day expressed alphabetically (base 26), not just the time.  So you can refer to any event in history or in the future with :WTF

For example, John Lennon was pronounced dead at 10:45pm on December 8, 1980 in New York City.  That was FJCGK:RBQ in :WTF

If you want to meet on the internet for a game of live chess tomorrow at 9:00 PM, that's FJRXD:QGN  (The FJ can be left off, it won't roll over to FK til 2024)

Cool huh?

It's a really good standard, and there'd be two extra hours in a day to get more done.  I think the Federal Goverment should start scheduling meetings and speeches in WTF, adapting to its 55 minute hours, to have space for two more hour long meetings in a day.  We'd have a conference call at :D, and people in Washington, California and Alaska would all call in at :D, there'd be no need to know what time zone anyone is in.   On the East cost, some people could have an early (10:43:07 AM EST) lunch at :EATLUNCH, but people out west would probably eat lunch around :IRI (12:00 PM PST), maybe meeting up at the new 4:20, 12:48:58 PST.

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Comments

    • The neat thing about wtf?

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    • the name
    • because its base 26, it’s more compact for text-based http, using just eight or nine characters to transmit a very precise timestamp, that would be 12 chars written “55156.985443” or “122509233059”
    • it’s impossible to confuse it with local time, when you see something is scheduled on the internet at :R you know it is :R, which is a few AlphaHours from :O
    • it’s fun
    • there are 26 hours in a day!  That’s two extra hours that networks could schedule shows in, classes could be scheduled for, people could be hired to work during, spend time at home with, it almost makes room for 10% more people on the planet and 10% more work being done.  Just by shortening each hour five minutes, cutting the slack out of the day, those last five minutes in a meeting when people just wait for the hour to be over.

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      p>The major drawback: getting used to it, and even after getting used to it, it would be hard to add or subtract time, like what letter is six hours from :K? and figuring out in your head what next thursday will be, things like that.  But there will be an App for that!

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