Notes on Time

Facebook invents new unit of time called a flick
Jan 2018, BBC

It's not as cool as it sounds at first. But I thought it might be nice to start recording instances of this attempt, because I had no idea that Swatch tried to reinvent global time at the dawn of the internet. (It was a marketing campaign that didn't hold up, and it wasn't the first attempt to decimalize time, most important of which was the 1792 French Revolutionary Time, and the most obvious being Chinese decimal time - they had it forever...just about as long as they were using chopsticks while Europeans were still eating with their hands.)

And since we're talking about time, I should take a moment to mention that time zones were created as a result of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860's. (I think about this every time my New Jersey Transit train is delayed.)

Prior that that time in history, there was no need to designate time zones, because we simply couldn't travel that fast, nor did we need to be so succinct about where and when we were.

Rail travel across such a large continetal landmass needed better coordination, or else trains coming from different places each using their own time standard would show up at different stations at different times. Very confusing. Things were finally standardized in 1883, and it was called "The Day of Two Noons" as each train station reset its local noon to the new standard noon.

Granted, Greenwich Mean Time has been around since the late 1600's and was needed for mariners. It can be seen as the first universal time, but the splitting of the globe into hour-long zones (4 minutes for every degree longitude) did not come until much later.

And a final note on time, there are two times we use here on Earth. The first is common, and it's the time as determined by the position of the Sun, or the Earth relative to the Sun. It's called solar time.

The second is less well known, and is determined by the position of our solar system relative to our galaxy. No, it's more specifically the position of the Earth relative to our galaxy. This is called sidereal time, or star time.

Sidereal time falls behind solar time by about four minutes per day, or one day per year. Who cares? Astronomers and astrologers, that's who. And no, they're not the same thing, although lots of people fail to recognize the difference.


Post Script
Astronomological
Network Address, 2015