Internet Time

My manager sits in Paris. So when he talks about anything to do with time it is always according to his timezone. For e.g the other day he said, let me have this query by this afternoon. It was 3.00 pm here and I first wondered its already afternoon, so when exactly does he want the query? Then I realized that it was still morning in Paris and I still had time to do the work. To know what time it is exactly in Paris I went to the site timeanddate.com. Thats where I came accross some thing very interesting. It seems there is a new way of describing time and it is called Internet Time. The unit of this system of time is not day,hour or second but something called as beats! Go through and make your opinion about this new time system

Internet Time

Internet Time is a "new" way to tell time, invented and marketed by the Swiss watch company Swatch. The current Internet Time is the same all over the World (no time zones or daylight saving time adjustments).

Theory

New time unit - the .beat
Instead of dividing the virtual and real day into 24 hours and 60 minutes per hour, the Internet Time system divides the day into 1000 ".beats". Each .beat is 1 minute and 26.4 seconds.

New meridian Internet Time is based on a new Meridian (as opposed to the Greenwich Meridian). This new Meridian goes through Swatch's office in Biel, Switzerland and is called the BMT Meridian.

BMT - the reference for Internet Time
BMT, another invention of Swatch, Biel Mean Time, which is linked up to the Central European Winter/Standard time - which is UTC + 1 hour. When it is Midnight in BMT, the Internet Time is @000 beats, Noon is @500 beats.

Time unit conversions

Beat	Unit Conversion	Unit	Beat Conversion
1 .beat	= 0.001 day	1 day	= 1000 .beats
1 .beat	= 0.024 hours	1 hour	= 41.666 .beats
1 .beat	= 1.44 minutes	1 minute	= 0.6944 .beats
1 .beat	= 86.4 seconds	1 second	= 0.01157 .beats

Advantages of the Internet Time system

• It uses the normal decimal system, instead of the ancient 24 hour, 60 minute, 60 second system which makes time telling more complicated.
• .beat time calculations are easy, @345 + 456 .beats = @801, compared to e.g. 3:45:20 + 2 hours, 25 minutes, 45 seconds, where the seconds, minutes and hours must all be added.
• No need for time zone conversions - the Internet Time is the same everywhere.

Disadvantages of the Internet Time system

• The use of the Biel Meridian introduces an unwanted additional Meridian - the Greenwich Meridian is the standard Meridian of the world.
• Wrong use of mean time - The Biel Meridian is not at exactly 15 degrees east longitude, which it should have been if the BMT (Biel Mean Time) should be 1 hour ahead of UTC / GMT (Greenwich Mean Time)
• The second, and not the beat is the basic unit of time in the International System of Units (and using .beats instead, would complicate the system).

So whats your take on this? I guess this would never become the standard time unless we reach an age where one can reach from Chennai to California in a blink of an eye! Otherwise it is a wonderful out of the box thinking by the guys at Swatch to come out with something like this!
Cherio