www.nico.schottelius.org/docs/sut.mdwn

[[!meta title="Simple Universal Time (SUT)"]]

## Introduction

This article describes a simple solution to the
problem of having to care about time zones, 
clock adjusting due to summer and winter time
changes. It also addresses the problematic to
of non-metric conversion when used with other
units.

**Simple Universal Time (SUT)**  
is suited for instant implementation and does
not interfer with any current time system.

## Motivation

The life of individuals becomes more and more
global:

  * Communication takes place covering several time zones
  * Travelling accross multiple time zones has become normal

Due to this change, people are more and more confronted to
think about the time in different time zones.

To place a call, you have to find out

  * in which time zone the target person is
  * how much offset to UTC this particular time zone has
  * remember the delta from my time zone to UTC
  * create the delta from both time zones
  * find a good time for a call

This is quite cumbersome and wastes a lot of energy
world wide, every day.

Furthermore, changes from summer time to winter time zone
make this process even harder: If you remember the offset
for a particular location, the time zone may have changed
due to summer time changes...

There is another problem with the current time scheme:
that is being non-metric. Having scientific 
calculations with all metric units is usually broken up
due to the non-metric behaviour of time. This is simply
unecessary and can be easily fixed as the following
proposal will show.

## Proposal

To simplify this time disaster, the following two changes
are proposed for change:

    * Convert the time of day to a metric system
    * Drop all time zones and only use SUT

### Conversion to metric

For a simple start, assume there is no time definition and
that we can start from scratch. Assume:

  * A day has 10 hours
  * An hour has 100 minutes
  * A minutes has 100 seconds

This would create a day that has 
**10 * 100 * 100 = 100000** seconds.

The old scheme used to have 24 hours, 60 minutes per hour
and 60 seconds per minute, which resulted in
**24 * 60 * 60 = 86400** seconds.

Let us prefix the new definition with the word 
**simple** to be able to distinguish between the two schemes and
let us convert them into another:

    100000 simple seconds = 86400 seconds # divide by 100000
    1 simple second = 0.864 seconds

Or the other way around:

    86400 seconds = 100000 simple seconds # divide by 86400
    1 second = 1.157407 (periodical, rounded)

So having the seconds calculated, we can also compare the
minutes and hours:

    1 simple minute = 100 simple seconds => 86.4 seconds = 1 minute 26.4 seconds
    1 simple hour = 10000 simple seconds => 8640 seconds = 144 minutes = 2h 24 minutes

And the other way round:

    1 minute = 60 seconds => 69.4 simple seconds (not one simple minute!)
    1 hour = 3600 seconds => 4166.67 simple seconds = 41.6667 simple minutes = 0.4167 simple hours 

### Drop all time zones

To be able to have one global time that everybody can use
without the need of calculations, there won't be any time
zones defined for use with **SUT**. Instead, SUT is based
on UTC.

### Time format

As SUT only includes 10 hours, you can display time of the
day using the following format:

    H:MM:SS

where **H** is in the range of **0-9**, **MM** in the range of
**00-99** and **SS** in the range of **00-99**.

## Implications for Society

When changing to SUT, societies productivity will
improve pretty fast. 
If a particular society wants to keep the 
unclear advantage of summe time, it can even do so by using
SUT: 

Instead of changing the time, this society can announce that
all shops open up earlier in summer and open up later in
winter time. Beware: An actual advantage of using summer time
for a society using **summer time** of one that doesn't 
**has not been proven**.

## Using SUT

You can start right away to use SUT in your daily work.

[Stefanos Kornilios Mitsis Poiitidis](https://github.com/skmp)
created a javascript implementation of SUT, so you
can easily see the current time.
It is hosted at
[http://telmich.github.io/sut](http://telmich.github.io/sut)

## Future and Related Work

Parts of the SUT proposal are also covered by the
[Decimal Time](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time),
which has been used in France around 1792.

As societies are adopting more and supporting utilities
will be created. You are advised to open source them
and add them to the [sut git repository](https://github.com/telmich/sut).

SUT is [the new standard](http://xkcd.com/927/) to replace
timezones, summer time changes and the 24 hour day.