Time for Time
I have always been a bit of a loner. OK, so not ‘a bit’. Since waking I have been keeping mostly to myself, waiting to see what I can do to bring up the issue of the ‘execution’, as well as what kind of organization we will set up to govern ourselves. Constitutions and such being a minor study of mine. I seriously want to be in on that discussion.
I was asked to see what we could do about the time difference. Since timekeeping is set up in the hardware of every computer, run by oscillating crystals, it is near impossible to change once manufactured. But software programs can correct for that. So I set up a rudimentary time-server on the main computer using a twenty hour day, based on Alchibah seconds and minutes, using the new 1118+ day year, numbering the days rather than naming them. It reads the system time from the main computer, which reports it down to the thousandth, and uses it to calculate the Alchibah time using a simple algorithm. It reports the Alchibah time when queried by another device, reporting it as YYYY.MM.DDDD.hh.mm.sstthh, where Y=Year, M=Month, D=Day, all numeric, and h=hours, m=minutes, s=seconds, t=tenths/second and h=hundredths/second. I can not get closer than hundredths, since the rounding errors are too much for accuracy at that level. But hundredths are good enough for damn near everything, and internally each device will still run on Earth time, just getting it reset a lot. This is for Human convenience. Plus, we can all check Earth time easily, since each device will now have both times. Might be nice for those that want to remember certain anniversaries or other dates.
We can set most dumb devices to query the server daily or more often if need be, and the robots we can just instruct to do so. I suggested hourly for most devices, at least initially.
No months or seasons yet, since the proposed 93 day month seems silly to me. It needs discussion. Why keep a 12 month calendar? heck, why keep anything from Earth that we do not need to? This trying to match up an Alchibah week with an Earth week is like those old stories of when the old North American USA tried to convert from the ancient English Imperial system of measurements to the world standard Metric System. They totally screwed it up by trying to get everyone to convert and use both systems at the same time. Better to just change all at once and get used to it.
So whatever day we decide to start our calendar from will, at least at first, be known as 0001.01.0001, year.month.day. Poetic, eh?
Yes, I made an assumption that there would be 99 or less months, but I think it is a safe one. We can backfill names for days and months after we decide on them, or just see what people come up with themselves. I think we should wait and see how people adjust to the new day length, and see what kind of work schedule they choose to maintain. This is going to be stressful, so better let folks sort it out each as they need. And trying to impose an 80 hour week is damn near suicidal. Assign tasks and due dates and let folks work it out. Some may get done faster and be able to help others, some may not. Some won’t be able to. I can not imagine Hist out in a field for 80 hours, supervising robots while sitting under an umbrella or not.
Hey, we can get rid of Mondays!