Oct 09 2008
Hexadecimal Time
I was pondering this evening on how to represent time of day using few binary digits and came up with what I called “hextime”: 16 hours per day, each with equal 16 subdivisions. One hexour is equivalent to 90 conventional minutes.
I decided to google “hextime” and found, of course, that the idea is not new:
- Hexadecimal Time (Powerset enhanced Wikipedia page) describes a similar scheme with a finer division of the hexour into 256 hexminutes
- Hextime describes a system identical to mine but lacking the terminology of hexours and hexminutes.
I have to go further then, and suggest the division of a year into 256 hexdays. Each hexday necessarily has the same length as a conventional day (24 conventional hours – 16 hexours). The other 109 or 110 days are made up of 52 2-day weekends and 5 or 6 holidays, which will be named as in the French revolutionary calendar.
Incidentally, the Powerset results for the simple query “hexadecimal time” are beautiful. Here is the top snippet on the results page:
