Swatch Internet Time

Swatch Internet Time (or beat time) is a decimal time concept introduced in 1998 by the Swatch corporation as part of their marketing campaign for their line of "Beat" watches.

Instead of hours and minutes, the mean solar day is divided up into 1000 parts called ".beats". Each .beat is equal to one decimal minute in the French Revolutionary decimal time system and lasts 1 minute and 26.4 seconds (86.4 seconds) in standard time. Times are notated as a 3-digit number out of 1000 after midnight. So, @248 would indicate a time 248 .beats after midnight representing 248/1000 of a day, just over 5 hours and 57 minutes.

There are no time zones in Swatch Internet Time; instead, the new time scale of Biel Meantime (BMT) is used, based on Swatch's headquarters in Biel, Switzerland and equivalent to Central European Time, West Africa Time, and UTC+01. Unlike civil time in Switzerland and many other countries, Swatch Internet Time does not observe daylight saving time.

History

Swatch Internet Time was announced on October 23, 1998, in a ceremony at the Junior Summit '98, attended by Nicolas G. Hayek, President and CEO of the Swatch Group, G.N. Hayek, President of Swatch Ltd., and Nicholas Negroponte, founder and then-director of the MIT Media Lab. During the Summit, Swatch Internet Time became the official time system for Nation1, an online country (supposedly) created and run by children.

Beat (1997 film)

Beat (Hangul: 비트; RR: Biteu) is 1997 South Korean gangster film directed by Kim Sung-su and written by Sam Shin about a high school dropout who is forced into gang life. Jung Woo-sung played the lead Min and Ko So-young his love interest Romy. The plot is based on a bestselling graphic novel by Huh Young-man.

The role solidified Jung as a leading Korean actor and was also based on his real-life experience as a high school dropout. This was the third and final film pairing Jung and Ko, but the director would later work with Jung again in Musa (2001).

Plot

Three friends in Korea all drop out of high school. Min is a feared brawler whose widowed mother is a drunk. The story traces his journey from high school to the underworld as his best friend introduces him to life in the mob. Complicating Min's life further is his love for the volatile Romy, a girl from an upper-class family with dreams of going to a prestigious college.

Cast

Beat (police)

In police terminology, a beat is the territory and time that a police officer patrols. Beat policing is based on traditional policing (late 19th century) and utilises the close relationship with the community members within the assigned beat to strengthen police effectiveness and encourage cooperative efforts to make a safer community. Beat police typically patrol on foot or bicycle which provides more interaction between police and community members.

Before the advent of personal radio communications, beats were organised in towns and cities to cover specific areas, usually shown on a map in the police station and given some sort of name or number. Officers reporting on duty would be allocated a beat by their sergeant and sometimes given a card indicating that the officer should be at a particular point at set times, usually half an hour, or forty-five minutes apart. The points would usually be telephone kiosks, police pillars or boxes, or perhaps public houses where it would be possible to phone the officer should he be needed to respond to an incident. The officer would remain at the point for five minutes and then patrol the area gradually making his way to the next point.

Question!

"Question!" is a song by Armenian American rock band System of a Down, released as the second single of their fourth album Mezmerize. The song was premiered on Los Angeles, California radio station KROQ-FM on May 23, 2005 and was released to alternative and rock radio stations on July 12 of the same year.

The song is sometimes compared to one of System of a Down's other songs "Aerials", which also deals with the nature of life in the lyrics. Both are primarily sung by Serj Tankian and have Daron Malakian as back-up in the chorus.

Music video

The video was released on August 5, 2005 on MTV and the band's website. The opening scene is of a boy with gray hair, clothes, and skin shooting a red bird with a slingshot, which coincides with the start of the song. At this point the video switches to a scene of the band members on a theater stage, performing music for a play. The play is based on a theme of life, death, and reincarnation, revolving around two lovers, a man in a dark suit and a woman in a red dress, who are shown both as children and adults. As the music reaches its climax, the woman collapses after eating a red berry and the man screams in grief. The video closes with an intense scene of a woman giving birth followed by a shot of a newborn baby wrapped in red cloth. The color red is central to the video, tying together the bird, the girl, the woman, and the baby in a cycle of rebirth.

Question

A question is a linguistic expression used to make a request for information, or the request made using such an expression. The information requested should be provided in the form of an answer.

Questions have developed a range of uses that go beyond the simple eliciting of information from another party. Rhetorical questions, for example, are used to make a point, and are not expected to be answered. Many languages have special grammatical forms for questions (for example, in the English sentence "Are you happy?", the inversion of the subject you and the verb are shows it to be a question rather than a statement). However questions can also be asked without using these interrogative grammatical structures – for example one may use an imperative, as in "Tell me your name".

Uses

The principal use of questions is to elicit information from the person being addressed, by indicating, more or less precisely, the information which the speaker (or writer) desires. However questions can also be used for a number of other purposes. Questions may be asked for the purpose of testing someone's knowledge, as in a quiz or examination. Raising a question may guide the questioner along an avenue of research (see Socratic method).

Question (short story)

"Question" is a science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov. The story first appeared in the March 1955 issue of Computers and Automation (thought to be the first computer magazine), and was reprinted in the April 30, 1957, issue of Science World. It is the first of a loosely connected series of stories concerning a fictional supercomputer called Multivac.

The story concerns two technicians who are servicing Multivac, and their argument over whether or not the machine is truly intelligent and able to think. Multivac, however, supplies the answer on its own.

After the reprint, another author, Robert Sherman Townes, noticed the climax in the last sentence was very similar to one of his own stories, "Problem for Emmy" (Startling Stories, June 1952), and wrote to Asimov about it. After searching in his library, Asimov did find the original story and, although he did not recall having read it, admitted that the endings were pretty similar. He then replied to Townes, apologizing and promising the story would never again be published, and it never was. Asimov mentioned "Question" in an editorial called "Plagiarism" which appeared in the August 1985 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction (although he did not mention Townes' name or the title of either story). "Plagiarism" was reprinted in Asimov's collection Gold (1995).