Beat [1]
Beat [1] :
A unit of time equal to 0.001 day or 86.4 seconds. "Metric time," meaning decimalized time, is an idea dating back at least to the French Revolution of the 1790's. In most metric time proposals, the day is divided into 10 metric hours, each metric hour into 100 metricminutes (or beats), and each metric minute into 100 metric seconds (sometimes called blinks). In 1998 the Swatch Corporation repackaged metric time in a very attractive way as Internet time. In their proposal, time is counted in beats from midnight Central European Standard (winter) time (2300 Universal Time of the previous day, or 6:00 pm U.S. Eastern Standard Time of the previous day). The time at n beats is recorded as @n.beat; thus midnight U.S. Eastern Standard Time is @250.beat
