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.

Lolita (term)

Lolita was the nickname of one of the principal characters in Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita. Lolita's actual name was Dolores, with whom the narrator, Humbert Humbert, develops a sexual obsession. In the book itself, "Lolita" is specifically Humbert's nickname for Dolores. Nevertheless, "Lolita" and "loli" has come to be used as a general reference to a seductive or sexually attractive young woman.

In the marketing of pornography, lolita is used to refer to a young girl, frequently one who has only recently reached the age of consent, or appears to be younger than the age of consent.

Etymology & Related Terms

Nymphet

A nymphet is a sexually attractive girl, or young woman. The first recorded use of the term "nymphet", defined by The Century Dictionary as "a little nymph", was by Drayton in Poly-Olbion I. xi. Argt. 171 (1612): "Of the nymphets sporting there In Wyrrall, and in Delamere."

In Lolita, "nymphet" was used to describe the 9- to 14-year-old girls to whom the protagonist is attracted, the archetypal nymphet being the character of Dolores Haze. Nabokov, in the voice of his narrator Humbert, first describes these nymphets in the following passage:

Born to Die (Lana Del Rey album)

Born to Die is the second studio album and major-label debut by American singer and songwriter Lana Del Rey. It was released on January 27, 2012 by Interscope Records, Polydor Records, and Stranger Records. Del Rey collaborated with producers including Patrik Berger, Jeff Bhasker, Chris Braide, Emile Haynie, Justin Parker, Rick Nowels, Robopop, and Al Shux to achieve her desired sound. Their efforts resulted in a primarily baroque pop record, which sees additional influences from alternative hip hop, indie pop and trip hop music.

Contemporary music critics were divided in their opinions of Born to Die; some commended its distinctive production, while its repetitiveness and melodramatic tendencies were a recurring complaint. The record debuted at number two on the U.S. Billboard 200 with first-week sales of 77,000 copies; it was later certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) after moving one million units. Born to Die reached the peak position on eleven international record charts, and has sold 8.5 million copies worldwide as of May 2015.

Lolita (play)

Lolita is a play adapted by Edward Albee from Vladimir Nabokov's novel of the same name. The troubled production opened on Broadway on March 19, 1981 after 31 previews and closed after only 12 performances.

Frank Rich in his New York Times review wondered why the play even opened after "weeks of delays" as it was "the kind of embarrassment that audiences do not quickly forget or forgive." Rich said the least of its sins were incompetence, being boring, and trashing a literary masterpiece. "What sets Lolita apart from ordinary failures is its abject mean-spiritedness," he wrote. "For all this play's babbling about love, it is rank with indiscriminate – and decidedly unearned – hate."

Ten years earlier, John Barry and Alan Jay Lerner's musical Lolita, My Love was a bomb, closing during tryouts in Boston. (Albee's Lolita also played in Boston before its Broadway launch.) Critics had scored the play, saying that the lack of Nabokov's authorial voice made the musical salacious. Albee put Nabokov on stage in his play, but it did not help.