- 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 metric minutes (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.
- beat [2]
- a musical unit representing a single rhythmic stress. In most musical compositions,
beats are organized into measures, with
each measure containing a set number of beats, one of which carries a primary
or accented stress. At the same time, the tempo of the music is expressed
by setting a number of beats equal to a whole note. If there are m beats
in a measure and n beats in a whole note, then the fraction m/n is
called the time signature of the composition. For example, a waltz has a
time signature of 3/4 (3 beats per measure and 4 beats per whole note), while
a march has a time signature of 4/4.
- beat [3]
- a unit of relative time in acting, representing a short, silent pause for
dramatic effect. In the script, playwrights may specify a pause of one, two,
or more beats. The unit does not have a definite length, but the director
and the actors usually have an intuitive sense of how long a beat should
be at a specific point in the action.
- Beaufort scale
- an empirical scale, first devised by
the British admiral Sir Francis Beaufort (1774-1857), for estimating wind
speed by observing the effects of the wind. Using the scale, sailors can judge
the wind velocity by observing the wind's effects on the waves. There is a
corresponding scale for observers on land. For example, a moderate gale (32-38
miles per hour) is described as "force 7" on the Beaufort scale. The Beaufort
scale numbers come rather close to being a unit of measurement, because they
are equal to the whole number closest to 0.66 times the wind velocity in miles
per hour raised to the exponent 2/3 (Beaufort force = 0.66 × (velocity2/3)).
|
|