Normal Time

Normal Time is a proposed notation that expresses times and durations as normalized fractions of a cycle, where 0.0 is the start and 1.0 is completion. Days are written as bare fractions (0.25 is 6 AM, 0.5 is noon), years as fractions followed by a circular-arrow symbol (0.0 is January 1st, about 0.5 is July 1st), and human lives as fractions of an average lifespan of 76.0 years. Living people are marked with a hollow bullet and deceased people with a filled bullet, so a completed life reads as 1.0 followed by its age-at-death fraction, as in Mozart at 0.571. The article argues that this removes implicit judgments about longer lives being more complete and treats all completed lives as equally whole.