3 ms·
Time zones and, worse, leap seconds interfere and needlessly complicate recorded time--the ability to compare two times and compute the time interval between th
by drallison 10y ago
Time zones and, worse, leap seconds interfere and needlessly complicate recorded time--the ability to compare two times and compute the time interval between them. Anyone who has tried to geophysical data from diverse locations and organizations knows how difficult that is.
Now would be a good time to adopt this change since the way standard units (mass, length, time, etc.) are being redefined.
- grzm 10y agoThere's more to time zones than just recorded time. We still need a way to coordinate synchronous human action around the globe. People are still going to wake, work, and sleep roughly with the sun. Time zones are one way of accomplishing this. What do you propose as an alternative? As an aside, please don't conflate the issues of leap seconds (or leap days, or daylight savings time) with time zones. They're at least three distinct topics. Interesting, yes, but distinct from time zones. I agree that management of temporal data across the globe is a challenging process. That's why some domains agree to operate in UTC all the time. And some of our common tooling (JavaScript in the browser comes immediately to mind) doesn't do a very good job in providing good methods for handing time zones. I think the answer to that is to improve our tooling. While removing time zones might make this recorded time issue go away, it seems problematic that we'd make a societal change to compensate for computer deficiencies. What do you think? In particular, how would society work without time zones? What do you see as the trade offs?