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This hits the nail on the head. Abandoning time zones would only make sense if there were no more need for time translation. But you'd still need to translate f
by minznerjosh 10y ago
This hits the nail on the head. Abandoning time zones would only make sense if there were no more need for time translation. But you'd still need to translate for the sake of biological clocks, and without time zones it would become more challenging to communicate that translation.
I would be in favor of doing away with DST and also eschewing AM/PM in favor of a 24-hour clock. I'm surprised this article didn't mention that.
- snvzz 10y ago> This hits the nail on the head. Abandoning time zones would only make sense if there were no more need for time translation. But you'd still need to translate for the sake of biological clocks, and without time zones it would become more challenging to communicate that translation. I argue it'd avoid mistakes, such as the assumption it's dark at the other clock's 18h because it is here.
- bluejekyll 10y agoYeah agree completely. And keeping zones is important to understand workdays. I wouldn't mind dropping named time zones completely in favor of UTC+Offset, I always end up looking that up, annoyingly. Or just name the zones based on the offset. So NY would be -5. We could for humans write time with the ecoding, similar to ISO-8601, but it would just be 15:30-5 for 3:30pm EST. While we're at it. Can we make all the months standard lengths too? 30 day months, with 1 New Year's Day (for a fun party) and every four years a bonus New Year's Day! For an especially big party :) Edit: as stated below I screwed up my (basic) math. 13 months 28 days is better. What should we call the 13th month?
- ISL 10y ago12*30+1 = 361. One solar year: 365.24219 x (86400s days).
- perilunar 10y ago> 30 day months, with 1 New Year's Day And the other 4 days?
- zeta0134 10y agoYour math doesn't work out there though. If we had 30 day months, we would end up with 360 days spread among 12 months, and an extra 5 days leftover. 28 day months make far more sense, would align nicely with your proposed single New Year's day, and have the added bonus of aligning with our 7-day week system quite nicely. This ends up with 13 months altogether, and hey, it turns out that 28 days is closer to a lunar cycle, so the full moon would end up happening at roughly the same time every month. Not perfectly of course, but with the chaos that is our solar system, I'll take what I can get. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
- bluejekyll 10y agoAh. I screwed up my math. 28 sounds perfect. I rely on unit tests for this stuff these days ;)
- jhbadger 10y agoThat first example (12 30 day months with 5 or 6 days outside months) was actually used in practice in post-revolutionary France (and again during the Paris Commune). I'm not sure keeping 7-day weeks is really a plus -- the French Revolutionary calendar used 10-day "decades" which align with the metric system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar
- wernercd 10y agoMetric? Yeah... us Americans would never go for that garbage... :)
- bluejekyll 10y agoI think you mean "we Americans..." And yeah. I mean 10 is only divisible by 2 and 5 where 12 is much more flexible in giving us 2, 3, 4, and 6. At least that was my grandfather's argument. I annoying need to keep Metric and Standard wrenches and such for working on various things. Eventually it won't matter as the US will mostly source parts built over-seas where it will only make sense to adopt metric. And then the Standard system will only be left on road signs and temeratures, oh that's pretty much already happened.
- irascible 10y agoI vote a 256 day year, of 8 , 16 day months. Each month is 4, 4 day weeks, with odd weeks being mandatory global time off. New years is a one bMonth long global celebration, also time off. This has a beneficial side effect of making date handling easier for 8 bit microcontrollers, so when the singularity happens, the superAI will take pity on us because we showed mercy to its ancestors.
- bbcbasic 10y agoThat's a hell of a lot of Earth angular momentum you need to destroy!
- edoceo 10y agoSmarch. From the Simpsons
- eutropia 10y agohttp://www.mithrandir.com/Tranquility/tranquility.html http://www.mithrandir.com/Tranquility/tranquility.html I think you're proposing this, 13 months named for scientists, one day outside the year.
- flukus 10y agoAldrin gets a day but Gargarin doesn't?
- bluejekyll 10y agoYes. Perfect. I've never seen that before. Thanks for sharing. It will never sell in the US though, the mere inclusion of Darwin will make it a political nightmare as people would be convinced we're atheists trying to kill their god.
- reflexive 10y ago> people would be convinced we're atheists trying to kill their god When the reality is much less exciting... replacing the old gods with a deified version of Science.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Asooka 10y agoOr, we use Latin names of numbers. So, Unusber, Duober, Tresber, Quattorber, Quinber, Sexber [rename as necessary for America], September, October, November, December, Undecimber, Duodecimber, Tredecimber.
- fao_ 10y agoUnusber It might not be correct, but I would prefer "Unober"
- talideon 10y agoThese would be better names from a purely phonological point of view: Unusper, Tresper, Quattober, Sexper. That way you don't have awkward clusters of both voiced and unvoiced consonants. The -ber affix having originally come from mensris (-mens-ris > *-membris > -ber), devoicing the initial 'b' to 'p' in those circumstances is reasonable enough. 'Quattober' is a simplification that makes it fit the pattern better. Alternatively, you would rely on the ordinals, dropping the -us ending and replacing it with -ilis as in Sextilis and Quintilis.
- cheiVia0 10y agoWorkdays are not worth keeping either. With the gig economy, you can't know if someone works at night or during the day, or morning or Sundays or whatever.
- Houshalter 10y ago28 is perfect because it's divisible by 7. So every day lands on the same day of every month and every year. Every 1rst is a Sunday. But really, while we are on the topic of reform, is there any particular reason the week should be 7 days? Or that there should be a week at all? Time keeping is also weird. Base 24 and 60 is so arbitrary. Make it base ten, and you can express date and time easily. Right now is 6.976. The 9 is the hour, the 76 is the minute, etc. And then if we are talking about radical standards reform, let's do away with base 10 entirely and go to 12. It carries more precision in less space, is much more divisible, and has more patterns in the multiplication tables. I love thinking about how more optimal the world could be if not for coordination problems and other issues.
- reflexive 10y ago> let's do away with base 10 entirely and go to 12 Why not hexadecimal, to help accelerate the singularity?
- fsiefken 10y ago12 is the most optimal and usable base for humans - James Grime explains it at Numberphile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6xJfP7-HCc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6xJfP7-HCc
- wan23 10y agoYour radical time standard reform undoes your first change - it's already based on the number 12, remember? 24 is two 12-hour periods - A.M. and P.M. and 60 minutes/seconds is 12 five-minute/second periods (the numbers on a clock).
- Houshalter 10y agoIt's based on 24, which is divisible by 12. But that's not quite the same as having a clock that is based on the base you use. A base 12 clock would work just like a decimal clock, just with 2 extra symbols. It would not look like the base 24 clock with base 60 minutes and base 60 seconds.
- nfixx 10y agoActually, in ETHIOPIA, it already is 13 MONTHS always! https://encrypted.google.com/#newwindow=1&q=ethiopia+13+months https://encrypted.google.com/#newwindow=1&q=ethiopia+13+mont... I was shocked, being a visitor here, when sometime about a month ago, we celebrated new year (after the 13th month), while the rest of the world was in the middle of the Gregorian calendar!
- mahyarm 10y agoYou can do 19 months with 19 days with a 4 or 5 day holiday time in between. That way the number of months are equal to the number of days.
- bench_soup 10y agoYou can start using the 'calendrier pataphysique' :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'Pataphysics#Pataphysical_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'Pataphysics#Pataphysical_cale...
- logfromblammo 10y agoI believe this "new calendar" idea has already been tried several times. Religion and agriculture always seem to be the sticking points. Months are hardly necessary, anyway. Wouldn't quarters be better? Have 4 quarters of 13 * 7-day weeks each. Designate the vernal equinox as day 0 of the calendar, follow it with the 4 91-day quarters, and tack on leap days after the 4th quarter according to the Gregorian calendar rules. So you end up with dates like the 41st of Spring, or the 82nd of Summer. New Year's Day would be the 0th (nilth) of Spring, and Leap Day the 92nd of Winter.
- restalis 10y ago"Months are hardly necessary, anyway. Wouldn't quarters be better?" Months are, more or less, related to the moon periods, just like the year is to earth period. And most of the world has year quarters, called seasons. Seasons are there (in front of our eyes) to stay, regardless of how we'll choose to distribute the days of the year.
- ywain 10y ago> What should we call the 13th month? Undecimber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undecimber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undecimber
- xom 10y agoWhile we're at it, how about defining the offsets the other way around, so we can write 15:30+5 == 15:30 EST == 20:30 UTC?
- cyberferret 10y agoBut the current concept of time is also based on the outdated industrial age concept of a 'working day' being 9-5. I doubt many of the people on HN for instance, work those set hours in this day and age. Nowadays it is purely a convenience factor to keep the worker drones in the same hive so they can gather for the next interminable meeting. With the rise of remote working, and other forms of communication tools, no one has to be constrained by those arbitrary work hours any more. I personally do my best work late at night and well into the early hours, and have indeed had remote meetings with overseas team members at 10 or 11 pm my time because it actually suits me better than 3pm my time, which is when I usually try and sleep off my post lunch lethargy. (Note: I see the irony in 'post lunch' - The concept of 3 set meals a day is also another byproduct of the agricultural/industrial age that is not really as relevant in modern society where families tend not to dine together at a set time any longer).
- grzm 10y agoThe working day is based on when humans naturally want to be active. Remote work, while increasing, is a fraction of work that's actually done. Humans are wired (in the majority) for the day, and our time conventions match that.
- Hydraulix989 10y agoYes, it's tough being an outlier. I am a night owl, not a morning lark -- this is my biologically-determined chronotype, not something I do because I'm lazy. It's always been a struggle to force myself to conform to society's idea of "normal hours," especially in high school when I had to wake up at 6 AM. I realize most people struggle relating to this; try imagining starting your day at 10 PM, if you're a "normal" morning lark.
- salmon30salmon 10y agoFor those who live in our Ivory Tower of the software industry that may be true, but the 9-5 concept is not outdated for a vast majority of working humans on the planet. Lets not project our reality onto the rest of the world.
- adiabatty 10y agoThe author likely neglected to mention Swatch .beats for a reason: only a tiny handful of people used them.
- ProxCoques 10y agoI get the impression Americans don't use 24-hour clock much. In Europe it's pretty much standard if you want to communicate time reliably. Or am I mistaken about the American love of am/pm?
- emodendroket 10y agoPeople use the term "military time" interchangeably with "24-hour clock" if that helps.
- w-ll 10y agoPeople do, but also people might not. I can see offering the same setting but with two different labels, or like in a dropdown.
- arcticfox 10y agoYou're correct. We call the 24-hour clock "military time" and basically no one uses it casually.
- iamdave 10y agoI do. Granted, I was in the military-I passively hate it when people call it 'military time' (passively meaning I mentally roll my eyes when someone says it), but I've been using it since middle school when I first even learned it was a thing. Mostly because it made sense right away. There are 24 hours in the day. Why are we recycling numbers in our time system? No really, why?
- melvinmt 10y ago> But you'd still need to translate for the sake of biological clocks I fail to see what you mean. Do you mean your biological clock needs to see it's 12pm to believe that it's the middle of the day? Why can't your biological clock just settle on any arbitrary number?
- oldmanjay 10y agoThe point was that people have a rhythm dictated more by the sun's relative position than the time on the clock.
- curun1r 10y ago> eschewing AM/PM in favor of a 24-hour clock Even if we keep AM/PM, we should make it make sense. It should switch when the numbers roll over. Having 11am be followed by 12pm is nonsensical. The fix for this, as any programmer will tell you, is to recognize that 12 is really 0...we've got an off-by-one bug. Midnight should be 0am and noon should be 0pm.
- nayuki 10y agoYes, this proposal does make things a lot easier because: twelveHour = twentyFourHour mod 12 But instead with the status quo, we need to add this extra line of logic: if twelveHour == 0 then twelveHour = 12
- colejohnson66 10y ago> But instead with the status quo, we need to add this extra line of logic: > if twelveHour == 0 then twelveHour = 12 That's because humans naturally begin counting from 1, not 0. Mainly because we are counting objects, not adding an array index to a pointer.
- fnj 10y agoTime is not a count. Time is a linear displacement, just like distance. As such, it only makes sense to start with 0. Did you ever see a ruler that starts with "1" at the very end? Of course not. It starts with "0", but they just don't bother to print the "0". One inch is a displacement of "1" from the beginning. One hour is a displacement of "1" from the beginning. It's pretty stupid to arbitrarily call the beginning "12".
- inimino 10y agoDST is mentioned in the first two paragraphs. > We need to deep-six not just daylight saving time, but [time zones]
- mvindahl 10y agoAgreed. DST is just plain silliness for no gain. In a century everyone will have a hearty laugh at the superstitious timekeeping ritual of their ancestors. And the 24 hours clock is just a matter of notation. In large parts of the world it's the default one for specifying time. I've worked in several companies with global offices and time translation was never an issue. Of course you'd need to accept the fact that people in other parts of the world would be in the office at different times of the day. But there is no "tech fix" for that.
- jdmichal 10y agoI'd rather make DST permanent. The decision between DST or not-DST is arbitrary -- one puts you ahead of true solar noon and one puts you behind. I'd rather be ahead, since that keeps the sun up later.
- Kurimo 10y agoExcept the economy is becoming more globalized and many people's jobs have them working at odd times anyway. I used to work 4pm-1am EST and so my schedule aligned more closely with people in hawaii and australia so I ended up befriending people in those locations on the internet since they were awake when I was. I think this will be a more and more common thing as more of our lives ends up online. It won't matter when the sun shines so much as what is normal to the individual.