23 ms·

I think in the future the number of people commuting to their jobs will be decreasing. Anyway, let's keep to the present. You could optimize the location of th

by barnacs 10y ago

I think in the future the number of people commuting to their jobs will be decreasing. Anyway, let's keep to the present. You could optimize the location of the zones for traffic. For example, we know that everyone will sleep at some point, so the resting zone could be at the center of the city. Then throughout the day, people would commute in and out of the center in all directions at about a constant rate. That's already a lot better if you consider road and parking space utilization, than 2x1 hour rushes in specific directions like we have now. The main benefit is spreading traffic across time, not space though. Also, rush hours are not limited to traffic. You can experience them in stores, offices, restaurants, pretty much everywhere as most people with 9-5 jobs try and run their errands in the very limited time before/after work. And time wouldn't change between zones, neither would our measurement of time. This is all in addition to abolishing time zones. Once you dump the notion of 'local time night is for sleeping, local time 9-5 is for working' all this seems like the next logical step to me.

grzm 10y ago
"Once you dump the notion of 'local time night is for sleeping, local time 9-5 is for working' all this seems like the next logical step to me." Can you expand on this? I read this as setting up schedules to potentially rotate everyone's sleep/work schedules, independent of the diurnal cycle. Though I wonder if I'm not reading too much into it.
- barnacs 10y ago
  I didn't really mean to imply that, but it would be interesting to see how reliant humans are on ~24 hour cycles apart from convention. It may be more deeply rooted in the way of nature than our work/sleep/leisure schedule within such cycles and changes in temperature and natural light may throw off our biology but with so many advances in artifical lighting and temperature control we shouldn't be so strict as to not even experiment with it :)
  - grzm 10y ago
    Thanks for clarifying! There's been quite a bit of research on circadian rhythms. I've heard that even our gut bacteria follow a daily cycle, slightly independent of other body systems. Pretty wild, eh? And there's been recently research on the effects of artificial light on sleep and circadian rhythms as well. If we're going to have these kinds of experiments, can I opt out? :)
    - barnacs 10y ago
      Maybe the gut bacteria simply follow a cycle based on our eating habits? But who knows, those things are weird and I keep running into them a lot lately. The experiments are not mandatory at this point, though I would love it if more people were inclined and allowed to experiment freely with what works best for them. For some reason I feel like most people don't have their schedule determined by trial and error :)
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    Our bodies respond to natural light. If we're deprived of it we run on more of a 25-hour cycle.
emodendroket 10y ago
The reason why the clock became important in the industrial world was that it allows coordination of large, modern enterprises. I'm not sure how this system really solves this problem, nor do I understand why you need to start messing with time zones to have people live in an essentially pre-industrial way (you can just let them ignore the clock, after all).
- barnacs 10y ago
  Without time zones, we'd still have clocks and a universally consistent description of time, which allows for coordination. What specific problems are you thinking of that would harder/impossible to solve without time zones? I guess you're right that the things I describe would be possible with or without timezones. It's just that the premise of abolishing time zones is what made me question whether the heavy dependence of our lifestyle on the 'local time of the day' is justified. We could just "ignore" the local time, but some activites seem to be mutually exclusive in the same neighborhood, such as sleeping and operating loud heavy machinery. So if there's no widely accepted temporal separation, we must take spatial separation more seriously. Also, if everyone "ignored" local time globally, then time zones would become obviously meaningless :)
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    What? You're talking about having micro-timezones for neighborhoods, I thought, not abolishing timezones and making everyone use UTC.

by barnacs 10y ago

grzm 10y ago

"Once you dump the notion of 'local time night is for sleeping, local time 9-5 is for working' all this seems like the next logical step to me." Can you expand on this? I read this as setting up schedules to potentially rotate everyone's sleep/work schedules, independent of the diurnal cycle. Though I wonder if I'm not reading too much into it.

barnacs 10y ago
I didn't really mean to imply that, but it would be interesting to see how reliant humans are on ~24 hour cycles apart from convention. It may be more deeply rooted in the way of nature than our work/sleep/leisure schedule within such cycles and changes in temperature and natural light may throw off our biology but with so many advances in artifical lighting and temperature control we shouldn't be so strict as to not even experiment with it :)
- grzm 10y ago
  Thanks for clarifying! There's been quite a bit of research on circadian rhythms. I've heard that even our gut bacteria follow a daily cycle, slightly independent of other body systems. Pretty wild, eh? And there's been recently research on the effects of artificial light on sleep and circadian rhythms as well. If we're going to have these kinds of experiments, can I opt out? :)
  - barnacs 10y ago
    Maybe the gut bacteria simply follow a cycle based on our eating habits? But who knows, those things are weird and I keep running into them a lot lately. The experiments are not mandatory at this point, though I would love it if more people were inclined and allowed to experiment freely with what works best for them. For some reason I feel like most people don't have their schedule determined by trial and error :)
- emodendroket 10y ago
  Our bodies respond to natural light. If we're deprived of it we run on more of a 25-hour cycle.

emodendroket 10y ago

The reason why the clock became important in the industrial world was that it allows coordination of large, modern enterprises. I'm not sure how this system really solves this problem, nor do I understand why you need to start messing with time zones to have people live in an essentially pre-industrial way (you can just let them ignore the clock, after all).

barnacs 10y ago
Without time zones, we'd still have clocks and a universally consistent description of time, which allows for coordination. What specific problems are you thinking of that would harder/impossible to solve without time zones? I guess you're right that the things I describe would be possible with or without timezones. It's just that the premise of abolishing time zones is what made me question whether the heavy dependence of our lifestyle on the 'local time of the day' is justified. We could just "ignore" the local time, but some activites seem to be mutually exclusive in the same neighborhood, such as sleeping and operating loud heavy machinery. So if there's no widely accepted temporal separation, we must take spatial separation more seriously. Also, if everyone "ignored" local time globally, then time zones would become obviously meaningless :)
- emodendroket 10y ago
  What? You're talking about having micro-timezones for neighborhoods, I thought, not abolishing timezones and making everyone use UTC.