11 ms·

This wasn't the first time someone tried to make something better than time zones and our silly days-weeks-months-years system, and I doubt it will be the last.

This wasn't the first time someone tried to make something better than time zones and our silly days-weeks-months-years system, and I doubt it will be the last. It probably goes back much further, but I know that the French tried to decimalize time in the revolution when they were rationalizing all the other measurements. (see The Measure of All Things by Ken Alder, without question the finest nonfiction book Ive ever read.) The reason I think it doesn't catch on is that what we have really isn't too bad. If I'm thinking locally, everything works perfectly. If I'm trying to schedule a meeting with my colleagues in Singapore, I just remember a single number, 14 and apply it to my time. I know that right this minute, it's 21:40 in Singapore, and I know that the sun is down, everyone is home and preparing to go to bed. With UTC, I have to remember that the sun rises at 23:00UTC, do a little math, figure people show up in the office around three hours after the sunrise, etc. Toss in offices in London, Shanghai, Cape Town, Melbourne, etc. and it gets confusing. Modulo 24 math is simple enough that anyone can do it, and looking up the offset for a city is much easier than finding out a "normal" person's schedule in that city. Yes of course it gets a little silly with edge cases around DST and strange places (good trivia question: with what city does the South Pole share its time zone? A: Auckland, NZ, where the logistics are handled or anywhere in NZ really), but it works 99% of the time. Could we make it work if we just decided to? Of course! Implementing the metric system was much harder, and we did that (well, most of us did, of course) because there were huge benefits to being on the same measure. Are there equally huge benefits to being on the same time zone? I doubt it.

mseebach 9y ago
It's a near-perfect instance of Chesterton's fence: https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/ https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/ Also, I don't think the comparison with the metric system is apt. It took a pretty intuitive system and replaced it with another slightly less intuitive system, but which is vastly easier to use for a large number of tasks that a large number of people need to do frequently (specifically, arithmetic on measurements). Timezone abolishers will bring about benefits that only a very small number of people will enjoy, while causing very significant confusion to practically everybody.
- taejo 9y ago
  What about customary measurements was more intuitive than metric?
  - mseebach 9y ago
    More people have a foot to hand (ha!), than have a meter.
  - oldcynic 9y ago
    They tend to be easier to visualise stemming from so many having root in human scale. For instance an inch is the width of a thumb - it'll match scale on many common charts so easy approximation of distance. (one of many dubious claims of the origin of "rule of thumb") A foot consists of 4 palms or 12 thumbs (inches). A fathom is distance of arms outstretched (6') and so it goes on. Many fractions and multiples can easily be achieved without resorting to scale or rule. You can trace all the way back to Egyptian/Roman times though many had their standard size fiddled with over the years. The German foot was a bit longer, a French pound (livre) a little heavier etc. Of course if you're mucking about in a globalised world with software, or engines, satellites and suchlike SI units are a much better bet.
    - taejo 9y ago
      OK, I'll concede that on length measures between one inch and one fathom, customary measurements might have an intuition advantage (and indeed, I've been known to measure things with my own feet before converting to metres). Once we get to miles, I don't think that those have any advantage over kilometres (of course, we could have a hybrid system with kiloyards, to get the advantages of both). And what about fahrenheit and pounds?
      - mseebach 9y ago
        Fahrenheit is "tighter" and has a better resolution in the "human" range -- ie. 0-100 degrees fahrenheit is roughly the range of temperatures that humans can exist in, and one degree celcius is a bit too coarse for human comfort, thermostats generally give you at least half degrees celcius precision, but can get by with only whole degrees fahrenheit.
kuschku 9y ago
On the other hand, you have regions such as Spain (which should be UTC-1, but is, like the rest of continental Europe, UTC+1), or even China (where the western border of China is 5 hours offset to neighboring countries). Obviously, this means that you can’t rely on timezones to determine business times. And then there’s cultural differences, in some countries people will eat dinner between 21:00 and 22:00, in others around 18:00 – this has obvious consequences for business dinners.
- davidmr 9y ago
  I did say that there were edge cases. Is encoding no regional information in local time better than encoding some that works pretty well in many common cases?
- pedroaraujo 9y ago
  While timezones are not 100% reliable, they still provide us with a pretty good picture of the state in the region you want to know the time for. The problems you describe are due to cultural mismatches and these can't really be solved by any other system.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    The danger of a leaky abstraction is that the leaky abstraction makes it easy to ignore the edge cases, and then when you have to handle them, they come as a surprise.
- tincholio 9y ago
  > Obviously, this means that you can’t rely on timezones to determine business times. Of course you can, you just need to know in which timezone they are (except for the China case, maybe).
gnud 9y ago
I agree - mostly time is manageable. I really just wish we could ditch DST. DST is horrible because the rules vary from year to year, not just from place to place.
- AckSyn 9y ago
  Time management is extremely easy in our current system, and I agree with you on DST. Remove the "daylight" time and stick to the timezone's currently/typically used that are defined mostly by longitude (political lines notwithstanding).
aezell 9y ago
For humans our current time system works pretty well. But for machines and the software that manages them, our human implementation of time is rife with inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies. All the edge cases certainly waste time and money and, at their worst, might even be life-threatening.
- wongarsu 9y ago
  DST is complicated and has very questionable benefit. The length of months is inconsistent but not a big deal. Other than that I find our time system very straight forward: about 9 billion cesium phase transitions make a second, sixty seconds make a minute, sixty minutes make an hour, etc. Every six months check in with IERS whether a leap second is scheduled (or find it yourself by calculating mean solar timbre and checking its deviation from your atomic clock). If a leap second is due, the minute 23:59 has 59 or 61 seconds (displayed as 23:59:60). To get local time look up the local UTC offset and add it. If you calculate in local time, time may repeat one hour due to DST, so just stay in UTC and convert for display. We have a homemade problem because computers pretend that every minute has 60 seconds, but that's not the fault of the time system.
logfromblammo 9y ago
Except the SI unit of time is the second, not the milliday. Logically, a metric clock should count up seconds, and roll over to zero after 86399. People acclimated to that would likely gravitate towards scheduling around the nearest kilosecond. Meet you at 20? I might get off work late, so better make it 21, and I have to be in bed no later than 40, so I can be up by 72.
- petre 9y ago
  Exept you'd most likely go to bed at 79 and wake up at 28.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    You have fallen into the trap of assigning some sort of meaning to the numbers themselves, when the difference between them by modulo arithmetic is the important part. Some time systems roll over at midnight (24-hour base-60 clock) some roll over at noon (Julian day) and some roll over at both (12-hour base-60 clock). You shouldn't assume anything about a timekeeping system that has never actually been used. Besides that, if such a clock had time zones, they certainly wouldn't be aligned to hours. If it had no time zones, you would have to know where on Earth the hypothetical conversation took place, and what the typical sleep schedule is there. Though I'm sure people like me would be irritated by that leftover 400 second bit every day, where you don't get a whole kilosecond before rollover, and it may be that everyone arranges things by consensus such that it usually happens while people are sleeping, wherever they may be. So you might be right. Zero could correspond roughly to around 3 AM by the old clock, just like with the DST transitions.

mseebach 9y ago

It's a near-perfect instance of Chesterton's fence: https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/ https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/ Also, I don't think the comparison with the metric system is apt. It took a pretty intuitive system and replaced it with another slightly less intuitive system, but which is vastly easier to use for a large number of tasks that a large number of people need to do frequently (specifically, arithmetic on measurements). Timezone abolishers will bring about benefits that only a very small number of people will enjoy, while causing very significant confusion to practically everybody.

taejo 9y ago
What about customary measurements was more intuitive than metric?
- mseebach 9y ago
  More people have a foot to hand (ha!), than have a meter.
- oldcynic 9y ago
  They tend to be easier to visualise stemming from so many having root in human scale. For instance an inch is the width of a thumb - it'll match scale on many common charts so easy approximation of distance. (one of many dubious claims of the origin of "rule of thumb") A foot consists of 4 palms or 12 thumbs (inches). A fathom is distance of arms outstretched (6') and so it goes on. Many fractions and multiples can easily be achieved without resorting to scale or rule. You can trace all the way back to Egyptian/Roman times though many had their standard size fiddled with over the years. The German foot was a bit longer, a French pound (livre) a little heavier etc. Of course if you're mucking about in a globalised world with software, or engines, satellites and suchlike SI units are a much better bet.
  - taejo 9y ago
    OK, I'll concede that on length measures between one inch and one fathom, customary measurements might have an intuition advantage (and indeed, I've been known to measure things with my own feet before converting to metres). Once we get to miles, I don't think that those have any advantage over kilometres (of course, we could have a hybrid system with kiloyards, to get the advantages of both). And what about fahrenheit and pounds?
    - mseebach 9y ago
      Fahrenheit is "tighter" and has a better resolution in the "human" range -- ie. 0-100 degrees fahrenheit is roughly the range of temperatures that humans can exist in, and one degree celcius is a bit too coarse for human comfort, thermostats generally give you at least half degrees celcius precision, but can get by with only whole degrees fahrenheit.

kuschku 9y ago

On the other hand, you have regions such as Spain (which should be UTC-1, but is, like the rest of continental Europe, UTC+1), or even China (where the western border of China is 5 hours offset to neighboring countries). Obviously, this means that you can’t rely on timezones to determine business times. And then there’s cultural differences, in some countries people will eat dinner between 21:00 and 22:00, in others around 18:00 – this has obvious consequences for business dinners.

davidmr 9y ago
I did say that there were edge cases. Is encoding no regional information in local time better than encoding some that works pretty well in many common cases?
pedroaraujo 9y ago
While timezones are not 100% reliable, they still provide us with a pretty good picture of the state in the region you want to know the time for. The problems you describe are due to cultural mismatches and these can't really be solved by any other system.
- kuschku 9y ago
  The danger of a leaky abstraction is that the leaky abstraction makes it easy to ignore the edge cases, and then when you have to handle them, they come as a surprise.
tincholio 9y ago
> Obviously, this means that you can’t rely on timezones to determine business times. Of course you can, you just need to know in which timezone they are (except for the China case, maybe).

gnud 9y ago

I agree - mostly time is manageable. I really just wish we could ditch DST. DST is horrible because the rules vary from year to year, not just from place to place.

AckSyn 9y ago
Time management is extremely easy in our current system, and I agree with you on DST. Remove the "daylight" time and stick to the timezone's currently/typically used that are defined mostly by longitude (political lines notwithstanding).

aezell 9y ago

For humans our current time system works pretty well. But for machines and the software that manages them, our human implementation of time is rife with inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies. All the edge cases certainly waste time and money and, at their worst, might even be life-threatening.

wongarsu 9y ago
DST is complicated and has very questionable benefit. The length of months is inconsistent but not a big deal. Other than that I find our time system very straight forward: about 9 billion cesium phase transitions make a second, sixty seconds make a minute, sixty minutes make an hour, etc. Every six months check in with IERS whether a leap second is scheduled (or find it yourself by calculating mean solar timbre and checking its deviation from your atomic clock). If a leap second is due, the minute 23:59 has 59 or 61 seconds (displayed as 23:59:60). To get local time look up the local UTC offset and add it. If you calculate in local time, time may repeat one hour due to DST, so just stay in UTC and convert for display. We have a homemade problem because computers pretend that every minute has 60 seconds, but that's not the fault of the time system.

logfromblammo 9y ago

Except the SI unit of time is the second, not the milliday. Logically, a metric clock should count up seconds, and roll over to zero after 86399. People acclimated to that would likely gravitate towards scheduling around the nearest kilosecond. Meet you at 20? I might get off work late, so better make it 21, and I have to be in bed no later than 40, so I can be up by 72.

petre 9y ago
Exept you'd most likely go to bed at 79 and wake up at 28.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  You have fallen into the trap of assigning some sort of meaning to the numbers themselves, when the difference between them by modulo arithmetic is the important part. Some time systems roll over at midnight (24-hour base-60 clock) some roll over at noon (Julian day) and some roll over at both (12-hour base-60 clock). You shouldn't assume anything about a timekeeping system that has never actually been used. Besides that, if such a clock had time zones, they certainly wouldn't be aligned to hours. If it had no time zones, you would have to know where on Earth the hypothetical conversation took place, and what the typical sleep schedule is there. Though I'm sure people like me would be irritated by that leftover 400 second bit every day, where you don't get a whole kilosecond before rollover, and it may be that everyone arranges things by consensus such that it usually happens while people are sleeping, wherever they may be. So you might be right. Zero could correspond roughly to around 3 AM by the old clock, just like with the DST transitions.