8 ms·
I wouldn't mind everyone moving to UTC. Sure, only people in Greenwich would be able to eat lunch at 12 noon. But at least it would simplify my life as a prog
by fold 9y ago
I wouldn't mind everyone moving to UTC. Sure, only people in Greenwich would be able to eat lunch at 12 noon. But at least it would simplify my life as a programmer.
- irrational 9y agoYou might want to move to China. Even though the country "should" have 5+ timezones, it only has 1 (Beijing Standard Time).
- rwmj 9y agoOr any country, since timezones only have a 1 hour granularity. If you're in Edinburgh (same longitude as Plymouth) this is quite noticable. Be interesting to see the consequences of hyper-local timezones where the sun is always over your head at 12 noon. With modern computing it should be possible to have your watch adjust as you drive east-west ...
- fergbrain 9y agoTime zones can have any granularity desired. Most are 1 hour, several are 30 minutes (including in India and Australia), and a few are 45 minutes (in New Zealand, for example). There’s no rule though about granularity though.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- asteli 9y agoMost countries agree to use a 1-hour division, but not all. Iran's offset, for example, is +3:30.
- jjeaff 9y agoThere are actually a few 30 minute and I think even 15 minute timezones.
- FireBeyond 9y agoAnd then we need to track lat/longs for every timestamp! "Says here you arrived at 1.33pm! You were meant to be there at 1.30pm!" "But Sir, look, it was 57 miles east so I was early!"
- dmode 9y agoHow does this affect people living on Western borders in China ? Do they have really long days ?
- zanny 9y agoI imagine they get up when the sun rises (about 9am their time) and go home / retire before the sun sets (about 9pm). Their days are only "long" in the sense that they probably go to bed after midnight. They still have the same average number of hours in a day as anyone at their latitude and altitude. That is why all the over-complicated time systems are dumb. You don't actually give yourself more time. You over-complicate reality to suit cultural norms like "the sun rises at 6am" despite the fact most people will grow up never moving that far from where they are born. If the sun rose at 1am people would sleep from 4 to 12, not try to force a standard time schedule of 6am sunrises on an entire population. They already don't - people get up generally around their sunrises everywhere on Earth - they just change clocks to make that sunrise always be around 6am. Time zones and DST are an accommodation for moving across time zones so no matter where you go you can use the clock as a reference to solar noon, except in the dozens / hundreds of instances where you cannot. The consequence is that the complicated system is hard to track, makes cross-zone communication and scheduling a nightmare, and causes legitimate accidents when people do not know where the date lines are, when the times change, how they change (I think there is a stretch of Russian border where you can go 3 hours forward and backward in time in about 100km).
- odiroot 9y agoAs far as I remember it's not even an appropriate TZ for Beijing. More like central China time.
- fold 9y agoAlaska is close enough, it's wide enough to cover 4 timezones http://www.alaska.org/how-big-is-alaska http://www.alaska.org/how-big-is-alaska Granted most people live in the space of 1 or 2.
- HeavenFox 9y agoPeople say this all the time. But if you look at a population density map of China, you realize that the vast majority of people live within the natural GMT+8 range, and the western region is very sparsely populated.
- somecontext 9y agoFor some context in case anyone was curious, my calculations suggest that ~3/4 of China = ~1 billion people are in the main band of GMT+8 (or slightly east), ~1/4 = ~300 million people are naturally in GMT+7, and only ~2% = 25 million people are at GMT+6 (or slightly west). The province of Sichuan (capital Chengdu), with a population of ~80 million people, is the most prominent province naturally one time zone west of Beijing.
- mjevans 9y agoI'd rather they just remove numbers from most 'clocks' (for humans) and instead define things like "morning" "lunch" "evening" as official designations relative to UTC (but humans would normally not see that offset) and list times like... (City) Morning + 2.5 hours
- nsxwolf 9y agoWhat? No really, time with numbers seems to work just fine.
- Johnny555 9y agohow does that make anything easier or better? Every locality will still have a "morning" designation, so when you schedule a meeting with your coworker across the country, you still need to look up his "morning" time so you don't schedule it before he gets to work.
- kgwgk 9y agoWe could call them lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers and compline. Fun fact: noon comes from “nona hora” (ninth hour), which actually was mid-afternoon.
- viewtransform 9y agoThe Japanese came up with such a 'temporal hour system'. An ingenious clock to display time that changes with the seasons is this Myriad Year Clock built in 1851 https://youtu.be/1moRfIXCfak?t=886 https://youtu.be/1moRfIXCfak?t=886
- Ajedi32 9y agoSo you want to abolish time zones: https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
- drb91 9y agoSeems like a long winded way of saying "We use time to figure out where the sun is". Obviously, there are many other non-sun-oriented uses of time, most of which are immensely complicated by timezones.
- Ajedi32 9y agoWhich is why, for those use-cases, we use UTC.
- zanny 9y agoExcept if we did abolish time zones rather than asking Google "what time is it in Melbourne" you ask it "is it the waking hours in Melbourne". In either case you don't know what time to call Melbourne. You either need to know a complicated and inconsistent system of time zones, or you just ask the same question in terms of when the sun rises and sets. You don't get out of asking a question, you don't lose any information (there is a 1 to 1 equivalence between what time it is somewhere and when its noon there, you could ask either question and have the exact same thought process comparing a time to "safe" hours to call someone). That article argues that the current system is some miraculous saver of sanity by solving all the problems associated with telling if someone is "awake" or not in a certain time zone. Except I have two cousins, both living in the same time zone, one of which wakes up at 6am and the other wakes up at 4pm. Also, from personal experience calling people both without and with substantial time zone difference, you never know when its a good time to call someone else. They might have had a long day and took a nap. They might not be home when you think they would be. They might be engaged in an activity they don't want to be distracted from. For practical uses of synchronous communication you need to have agreements on when to call in the first place. If I'm calling someone I know, its because I know from experience when they are available, relative to my time. It does not matter if they are in Munich or Tokyo or down the street, I need to know in advance their availability for that call regardless of silly contrivances like the culturally normative sleep cycles of the region I'm calling into. Because at the end of the day, there are still tens of thousands of people in Melbourne working the night shift.
- rb808 9y agoAlso if we could decimalize it too that would be great. Not sure if I want 10 hours or day, or ten in the morning and ten afternoon, but would be a big improvement over the current dozen.
- lacker 9y agoWe can just start using kilosecond, megasecond, gigasecond. Like in Vernor Vinge's novel Deepness in the Sky ;-)
- teeray 9y agoAs nice as that would be for code, people would still be left with trying to answer "is this a reasonable time to contact someone?" across great distances. The utility provided by time zones is a function for us to take our local time and determine whether or not we're interrupting someone's evening or sleep. Not to mention, travel alarm clocks everywhere would need to be sold with a book of "reasonable waking times" for different cities, which is really no different than the time zone offsets we have today. I would completely agree with moving to UTC if we weren't animals beholden to a diurnal sleep cycle.
- nerpderp83 9y agoSeeing as almost no comms are direct, they are all intermediated by code, let the receiver decide. I for one would decide to never get contacted. :)
- Osiris 9y ago> trying to answer "is this a reasonable time to contact someone?" across great distances This is a problem right now. My brother lives in Japan but I have no idea if 4pm my time is a reasonable time for him or not without going online and looking it up. Going to UTC would make scheduling meetings really easy because you'd just say "Meeting at 13:00" and for some people that's the afternoon and others it's the morning and some it's the middle of the night, but there's no timezone math to be done. I'm doing interviews right now and I have always put "I'm available 10am to 4pm (Mountain)" or I get an interview for "3:30pm EST" (which I then have to think about is 1:30pm my time). If there were no timezones we wouldn't have to do all that.
- acjacobson 9y agoWouldn’t you have the same problem of availability though? The issue is not whether the meeting time is the middle of the night - you can do the same thing now by saying the meeting is at 4pm EST and not being concerned about what time it is elsewhere. Making the time UTC everywhere doesn’t resolve that a person in Japan at the same UTC time simply will not attend the meeting because they’re asleep at that time. Switching to UTC everywhere simply changes the question form what time is it there? To are they asleep or awake there? It doesn’t seem like this makes the scheduling aspect easier because regardless of what the clock says you always have to ask the availability question.
- Johnny555 9y agoNo it wouldn't -- users of your applications will still want to see "human" time in different areas, so rather than a (relatively) well defined Timezone standard, you'll need to keep a table of accepted working hours, meal times, etc for each region. At least now you can tell them that it's 5pm in their selected area so they can decide what that means.
- gt_ 9y agoThis is the exact problem it would solve, once "everyone" had actually switched.
- Johnny555 9y agoHow does it solve anything? If everyone was on UTC and I want to schedule a meeting with my coworker across the country, I still need the application to tell me what time standard business hours are wherever he is located So the developer still has to do the UTC->Localtime lookup. Plus, when I travel, I have to keep a chart of local "human-time", so I know that when it's 03:00, it's time for lunch.
- zanny 9y agoYou always have to ask the question "what times are good for you?" because everyone lives on a different schedule. With global UTC it just means the times each of you give don't need to go through a complicated conversion process to interpret.
- gt_ 9y agoI would mourn the full effect of "midnight" poetics, as in Eric Clapton's "After Midnight" or Gladys Knight's "Midnight Train To Georgia".
- qbrass 9y agoChange "midnight" to "mid-night" and things work well enough. "It's 5 O'Clock Somewhere" loses all meaning, along with anything else referencing the 9-5 workday.
- askvictor 9y agoAnd good riddance to the 9-5 workday; it's a relic of an work-era long gone. In terms of poetry and art, well yes, people will not quite understand the reference eventually, but this is already the case with older art (who understands the references in 20's folk music?)
- rjbwork 9y agoI actually have my laptop at work and desktop at home set to UTC. I eat lunch at 17:00. I go to sleep at 04:00. Not too difficult, just do it.
- Taniwha 9y agoI live in NZ, I work in California, I get up at 5am in (my) winter, 6am for a few weeks in spring/autumn, 7am in summer - I have breakfast (lunch at) 7/8/9am, I quit at 1/2/3 In case you haven't figured it out DST transitions go the other way in the southern hemisphere - UTC would make so much sense (and for me being at roughly UTC+12 wouldn't be such a big deal) having said that I'm a big fan of just being on permanent DST, more daylight evening time for people
- rhombocombus 9y agoI agree, besides with most of the tech we use people can set their notifications to not get disturbed while they are sleeping. I don't really care if my lunch is at 20:00 or 12:00, but when I work across time zones and there is a mismatch because of seasonal time change it can get really infuriating. Pilots adopted UTC for similar reasons a long time ago, except in their case the potential mixups had a high risk of fatality rather than annoyance and inconvenience.
- ErnestedCode 9y agoThat will work until Elon Musk opens his Mars settlement. Then we will have to rename "Universal Coordinated Time" to "Earth Coordinated Time" and have separate "Planet Times".
- kej 9y agoWe already have separate planet times, for what it's worth [1]. I can't find it now, but I remember listening to an interview with a scientist involved with one of the Mars rovers who converted his whole family to Martian time for a few weeks or months after his rover landed, since those were the hours he was keeping for work. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timekeeping_on_Mars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timekeeping_on_Mars
- rspeele 9y agoWhat about the poor Hawaiians? For whom it would only be Thursday until early afternoon, at which point it becomes Friday by the UTC overlords' decree. "When are you free for a meeting?" "Friday's good for me." "Should we do Friday afternoon, or sleep on it and meet Friday morning?"
- TheAceOfHearts 9y agoEveryone should start using 24hr clocks as well. It would remove a ton of ambiguities. Oh, and using ISO8601 everywhere. Dates should always be represented as [YYYY]-[MM]-[DD]. Seriously, why do some systems even support other calendar systems?