12 ms·

The Day of Two Noons

64 points by danso 7y ago

oeuviz 7y ago
Sometimes the time changed every few minutes. Wait, what did it do in between?
huffmsa 7y ago
> Oh, my goodness, there'd be a couple of years of bumps and grinds as people readjusted their schedules. Except for the literal billions of computers which will need replacing and trillions of lines of code you're going to need to rewrite, sure. And redeploy the entire GPS system. And the code running on the mainframe in the back room of the basement which no one has touched in literal decades. Seems.... Risky
- henrikschroder 7y ago
  "readjusted their schedules" is such a ridiculous hand-waving away of serious problems with the idea. One of the biggest problems is that weekdays completely cease to make sense. With timezones, the day of the week changes at midnight, when most people are asleep. You wake up in the morning, it's a new weekday, and it's the same weekday for as long as the sun is in the sky. If we abolish timezones and choose UTC as the one time, the day of the week will change at 5pm in San Francisco. Say that you have an establishment that is normally closed on Sundays. It's 4pm on a Saturday, do you close in an hour because it is then Sunday? Or do you change your "schedule" so that your establishment is closed on SundayMondays instead? Or perhaps you keep it closed on SaturdaySundays? Because the concept of "Sunday" doesn't make sense anymore, "Sunday" is no longer a contiguous period of normal waking hours. In San Francisco. In London it's business as usual. But in Sydney the day of the week changes at 10am. When is "Sunday morning"? 9am Sunday morning is the day after 10am Sunday morning. Every week has two Sunday mornings now. (And two Monday mornings!) Which one of them did you mean? Adjusting computer systems is much, much simpler than getting humans to accept this idiotic system.
  - erinaceousjones 7y ago
    > Adjusting computer systems is much, much simpler than getting humans to accept this idiotic system. Agreed -- I think of timezones much like coordinate systems: They're all representing the same point in (space|time), just in a slightly different format, each with different benefits/setbacks for biological things vs electronical things. Like latitudes and longitudes vs UTM coordinates vs local grid coordinates. "Number of milliseconds since January 1st 1970" can still describe the same global time-point as "First of July, 2019, noon". Timezones are there for people. Everything else can normalize on UTC. That being said, I think the "universal" in coordinated universal time is a bit of a misnomer -- at some point in our interstellar future, are we going to have to start thinking more about factoring in time dilation? :-) we already have "coordinated Mars time".. Are we going to have an intergalactic day of many noons..
  - evandev 7y ago
    And getting humans to accept the system is easier than changing laws that specify when things can be open/closed. E.g. The US Postal Service, drinking establishments, hunting laws.
  - z2 7y ago
    And even if those adjustments are somehow accepted, travelling anywhere longitudinally will be a world of pain to the traveler, to re-learn what should be common sense on the 'local' time to wake up, time for lunch, days of the weekend...
    - henrikschroder 7y ago
      If only there was a system, some kind of longitudinal "zones" maybe, that would help your smartphone auto-adjust so it could show you when things like working hours, lunch, afternoon, etc occurs in the place you're in...
- gwbas1c 7y ago
  Computers use UTC internally
- jerf 7y ago
  "Except for the literal billions of computers which will need replacing and trillions of lines of code you're going to need to rewrite, sure." If anything, it's the computers that would have the easiest time of things. Time is already so random and janky that on the whole the computing world has dealt with it reasonably well. It would "just" mean one more entry for every timezone in the Olson timezone DB, and that's a lot of the work right there. However, by the same token, if you want to get a sense of just how impossible this is going to be to get anyone to agree to from the political side, a read through the comments in the timezone DB can be constructive, such as: https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/master/europe https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/master/europe It'll really show you what anyone who thinks they can convince the whole world to change is up against.
- firethief 7y ago
  None of those things use local time internally...
- TheOtherDave 7y ago
  I’m under the possibly mistaken impression that most computers already do everything in UTC and the “local time” which gets displayed is just calculated from that.
FearNotDaniel 7y ago
File under the same category as: - everyone switches to Dvorak keyboards - British motorists start driving on the right* - United States adopts the metric system - Daily Telegraph admits a hard Brexit may have negative consequences for the population as a whole * yes, I know, Dagen H, but 2019 UK is very different from 1967 Sweden
- henrikschroder 7y ago
  Well, switching to metric and switching to right-hand driving would be good things, painful in the short perspective, but extremely beneficial in the long perspective. Abolishing time zones is just an incredibly dumb idea, and the drawbacks heavily outweigh the benefits if you actually think about it. So I'm actually glad that human inertia makes it impossible to do.
  - bostonpete 7y ago
    I wonder how beneficial switching to the metric system would really be. It's trivial to convert between systems if need be and pretty much all serious engineering/science work (where confusion can be costly) is done using the metric system these days anyways.
    - falcor84 7y ago
      >Despite this being a "solved problem"(TM), it's not really trivial in any meaningful sense, neither for regular people nor for developers creating a system that should deal with units in both systems.
      - bostonpete 7y ago
        It really is trivial for "regular" people as everyone has a device in their pocket that can quickly convert to any unit you want (which is an infrequent thing to need in daily life). As for developers, there's lots of changes we could impose on the world to make our (developers) lives easier but easing the burden on developers should rarely be a consideration when considering such changes IMO.
henrikschroder 7y ago
Obligatory: https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
- emiliobumachar 7y ago
  Definitely a great resource. It explains steady-state drawbacks of universal time, that is, drawbacks that would keep existing even after everyone has adapted.
madengr 7y ago
GMT is used in ham radio too. Gives me an excuse for s 24 hour watch.
telesilla 7y ago
"William F. Allen realized that time is not just some objective measurement of where the sun is in the sky. It is also about the needs of society" As I wait for my remote team member half-a-world away to get online so we can have our meeting and I can go to lunch while she has her breakfast, this rings so true.
sandworm101 7y ago
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/invention-of-standard-time-feature https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/invention-... The invention of standard time was more complex, more international, than america's NPR would have us believe. On july 1st, let us also remember that basketball was invented by a canadian. (Go raptors).
lalaithion 7y ago
https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
nmeofthestate 7y ago
This is a great idea. While we're at it, we should standardise "up" so everyone is on the same page regardless of their location. "Up" should be the vector pointing at Alpha Centauri. This would make it so much easier for people around the world to talk about directions.
- opwieurposiu 7y ago
  I was on an airliner getting ready for takeoff, the captain gives his announcement we are flying to such and such will be there in 3 hours etc. This was in the USA and the captain had an australian accent. At the end of his announcement he said "And to the passenger that expressed concern, please be assured that I have received extensive training as to the direction of "up" in the northern hemisphere.
- chicob 7y ago
  A "vector pointing at Alpha Centauri" is an incomplete definition, since a vector has a magnitude and direction. Also, Alpha Centauri has a declination of –60° 50′ 02.3737″, which makes it necessary to adjust for the time of the day. That would make people dizzy, which is unfortunate. So I propose the following very simple definition: Up - The direction defined by the position vector of Polaris with reference to the center of the Earth (not to be confused with North). Down - The direction opposite of Up (See also: South).
  - munificent 7y ago
    > since a vector has a magnitude and direction. How is the direction represented?
    - archgoon 7y ago
      A normalized vector; i.e. a vector with magnitude 1.
  - saalweachter 7y ago
    This does give us the opportunity for international compromise. Since GMT is the time in England, and the meter is (more or less) 3 Parisian feet, we should at least standardize "up" as the direction the Empire State Building goes.
tengbretson 7y ago
I did a lot of scientific research and I've come to the conclusion that if we all just agreed to stop coming up with ideas that start with the phrase "if we all just agree to X." we'd stop wasting so much of each other's time.
QuercusMax 7y ago
Anyone else catch that Helm seems to think that meteorology has to do with shooting stars?
- tantalor 7y ago
  "40% chance of meteor showers this evening."
amluto 7y ago
> STEVE HANKE: You can trade 24 hours a day, almost around the clock in gold, currencies, stocks and everything else under the sun. And those are all time-stamped using Universal Time. A surprising amount of finance is time stamped in New York time. Just for fun, Auckland time gets used a bit, too.
gwbas1c 7y ago
I wish most of the comments weren't so snarky. I work in a team distributed throughout the globe. It's very difficult to talk about "time" because everyone's timezone is so different. What would be nice is if our computers always showed two times. The local time in a larger font, and then UTC time in a smaller font. This way, when we need to talk about time in a global context, we can use UTC. But, because most of us live our lives in local time, we don't need to say something silly like, "I'm getting lunch at 22:00".
- asdfman123 7y ago
  >What would be nice is if our computers always showed two times It's pretty easy to set up on Windows and I can't imagine it's hard on other OSes either. I did that when I worked remotely so I wouldn't constantly have to translate time zones.
- Gys 7y ago
  On a Mac I suggest you look into Bitbar: https://getbitbar.com https://getbitbar.com If it not already exists as a script, it would be very easy to create.
- shrimp_emoji 7y ago
  On Linux (KDE panel), adding a second Digital Clock widget set to UTC and in a different font on top of another one set to U.S. East (which shows date as opposed to zone): https://i.imgur.com/H6H8wOD.png https://i.imgur.com/H6H8wOD.png Unfortunately, can't do different font sizes. : T
- henrikschroder 7y ago
  The reason the comments are snarky is because getting rid of timezones is a monumentally stupid idea that doesn't solve the problem it thinks it's solving. When you are scheduling a meeting with people in a different timezone, you need to figure out what a specific time is and what a specific time means for both parties. Because times have meaning, we know that 8:00 is breakfast, 12:00 is lunch, 18:00 is dinner and 23:00 is night and people are sleeping. Timezones force you to do a lookup to figure out what the time is in the other location, and given that knowledge, you know because of universal global conventions what that time means, so you can avoid scheduling a meeting when they are probably sleeping. If you remove timezones, you no longer have to do a lookup to figure out what the time is in the other location, because it's the same everywhere - yaaaayyyy!!! - but you still have to do a lookup to figure out what a specific time means. Is the sun up? Are they sleeping? Are they at work? You know that you wake up at 17:00, eat breakfast at 18:00 and have to be at work at 19:00, but you have no idea at what time people typically do that at the other location. You have perfect knowledge of what the time is everywhere, but you have no knowledge of what times mean anymore. Great. And that's just one of the multiple issues with removing timezones.
fjfaase 7y ago
In Urumqi they are using Beijing time, but doing everything two hours later. The official working hours are from 10:00 to 14:00 and 16:00 to 20:00. Even after being there for two weeks, it kept confusing me. Every time I looked at a clock (and you do this many times a day), it took me some mental effort to 'translate' the time on the clock to my own time of when I am used to do certain things. And this was only a two hour shift. Imagine if it would be 7 hours.
qserasera 7y ago
I think we should have two numerical time zones. One should be sun time and the other should be world time. Sun time could eventually become obsolete if not helpful for workdays and sleeping habits.
jtlienwis 7y ago
I thought about this. My watch needs to tell me (no matter were I am, by using GPS) what time are the most common for meals and what time is my meeting with the locals. What numbers it assigns to these are not material, but UGMT would make the most sense. I once made a trip south of Chicago. Got to my destination in Indiana. I could not make sense of the miles per hour I realized for the trip. Then later on I realized that Indiana has two time zones and I had gained an extra hour between Gary and Indianapolis.

64 points by danso 7y ago

Sometimes the time changed every few minutes. Wait, what did it do in between?

> Oh, my goodness, there'd be a couple of years of bumps and grinds as people readjusted their schedules. Except for the literal billions of computers which will need replacing and trillions of lines of code you're going to need to rewrite, sure. And redeploy the entire GPS system. And the code running on the mainframe in the back room of the basement which no one has touched in literal decades. Seems.... Risky

henrikschroder 7y ago
"readjusted their schedules" is such a ridiculous hand-waving away of serious problems with the idea. One of the biggest problems is that weekdays completely cease to make sense. With timezones, the day of the week changes at midnight, when most people are asleep. You wake up in the morning, it's a new weekday, and it's the same weekday for as long as the sun is in the sky. If we abolish timezones and choose UTC as the one time, the day of the week will change at 5pm in San Francisco. Say that you have an establishment that is normally closed on Sundays. It's 4pm on a Saturday, do you close in an hour because it is then Sunday? Or do you change your "schedule" so that your establishment is closed on SundayMondays instead? Or perhaps you keep it closed on SaturdaySundays? Because the concept of "Sunday" doesn't make sense anymore, "Sunday" is no longer a contiguous period of normal waking hours. In San Francisco. In London it's business as usual. But in Sydney the day of the week changes at 10am. When is "Sunday morning"? 9am Sunday morning is the day after 10am Sunday morning. Every week has two Sunday mornings now. (And two Monday mornings!) Which one of them did you mean? Adjusting computer systems is much, much simpler than getting humans to accept this idiotic system.
- erinaceousjones 7y ago
  > Adjusting computer systems is much, much simpler than getting humans to accept this idiotic system. Agreed -- I think of timezones much like coordinate systems: They're all representing the same point in (space|time), just in a slightly different format, each with different benefits/setbacks for biological things vs electronical things. Like latitudes and longitudes vs UTM coordinates vs local grid coordinates. "Number of milliseconds since January 1st 1970" can still describe the same global time-point as "First of July, 2019, noon". Timezones are there for people. Everything else can normalize on UTC. That being said, I think the "universal" in coordinated universal time is a bit of a misnomer -- at some point in our interstellar future, are we going to have to start thinking more about factoring in time dilation? :-) we already have "coordinated Mars time".. Are we going to have an intergalactic day of many noons..
- evandev 7y ago
  And getting humans to accept the system is easier than changing laws that specify when things can be open/closed. E.g. The US Postal Service, drinking establishments, hunting laws.
- z2 7y ago
  And even if those adjustments are somehow accepted, travelling anywhere longitudinally will be a world of pain to the traveler, to re-learn what should be common sense on the 'local' time to wake up, time for lunch, days of the weekend...
  - henrikschroder 7y ago
    If only there was a system, some kind of longitudinal "zones" maybe, that would help your smartphone auto-adjust so it could show you when things like working hours, lunch, afternoon, etc occurs in the place you're in...
gwbas1c 7y ago
Computers use UTC internally
jerf 7y ago
"Except for the literal billions of computers which will need replacing and trillions of lines of code you're going to need to rewrite, sure." If anything, it's the computers that would have the easiest time of things. Time is already so random and janky that on the whole the computing world has dealt with it reasonably well. It would "just" mean one more entry for every timezone in the Olson timezone DB, and that's a lot of the work right there. However, by the same token, if you want to get a sense of just how impossible this is going to be to get anyone to agree to from the political side, a read through the comments in the timezone DB can be constructive, such as: https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/master/europe https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/master/europe It'll really show you what anyone who thinks they can convince the whole world to change is up against.
firethief 7y ago
None of those things use local time internally...
TheOtherDave 7y ago
I’m under the possibly mistaken impression that most computers already do everything in UTC and the “local time” which gets displayed is just calculated from that.

FearNotDaniel 7y ago

File under the same category as: - everyone switches to Dvorak keyboards - British motorists start driving on the right* - United States adopts the metric system - Daily Telegraph admits a hard Brexit may have negative consequences for the population as a whole * yes, I know, Dagen H, but 2019 UK is very different from 1967 Sweden

henrikschroder 7y ago
Well, switching to metric and switching to right-hand driving would be good things, painful in the short perspective, but extremely beneficial in the long perspective. Abolishing time zones is just an incredibly dumb idea, and the drawbacks heavily outweigh the benefits if you actually think about it. So I'm actually glad that human inertia makes it impossible to do.
- bostonpete 7y ago
  I wonder how beneficial switching to the metric system would really be. It's trivial to convert between systems if need be and pretty much all serious engineering/science work (where confusion can be costly) is done using the metric system these days anyways.
  - falcor84 7y ago
    >Despite this being a "solved problem"(TM), it's not really trivial in any meaningful sense, neither for regular people nor for developers creating a system that should deal with units in both systems.
    - bostonpete 7y ago
      It really is trivial for "regular" people as everyone has a device in their pocket that can quickly convert to any unit you want (which is an infrequent thing to need in daily life). As for developers, there's lots of changes we could impose on the world to make our (developers) lives easier but easing the burden on developers should rarely be a consideration when considering such changes IMO.

henrikschroder 7y ago

Obligatory: https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish

emiliobumachar 7y ago
Definitely a great resource. It explains steady-state drawbacks of universal time, that is, drawbacks that would keep existing even after everyone has adapted.

madengr 7y ago

GMT is used in ham radio too. Gives me an excuse for s 24 hour watch.

telesilla 7y ago

"William F. Allen realized that time is not just some objective measurement of where the sun is in the sky. It is also about the needs of society" As I wait for my remote team member half-a-world away to get online so we can have our meeting and I can go to lunch while she has her breakfast, this rings so true.

sandworm101 7y ago

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/invention-of-standard-time-feature https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/invention-... The invention of standard time was more complex, more international, than america's NPR would have us believe. On july 1st, let us also remember that basketball was invented by a canadian. (Go raptors).

lalaithion 7y ago

https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish

nmeofthestate 7y ago

This is a great idea. While we're at it, we should standardise "up" so everyone is on the same page regardless of their location. "Up" should be the vector pointing at Alpha Centauri. This would make it so much easier for people around the world to talk about directions.

opwieurposiu 7y ago
I was on an airliner getting ready for takeoff, the captain gives his announcement we are flying to such and such will be there in 3 hours etc. This was in the USA and the captain had an australian accent. At the end of his announcement he said "And to the passenger that expressed concern, please be assured that I have received extensive training as to the direction of "up" in the northern hemisphere.
chicob 7y ago
A "vector pointing at Alpha Centauri" is an incomplete definition, since a vector has a magnitude and direction. Also, Alpha Centauri has a declination of –60° 50′ 02.3737″, which makes it necessary to adjust for the time of the day. That would make people dizzy, which is unfortunate. So I propose the following very simple definition: Up - The direction defined by the position vector of Polaris with reference to the center of the Earth (not to be confused with North). Down - The direction opposite of Up (See also: South).
- munificent 7y ago
  > since a vector has a magnitude and direction. How is the direction represented?
  - archgoon 7y ago
    A normalized vector; i.e. a vector with magnitude 1.
- saalweachter 7y ago
  This does give us the opportunity for international compromise. Since GMT is the time in England, and the meter is (more or less) 3 Parisian feet, we should at least standardize "up" as the direction the Empire State Building goes.

tengbretson 7y ago

I did a lot of scientific research and I've come to the conclusion that if we all just agreed to stop coming up with ideas that start with the phrase "if we all just agree to X." we'd stop wasting so much of each other's time.

QuercusMax 7y ago

Anyone else catch that Helm seems to think that meteorology has to do with shooting stars?

tantalor 7y ago
"40% chance of meteor showers this evening."

amluto 7y ago

> STEVE HANKE: You can trade 24 hours a day, almost around the clock in gold, currencies, stocks and everything else under the sun. And those are all time-stamped using Universal Time. A surprising amount of finance is time stamped in New York time. Just for fun, Auckland time gets used a bit, too.

gwbas1c 7y ago

I wish most of the comments weren't so snarky. I work in a team distributed throughout the globe. It's very difficult to talk about "time" because everyone's timezone is so different. What would be nice is if our computers always showed two times. The local time in a larger font, and then UTC time in a smaller font. This way, when we need to talk about time in a global context, we can use UTC. But, because most of us live our lives in local time, we don't need to say something silly like, "I'm getting lunch at 22:00".

asdfman123 7y ago
>What would be nice is if our computers always showed two times It's pretty easy to set up on Windows and I can't imagine it's hard on other OSes either. I did that when I worked remotely so I wouldn't constantly have to translate time zones.
Gys 7y ago
On a Mac I suggest you look into Bitbar: https://getbitbar.com https://getbitbar.com If it not already exists as a script, it would be very easy to create.
shrimp_emoji 7y ago
On Linux (KDE panel), adding a second Digital Clock widget set to UTC and in a different font on top of another one set to U.S. East (which shows date as opposed to zone): https://i.imgur.com/H6H8wOD.png https://i.imgur.com/H6H8wOD.png Unfortunately, can't do different font sizes. : T
henrikschroder 7y ago
The reason the comments are snarky is because getting rid of timezones is a monumentally stupid idea that doesn't solve the problem it thinks it's solving. When you are scheduling a meeting with people in a different timezone, you need to figure out what a specific time is and what a specific time means for both parties. Because times have meaning, we know that 8:00 is breakfast, 12:00 is lunch, 18:00 is dinner and 23:00 is night and people are sleeping. Timezones force you to do a lookup to figure out what the time is in the other location, and given that knowledge, you know because of universal global conventions what that time means, so you can avoid scheduling a meeting when they are probably sleeping. If you remove timezones, you no longer have to do a lookup to figure out what the time is in the other location, because it's the same everywhere - yaaaayyyy!!! - but you still have to do a lookup to figure out what a specific time means. Is the sun up? Are they sleeping? Are they at work? You know that you wake up at 17:00, eat breakfast at 18:00 and have to be at work at 19:00, but you have no idea at what time people typically do that at the other location. You have perfect knowledge of what the time is everywhere, but you have no knowledge of what times mean anymore. Great. And that's just one of the multiple issues with removing timezones.

fjfaase 7y ago

In Urumqi they are using Beijing time, but doing everything two hours later. The official working hours are from 10:00 to 14:00 and 16:00 to 20:00. Even after being there for two weeks, it kept confusing me. Every time I looked at a clock (and you do this many times a day), it took me some mental effort to 'translate' the time on the clock to my own time of when I am used to do certain things. And this was only a two hour shift. Imagine if it would be 7 hours.

qserasera 7y ago

I think we should have two numerical time zones. One should be sun time and the other should be world time. Sun time could eventually become obsolete if not helpful for workdays and sleeping habits.

jtlienwis 7y ago

I thought about this. My watch needs to tell me (no matter were I am, by using GPS) what time are the most common for meals and what time is my meeting with the locals. What numbers it assigns to these are not material, but UGMT would make the most sense. I once made a trip south of Chicago. Got to my destination in Indiana. I could not make sense of the miles per hour I realized for the trip. Then later on I realized that Indiana has two time zones and I had gained an extra hour between Gary and Indianapolis.