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Same here, and I've also thought about writing the same app. I've always wondered why our system of time is built around the point of "midnight", when what we

Same here, and I've also thought about writing the same app. I've always wondered why our system of time is built around the point of "midnight", when what we really care about is "sunrise". DST is an ugly hack that we use on top of our midnight-based time system to roughly approximate a constant sunrise time. Imagine if 00:00 was defined as the time that the sun rises. You could set your alarm to 00:00 and start work around 01:30 or 02:00 every day. There'd be no need to worry about kids going to school in the dark, and the shift between summer and winter time would be continuous instead of an abrupt shift (so no more DST-induced heart attacks or traffic accidents). We now have computers that could do timezone conversions quickly and easily, and places like Iceland that go for months without seeing the sun could use an arbitrary point in time to represent sunrise. Ancient societies have used systems of time that are based around the time of sunrise, e.g. the ancient Jews: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_hour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_hour. For whatever reason, we ended up with our midnight-based time system instead.

ogre_codes 6y ago
You and I are very much alike in thinking. Sunrise is the logical start of the day. For appointments and scheduling, using GMT makes sense. For any other reference, hours after local sunrise makes much more sense.
xmprt 6y ago
That would mean variable length days right? Sounds a bit like a nightmare.
- quicklime 6y ago
  We already have variable length days ;)
- tzs 6y ago
  It would be a bit of a nightmare for makers of mechanical clocks. For nearly everyone else if their clocks automatically handled it, I can't think of many people that would notice that the interval from a given time one day to the same time the next day varies slightly from day to day.
h0l0gr4ph1c 6y ago
IIRC our system of time is more so aligned with midday rather than midnight. As that is when the sun is at its highest point in the sky, which allowed us to create a common point between timezones.
throw_away 6y ago
IIRC, this is also how time is kept in some equatorial regions, as their days are consistently the same length year-round. Starting one 12 hour cycle at daybreak and another at sunset made the most sense.
rhino369 6y ago
Our system was originally based on noon, not midnight. I don't think most people really care about sunrise. Humans don't seem to naturally rise with the sun. I don't know anyone who plans their day based on when the sun rose. You'd have 3+ hour swings in what time meant from December to June. Seems worse than even daylight savings time.
- sjburt 6y ago
  After decades of using an alarm clock and sleeping in a dark room, a few years ago I began going to bed consistently around 10pm and allowing natural light to wake me up. It has really improved the quality of my sleep and my feeling of restedness in the morning. Of course, this means the time I wake up does vary throughout the year, but the time change helps keep it more consistent and even in the middle of winter, waking up at 7:30 or so give me plenty of time to get to work. I do know people that use lighted alarm clocks and report similar results, but that's clearly just an imitation of the real thing.
- philwelch 6y ago
  > I don't think most people really care about sunrise. Humans don't seem to naturally rise with the sun. I don't know anyone who plans their day based on when the sun rose. Probably everyone you know habitually uses artificial lighting.
  - maccard 6y ago
    For anyone living north of san Francisco it's pretty much a requirement. If I didn't use artificial light my winter days would be 6 hours long and my summer days would be 18 hours longm
    - arethuza 6y ago
      I remember being quite surprised when I noticed (while I was actually in San Francisco) that its about the same latitude as Lisbon in Portugal. So you are talking about almost all of Europe.
    - 6y ago
cameldrv 6y ago
I think that DST is not such an ugly hack. Think of it as a mass coordination problem. You want to start work every day 1-2 hours after the sun rises. Fine, but in this time system, it's a different time in every point on earth, and it's complicated to convert between them. If you want to schedule a phone call, you're going to have to use a computer to figure out what two equivalent times are. Times are meaningless unless a precise location is also specified. A similar (but not as bad) problem cropped up when every town had a clock set by the local solar noon, and the railroad came to town. They would have to do time conversions for train tables for every stop. The conductor couldn't just have a watch to figure out what time to pull out of the station or how long until the next stop -- it involved a bunch of time offsets. The solution was time zones. Then the conductor just has to adjust his watch exactly one hour when they cross a timezone boundary and everything works out. DST is a very similar solution to a very similar problem. Everyone wants to have certain things happen at approximately a certain time after sunrise. People still want to be able to specify a time that is valid over a large geographical region, and is easily convertible when outside of that region. People want to be able to have watches that don't need to know the user's location in order to say what time it is. DST gives you the approximation of all of these things, and you only have to think about it twice a year, when you make a big adjustment to the length of the day, instead of making little adjustments to the length of the day every day.
- BlargMcLarg 6y ago
  DST wouldn't be so bad if everything didn't need to be heavily synchronized alongside a 9-to-5 mentality. Time is useful for synchronization, but just the fact many people chastise night owls while applauding early birds, as well as emphasizing the "when" instead of the "how many hours did you do N" (or better: "how much N did you achieve"), puts many people who are dependent on more light to start their day in a weird spot. That's what DST does. It forcefully yanks those people already struggling to adapt to society's wishes, forcing a pretty radical change. We have several solutions (group people based on chronotype, respect chronotypes more, limit the need for synchronized events in early mornings / late nights), but those still aren't being applied as widely as they could be. Just the fact people are expected to drink coffee to wake up and participate in a relatively dangerous activity while still groggy (driving) indicates how little we actually think of all this.
3np 6y ago
May work well in your latitude, but go far enough north and it’d just get ridiculous over the year. Sunrise is also gradual and long enough around the solstices to become quite arbitrary
ajnin 6y ago
The problem would be that everyone would have a different time depending on where they are on the globe, not only different hour but also minute. That would make things like meetings between people living in slightly different places very difficult. Timezones are needed by the modern organization of society, and I guess that organization is not necessarily very friendly with human needs.
_ph_ 6y ago
Noon is the only easily measurable time point in the day that is always (approximately) 24 hours apart. Also, sunrise and sunset are always symmetrical to noon, even when the day length varies considerably. For setting up a time system, noon consequentially is the correct reference point. But yes, your day rhythm will vary relative to that across the year, but there will differences according to local (like latitude) and personal environments which will make sunrise not a good reference point for a time system.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > Noon is the only easily measurable time point in the day that is always (approximately) 24 hours apart. DST resets the time to move noon closer to sunrise, not closer to midday. There are currently 4h30m before noon and 7h30m between noon and sunset. In the middle of summer, it's 6h30m before and 9h30m after. Noon isn't well indexed at all.
8fingerlouie 6y ago
a thousand years ago in Scandinavia the new day would start at 6pm, effectively at sunset, which is also why Christmas in Scandinavia is on the evening of the 24th instead of the 25th in the morning. Or so the legend goes. I'm pretty sure that the ancient winter solstice feast had something to do with it as well. In Scandinavia the word for christmas is still some variation of the ancient "Yule" meaning wheel in old norse.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

ogre_codes 6y ago

You and I are very much alike in thinking. Sunrise is the logical start of the day. For appointments and scheduling, using GMT makes sense. For any other reference, hours after local sunrise makes much more sense.

xmprt 6y ago

That would mean variable length days right? Sounds a bit like a nightmare.

quicklime 6y ago
We already have variable length days ;)
tzs 6y ago
It would be a bit of a nightmare for makers of mechanical clocks. For nearly everyone else if their clocks automatically handled it, I can't think of many people that would notice that the interval from a given time one day to the same time the next day varies slightly from day to day.

h0l0gr4ph1c 6y ago

IIRC our system of time is more so aligned with midday rather than midnight. As that is when the sun is at its highest point in the sky, which allowed us to create a common point between timezones.

throw_away 6y ago

IIRC, this is also how time is kept in some equatorial regions, as their days are consistently the same length year-round. Starting one 12 hour cycle at daybreak and another at sunset made the most sense.

rhino369 6y ago

Our system was originally based on noon, not midnight. I don't think most people really care about sunrise. Humans don't seem to naturally rise with the sun. I don't know anyone who plans their day based on when the sun rose. You'd have 3+ hour swings in what time meant from December to June. Seems worse than even daylight savings time.

sjburt 6y ago
After decades of using an alarm clock and sleeping in a dark room, a few years ago I began going to bed consistently around 10pm and allowing natural light to wake me up. It has really improved the quality of my sleep and my feeling of restedness in the morning. Of course, this means the time I wake up does vary throughout the year, but the time change helps keep it more consistent and even in the middle of winter, waking up at 7:30 or so give me plenty of time to get to work. I do know people that use lighted alarm clocks and report similar results, but that's clearly just an imitation of the real thing.
philwelch 6y ago
> I don't think most people really care about sunrise. Humans don't seem to naturally rise with the sun. I don't know anyone who plans their day based on when the sun rose. Probably everyone you know habitually uses artificial lighting.
- maccard 6y ago
  For anyone living north of san Francisco it's pretty much a requirement. If I didn't use artificial light my winter days would be 6 hours long and my summer days would be 18 hours longm
  - arethuza 6y ago
    I remember being quite surprised when I noticed (while I was actually in San Francisco) that its about the same latitude as Lisbon in Portugal. So you are talking about almost all of Europe.
  - 6y ago

cameldrv 6y ago

I think that DST is not such an ugly hack. Think of it as a mass coordination problem. You want to start work every day 1-2 hours after the sun rises. Fine, but in this time system, it's a different time in every point on earth, and it's complicated to convert between them. If you want to schedule a phone call, you're going to have to use a computer to figure out what two equivalent times are. Times are meaningless unless a precise location is also specified. A similar (but not as bad) problem cropped up when every town had a clock set by the local solar noon, and the railroad came to town. They would have to do time conversions for train tables for every stop. The conductor couldn't just have a watch to figure out what time to pull out of the station or how long until the next stop -- it involved a bunch of time offsets. The solution was time zones. Then the conductor just has to adjust his watch exactly one hour when they cross a timezone boundary and everything works out. DST is a very similar solution to a very similar problem. Everyone wants to have certain things happen at approximately a certain time after sunrise. People still want to be able to specify a time that is valid over a large geographical region, and is easily convertible when outside of that region. People want to be able to have watches that don't need to know the user's location in order to say what time it is. DST gives you the approximation of all of these things, and you only have to think about it twice a year, when you make a big adjustment to the length of the day, instead of making little adjustments to the length of the day every day.

BlargMcLarg 6y ago
DST wouldn't be so bad if everything didn't need to be heavily synchronized alongside a 9-to-5 mentality. Time is useful for synchronization, but just the fact many people chastise night owls while applauding early birds, as well as emphasizing the "when" instead of the "how many hours did you do N" (or better: "how much N did you achieve"), puts many people who are dependent on more light to start their day in a weird spot. That's what DST does. It forcefully yanks those people already struggling to adapt to society's wishes, forcing a pretty radical change. We have several solutions (group people based on chronotype, respect chronotypes more, limit the need for synchronized events in early mornings / late nights), but those still aren't being applied as widely as they could be. Just the fact people are expected to drink coffee to wake up and participate in a relatively dangerous activity while still groggy (driving) indicates how little we actually think of all this.

3np 6y ago

May work well in your latitude, but go far enough north and it’d just get ridiculous over the year. Sunrise is also gradual and long enough around the solstices to become quite arbitrary

ajnin 6y ago

The problem would be that everyone would have a different time depending on where they are on the globe, not only different hour but also minute. That would make things like meetings between people living in slightly different places very difficult. Timezones are needed by the modern organization of society, and I guess that organization is not necessarily very friendly with human needs.

_ph_ 6y ago

Noon is the only easily measurable time point in the day that is always (approximately) 24 hours apart. Also, sunrise and sunset are always symmetrical to noon, even when the day length varies considerably. For setting up a time system, noon consequentially is the correct reference point. But yes, your day rhythm will vary relative to that across the year, but there will differences according to local (like latitude) and personal environments which will make sunrise not a good reference point for a time system.

ogre_codes 6y ago
> Noon is the only easily measurable time point in the day that is always (approximately) 24 hours apart. DST resets the time to move noon closer to sunrise, not closer to midday. There are currently 4h30m before noon and 7h30m between noon and sunset. In the middle of summer, it's 6h30m before and 9h30m after. Noon isn't well indexed at all.

8fingerlouie 6y ago

a thousand years ago in Scandinavia the new day would start at 6pm, effectively at sunset, which is also why Christmas in Scandinavia is on the evening of the 24th instead of the 25th in the morning. Or so the legend goes. I'm pretty sure that the ancient winter solstice feast had something to do with it as well. In Scandinavia the word for christmas is still some variation of the ancient "Yule" meaning wheel in old norse.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]