5 ms·

Why wouldn’t we decouple time from the earths orbit? Instead have 2 calendars: the normal date time is standardised, no leap anything and simply increases. The

Why wouldn’t we decouple time from the earths orbit? Instead have 2 calendars: the normal date time is standardised, no leap anything and simply increases. The orbital time tracks the earths revolution around the sun. Sure, eventually the two will drift. But leap days account for 3 weeks-ish of time for the average person through out their life (let’s assume 80 years life span for arguments sake). So this doesn’t seem so hard to adjust to.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
FredPret 5y ago
Leap seconds are so much simpler than trying to wrangle two calendars with built in drift
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
  I'm not sure how you figure that. In my system, the time is simply a number that increments. No calculations are ever needed to correct anything. This is what most people use to schedule things. The second "clock" tracks position of the earth around the sun. You need it for the seasons. But this too is always exact. There will never be a situation where we need to adjust it. You can never reach the end of a year and be slightly short on the distance traveled around the sun. So one day Xmas is slightly warming than usual. But so what?
  - FredPret 5y ago
    Every person using their calendar is solving one simple problem in a simple way. But the real magic of the calendar is that billions of individuals use the same calendar for the same problem and thus we can all agree what day it is, every single day. So if there's an issue with the existing calendar, then simply adjusting our calendar by an amount really no-one will notice is by far the most practical solution. Almost every industry cycles with the season; we need the calendar to track it accurately.
    - 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
      I have not broken any of that though. The article is all about trying to get 2 things to sync because of the slowing down of the earths rotation. You haven't actually described why we need to go to this effort beyond maintaining the current system. Nor why this is a practical thing to do in general beyond maintaining the current system. Loads of people accept weird times shifts all the time. The poles have 6 month days and nights. In the summer I get 3 extra hours of day light and treat 7pm as "day". We already adjust what we do by what it looks like outside. Why does the time need to "match"?
      - withinboredom 5y ago
        With your calendar, wouldn't the drift eventually be so bad that the month we currently call January might be your calendar's October? When people read old stories about the fall leaves of Halloween people would think it was weird because there'd normally be snow on the ground in October, or the dead heat of summer in the southern hemisphere. And what's this about a "white Christmas?" in Spring? Keeping the time in sync with the orbit of the earth isn't just about the "here and now" but also history.
      - FredPret 5y ago
        Everything hinges on our rotation around the sun - at the most fundamental level: seasons, crops, construction schedules, even military campaigns. From there on up we get holidays, sport seasons, business cycles. These things have to match up to the calendar from one year to the next or there will be chaos. If our calendar is off by a second or two a year, it's very easy to correct without confusing the general populace - most people want to spend precisely zero time thinking about calendars and orbits. Currently, only a few nerds have to worry about leap seconds and the like. And it's part of their jobs, so it's OK. In a two-calendar system, every human will have to keep track of a personal calendar and a scientific calendar. Asking people who don't care to do that - and to fix an issue we already have an almost zero-friction fix for - is a non-starter.
SkittyDog 5y ago
When I first read this, my intial reaction was "LOL what a silly... of course the simple reason is..." ... and then it turns out, I couldn't actually explain it to myself. I had a couple of reasons lined up, but none of them passed muster when I broke it down. I suspect the real reason my be overlapping domains of varying precision/accuracy, which tolerate different degrees of error on any specific time measurement, but still need to agree on a shared center of the distribution of that error. So in our daily lives, we might tolerate a fraction of a second of drift without notice... But there are some specialty domains that do require more precision, and we need the time measurements in both domains to mostly line up, to avoid confusion. So our daily clock needs to be slaved to the more precise clock, even if we don't require that precision in most things.
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
  It's not obvious to me that there would be a loss of precision. If you are a farmer, you check the solar calendar and plan activities based on that. For your daily work, you still have the normal 24hour day. But we do all sort of dumb time related things: - day light savings - leap seconds, days, years Some places too close to the poles don't have normal day/night cycles of light. So we already tolerate a lot of weird time stuff. This way we keep tolerating it and get rid of the calculations.
  - SkittyDog 5y ago
    Wait... Why is all that timekeeping stuff "dumb"? Because you don't see a reason for it, and you can't imagine that you might not yet know the reason why? That's just plain egotistical, man. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence You need to learn the actual reasons why precision synchronous time exists. Until you do that, you're just wandering around in the dark, being silly.
dredmorbius 5y ago
Earth clock time and calendars arose specifically to measure time as concerns earth-related experiences --- events within a day, throughout the year, and across multiple years. Measurement systems ultimately serve the needs of those who are doing the measuring. This fact alone accounts for many of the idiosyncratic aspects of traditional measurement systems. An acre-foot measurement (a volume of water) makes sense when you've got a pond whose surface area (in acres) is known, and whose depth (in feet) can be measured against a post or dam face. An acre itself is the amount of land a farmer can plough in a day (in German, Tagwerke), and would vary by terrain, farmer, plough, draught animals, and hitches. Time systems suitable for other needs may come to be used. So long as a substantial human population remains on Earth, an Earth-centric time system will all but certainly exist, and adapt to changes in the Earth-Moon-Sun system's orbital and rvolutionary characteristics.
lmm 5y ago
Look at how bad people are at dealing with timezones. Having two similar but subtly different overloadings of the same terms is a recipe for confusion (having very distinct terms would actually be an improvement).

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

FredPret 5y ago

Leap seconds are so much simpler than trying to wrangle two calendars with built in drift

2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
I'm not sure how you figure that. In my system, the time is simply a number that increments. No calculations are ever needed to correct anything. This is what most people use to schedule things. The second "clock" tracks position of the earth around the sun. You need it for the seasons. But this too is always exact. There will never be a situation where we need to adjust it. You can never reach the end of a year and be slightly short on the distance traveled around the sun. So one day Xmas is slightly warming than usual. But so what?
- FredPret 5y ago
  Every person using their calendar is solving one simple problem in a simple way. But the real magic of the calendar is that billions of individuals use the same calendar for the same problem and thus we can all agree what day it is, every single day. So if there's an issue with the existing calendar, then simply adjusting our calendar by an amount really no-one will notice is by far the most practical solution. Almost every industry cycles with the season; we need the calendar to track it accurately.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
    I have not broken any of that though. The article is all about trying to get 2 things to sync because of the slowing down of the earths rotation. You haven't actually described why we need to go to this effort beyond maintaining the current system. Nor why this is a practical thing to do in general beyond maintaining the current system. Loads of people accept weird times shifts all the time. The poles have 6 month days and nights. In the summer I get 3 extra hours of day light and treat 7pm as "day". We already adjust what we do by what it looks like outside. Why does the time need to "match"?
    - withinboredom 5y ago
      With your calendar, wouldn't the drift eventually be so bad that the month we currently call January might be your calendar's October? When people read old stories about the fall leaves of Halloween people would think it was weird because there'd normally be snow on the ground in October, or the dead heat of summer in the southern hemisphere. And what's this about a "white Christmas?" in Spring? Keeping the time in sync with the orbit of the earth isn't just about the "here and now" but also history.
    - FredPret 5y ago
      Everything hinges on our rotation around the sun - at the most fundamental level: seasons, crops, construction schedules, even military campaigns. From there on up we get holidays, sport seasons, business cycles. These things have to match up to the calendar from one year to the next or there will be chaos. If our calendar is off by a second or two a year, it's very easy to correct without confusing the general populace - most people want to spend precisely zero time thinking about calendars and orbits. Currently, only a few nerds have to worry about leap seconds and the like. And it's part of their jobs, so it's OK. In a two-calendar system, every human will have to keep track of a personal calendar and a scientific calendar. Asking people who don't care to do that - and to fix an issue we already have an almost zero-friction fix for - is a non-starter.

SkittyDog 5y ago

When I first read this, my intial reaction was "LOL what a silly... of course the simple reason is..." ... and then it turns out, I couldn't actually explain it to myself. I had a couple of reasons lined up, but none of them passed muster when I broke it down. I suspect the real reason my be overlapping domains of varying precision/accuracy, which tolerate different degrees of error on any specific time measurement, but still need to agree on a shared center of the distribution of that error. So in our daily lives, we might tolerate a fraction of a second of drift without notice... But there are some specialty domains that do require more precision, and we need the time measurements in both domains to mostly line up, to avoid confusion. So our daily clock needs to be slaved to the more precise clock, even if we don't require that precision in most things.

2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
It's not obvious to me that there would be a loss of precision. If you are a farmer, you check the solar calendar and plan activities based on that. For your daily work, you still have the normal 24hour day. But we do all sort of dumb time related things: - day light savings - leap seconds, days, years Some places too close to the poles don't have normal day/night cycles of light. So we already tolerate a lot of weird time stuff. This way we keep tolerating it and get rid of the calculations.
- SkittyDog 5y ago
  Wait... Why is all that timekeeping stuff "dumb"? Because you don't see a reason for it, and you can't imagine that you might not yet know the reason why? That's just plain egotistical, man. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence You need to learn the actual reasons why precision synchronous time exists. Until you do that, you're just wandering around in the dark, being silly.

dredmorbius 5y ago

Earth clock time and calendars arose specifically to measure time as concerns earth-related experiences --- events within a day, throughout the year, and across multiple years. Measurement systems ultimately serve the needs of those who are doing the measuring. This fact alone accounts for many of the idiosyncratic aspects of traditional measurement systems. An acre-foot measurement (a volume of water) makes sense when you've got a pond whose surface area (in acres) is known, and whose depth (in feet) can be measured against a post or dam face. An acre itself is the amount of land a farmer can plough in a day (in German, Tagwerke), and would vary by terrain, farmer, plough, draught animals, and hitches. Time systems suitable for other needs may come to be used. So long as a substantial human population remains on Earth, an Earth-centric time system will all but certainly exist, and adapt to changes in the Earth-Moon-Sun system's orbital and rvolutionary characteristics.

lmm 5y ago

Look at how bad people are at dealing with timezones. Having two similar but subtly different overloadings of the same terms is a recipe for confusion (having very distinct terms would actually be an improvement).