3 ms·

So we make things worse for humans in order to make it easier for computers? Yah, one second doesn't matter, but it builds up. This: "Or we could even decoupl

by ars 4y ago

So we make things worse for humans in order to make it easier for computers? Yah, one second doesn't matter, but it builds up. This: "Or we could even decouple our sense of time from the Sun entirely, to create a single world time zone in which different countries see the Sun overhead at different times of day or night." Shows that they are completely disconnect from human reality: "Science already doesn’t use local times, we talk in UTC." That's great for science, but people care about day vs night.

soggybutter 4y ago
I struggle to understand how we benefit that much from the same wall clock times mapping roughly to the same times of day across time zones. It seems like there's pros and cons to both ways and there's no clear "better" option when it comes to the human experience. Meanwhile, doing away with timezones also does away with a lot of complexity both in computing and other areas (e.g. scheduling across timezones)
- ars 4y ago
  This will help you understand: https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
Beltalowda 4y ago
> Yah, one second doesn't matter, but it builds up. I don't think it's that big of a deal; do you really care what the perception of "11 in the morning" is for someone 1,000 years ago? This kind of thing is pretty cultural anyway, and a slow drift over a thousands of years doesn't really matter. The main reason we have the "new" Gregorian calendar is because of religious reasons, not because people were having huge practical problems with the old (slightly less accurate) Julian calendar. Plus the current leap second system won't really deal with the long-term drift anyway because the earth's rotation keeps slowing, so in a few hundred years we'd need more leap seconds than the current system allows, and eventually we'd need a "leap second" every day because the day is a second longer (around the year 6000 IIRC).
- Eleison23 4y ago
  Religion was only half the reason for the Gregorian calendar reform. Church and state, being interlinked and intertwined, the civil calendar was gradually slipping away from correct calibration with the equinoxes and thus the seasons. So it was important for farmers and mariners and politicians to all have a reliable calendar that matched what the Earth was actually going through. It just so happened that the religious authority in the West was able to make a significant change to the civil calendar which also happened to match the Church calendar, and it was adopted by all of Christendom, eventually even Asia and the four corners of the Earth have accepted it as universal and not so religious.
  - Beltalowda 4y ago
    That was I was told in history lesson, too, but I'm not so sure that was all that important of a reason, otherwise it wouldn't have taken hundreds of years for people to adopt the new calendar. The drift is so slow that a week more or less over a period of 1,000 years is easily something that can slowly be adjusted to by farmers, politicians, and the like (unlike, say, the Roman calendar before Caesar reformed it which drifted by several days every year).
friend_and_foe 4y ago
I agree with you quite a bit here, although I'm of the persuasion that this one minute a century drift is nothing, you already deal with orders of magnitude worse when you go visit family in another time zone for example, and you're fine. I think this goes along the lines of the great DST debate, the US is going to do away with the changes next year and make DST permanent. Not do away with it, keep it, forever. Fundamentally we create these abstractions and begin to rely on them and then decouple how we operate from the real world. We created the clocks to measure the position of the sun in the sky, now we ignore the sun entirely, the clocks are god now. I don't think it's a good thing generally speaking, but on this particular issue, I don't think people are going to really feel anything different happening, it will decrease the engineering burden to constantly maintain and update systems, which means decreased resource consumption, with no noticeable impact on the day to day lives of anyone except those engineers relying on exact time measurement.
alerighi 4y ago
Because we have to distinguish the two concepts. With timezones we already did it: computers save time (usually) in UTC format, and time is converted to the user time zone only when displaying it (at an higher level). This is obviously better, when you save a file for example you don't care about the region of the user, and thus the save timestamp of the file should really be an absolute number, so if you take your laptop and go from one country to another your whole system doesn't break because it sees timestamps in the future, same thing when daylight saving is applied and the clock is brought back/forward by an hour. Leap seconds, if we decide that we should keep them (to me not, because the difference is so little that we would start to notice that in centuries, and who knows not which computer systems we will have but if humanity still exists), should really be handled at time zone level, by shifting of an offset that contemplates leap seconds, and not by slowing up/accelerating clocks.
philwelch 4y ago
Solar noon, or the solar meridian, is the time of day in which the sun is highest in the sky. If our times were completely natural, solar noon would be at 12 PM exactly. Today, the solar meridian in Madrid is at 12:59 PM, while the solar meridian in Belgrade is at 11:23 AM. This is because Madrid and Belgrade are within the same time zone, in order to more easily coordinate European commerce. If that's an acceptable tradeoff, I don't really see the issue in drifting something on the order of dozens-to-hundreds of seconds per century.
nullc 4y ago
> one second doesn't matter, but it builds up. Less than you think. A part of the leap second is correcting an unpredictable random walk. The random walk part does not add up. The linear drift part does add up. We're still talking several thousand years to end up with just an hour offset. Just switching to a new timezone every few thousand years ("As of Jan 1st 6022, fifty years from now, all usage of Eastern timezone will switch to New Eastern timezone, which is an hour ahead.") would handle your civil usage concern fine. (and then in year 10022 they can switch to New New Eastern timezone, if there are any survivors of world war 5...)

by ars 4y ago

soggybutter 4y ago

I struggle to understand how we benefit that much from the same wall clock times mapping roughly to the same times of day across time zones. It seems like there's pros and cons to both ways and there's no clear "better" option when it comes to the human experience. Meanwhile, doing away with timezones also does away with a lot of complexity both in computing and other areas (e.g. scheduling across timezones)

ars 4y ago
This will help you understand: https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish

Beltalowda 4y ago

> Yah, one second doesn't matter, but it builds up. I don't think it's that big of a deal; do you really care what the perception of "11 in the morning" is for someone 1,000 years ago? This kind of thing is pretty cultural anyway, and a slow drift over a thousands of years doesn't really matter. The main reason we have the "new" Gregorian calendar is because of religious reasons, not because people were having huge practical problems with the old (slightly less accurate) Julian calendar. Plus the current leap second system won't really deal with the long-term drift anyway because the earth's rotation keeps slowing, so in a few hundred years we'd need more leap seconds than the current system allows, and eventually we'd need a "leap second" every day because the day is a second longer (around the year 6000 IIRC).

Eleison23 4y ago
Religion was only half the reason for the Gregorian calendar reform. Church and state, being interlinked and intertwined, the civil calendar was gradually slipping away from correct calibration with the equinoxes and thus the seasons. So it was important for farmers and mariners and politicians to all have a reliable calendar that matched what the Earth was actually going through. It just so happened that the religious authority in the West was able to make a significant change to the civil calendar which also happened to match the Church calendar, and it was adopted by all of Christendom, eventually even Asia and the four corners of the Earth have accepted it as universal and not so religious.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  That was I was told in history lesson, too, but I'm not so sure that was all that important of a reason, otherwise it wouldn't have taken hundreds of years for people to adopt the new calendar. The drift is so slow that a week more or less over a period of 1,000 years is easily something that can slowly be adjusted to by farmers, politicians, and the like (unlike, say, the Roman calendar before Caesar reformed it which drifted by several days every year).

friend_and_foe 4y ago

I agree with you quite a bit here, although I'm of the persuasion that this one minute a century drift is nothing, you already deal with orders of magnitude worse when you go visit family in another time zone for example, and you're fine. I think this goes along the lines of the great DST debate, the US is going to do away with the changes next year and make DST permanent. Not do away with it, keep it, forever. Fundamentally we create these abstractions and begin to rely on them and then decouple how we operate from the real world. We created the clocks to measure the position of the sun in the sky, now we ignore the sun entirely, the clocks are god now. I don't think it's a good thing generally speaking, but on this particular issue, I don't think people are going to really feel anything different happening, it will decrease the engineering burden to constantly maintain and update systems, which means decreased resource consumption, with no noticeable impact on the day to day lives of anyone except those engineers relying on exact time measurement.

alerighi 4y ago

Because we have to distinguish the two concepts. With timezones we already did it: computers save time (usually) in UTC format, and time is converted to the user time zone only when displaying it (at an higher level). This is obviously better, when you save a file for example you don't care about the region of the user, and thus the save timestamp of the file should really be an absolute number, so if you take your laptop and go from one country to another your whole system doesn't break because it sees timestamps in the future, same thing when daylight saving is applied and the clock is brought back/forward by an hour. Leap seconds, if we decide that we should keep them (to me not, because the difference is so little that we would start to notice that in centuries, and who knows not which computer systems we will have but if humanity still exists), should really be handled at time zone level, by shifting of an offset that contemplates leap seconds, and not by slowing up/accelerating clocks.

philwelch 4y ago

Solar noon, or the solar meridian, is the time of day in which the sun is highest in the sky. If our times were completely natural, solar noon would be at 12 PM exactly. Today, the solar meridian in Madrid is at 12:59 PM, while the solar meridian in Belgrade is at 11:23 AM. This is because Madrid and Belgrade are within the same time zone, in order to more easily coordinate European commerce. If that's an acceptable tradeoff, I don't really see the issue in drifting something on the order of dozens-to-hundreds of seconds per century.

nullc 4y ago

> one second doesn't matter, but it builds up. Less than you think. A part of the leap second is correcting an unpredictable random walk. The random walk part does not add up. The linear drift part does add up. We're still talking several thousand years to end up with just an hour offset. Just switching to a new timezone every few thousand years ("As of Jan 1st 6022, fifty years from now, all usage of Eastern timezone will switch to New Eastern timezone, which is an hour ahead.") would handle your civil usage concern fine. (and then in year 10022 they can switch to New New Eastern timezone, if there are any survivors of world war 5...)