4 ms·
Give the way we structure our time zones, noon can only ever match the sun's zenith for some subset of people.
by danaris 4y ago
Give the way we structure our time zones, noon can only ever match the sun's zenith for some subset of people.
- xvedejas 4y agoIt could be within 30 minutes of correct for nearly everyone, if we decide that's a goal for the system.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoBut for most people it seems like a terrible goal. Solar maximum is much less important to daily life than sunrise and sunset
- inciampati 4y agoA sunrise centered clock would be awesome and insanely impractical. Your days will be longer than 24hrs from winter to summer solstice, and shorter from summer to winter. You cannot have the same time system across an entire line if longitude. Which sunrise do you pick? The equitorial one? 45 north? This may be more fraught than you were considering.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoOK, you convinced me. I have decided I am now a sunrise local time absolutist. We could move from measuring time with a 24 hour clock to one based on solar angle. We could also measure geographic distance in relative change of solar angle, combining our time and distance systems. Some think it overly complex, but the increased geometry proficiency would save many lives.
- rssoconnor 4y agoOne perk of work-from-home is that I try to structure my day around sunrise like this. I set my alarm for sunrise (usually I only adjust it once a week), with the nice perk that when DST rolls around I don't lose any sleep, I just wake up "later". I am far enough north that at some point as summer rolls around, I transition to sunset based structure, setting my morning alarm for 9 or 10 hours after sunset.
- tzs 4y agoWhy do you need the same time system across an entire line of longitude?
- _ph_ 4y agoSure, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't optimize the time zones so that the deviation is minimized.
- adhesive_wombat 4y agoSure, if "minimise the deviation from the local solar maximum when the clock hands are vertical" is the best thing to optimise for. In practise, whether the sun is 15 degrees to the left or right at exactly noon doesn't have much practical effect on people in the way that it getting dark before they even can see the sky in the evenings does.
- inciampati 4y agoTbh this sounds like a problem to bring up with employers and not whole societies. Anyway people should do this daylight saving forever experiment and contemplate these issues in the dead of winter. We can come back to this in a few decades. All those standard start times are based on a world centered on solar noon. Maybe the semi ancients were onto something.
- adhesive_wombat 4y agoMany "semi-ancients" had variable length hours from ancient Egypt right though to about the 14th century. Even after the introduction of mechanical clocks with uniform hours, some systems counted from sunset, not noon. Eventually the noon reference became fixed upon, but it's only noon because it was easier to measure the shadow in that way. Other than a vague but unfounded sense of aesthetic need and the obsolete practically of synchronization with a sundial, solar noon isn't special.