4 ms·

> Why shouldn't we have one timezone? Why not have one worldwide timezone? Your watch hands read '20230710T142847Z', don't they?

• adolph 3y ago
  No. For one, I use the ordinal date option in ISO 8601 because the whole month and day thing is stupid. Today is 2023-191. Also my watch only reads 14:28 since the date and TZ are typically implied in watches. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 One thing for which I would advocate is removing zero based numbering from hours and minutes. Clocks reading 12:15 for 00:15 is tremendously confusing. Most human oriented counting systems are not zero indexed. One indexed series align cardinal and ordinal numbering which reflects the passage of time rather than each hour being nominally disconnected from a sequence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-based_numbering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-based_numbering
  • Timon3 3y ago
    > No. For one, I use the ordinal date option in ISO 8601 because the whole month and day thing is stupid. Apart from this being very funny and an interesting idea I have a question: how do you deal with leap years? Many important dates throughout the year (e.g. holidays, birthdays, business quarters etc.) are bound to specific days of months, do you just have to remember that all such days after February are one off sometimes in an ordinal date system?
    • adolph 3y ago
      I appreciate your questions. I will honor them with the same dry humor by responding as if actually using ordinal dates were something many people did. Leap years: A sidereal year adjustment may occur on any day, there is not a requirement for it to occur on a specific day. Leap years merely have an additional day identifier in the series before returning to 001. Anniversary events: Again, there is no requirement that the memorialization of a person or event occur on a specific month and day. Many occurrences such as Mardi Gras and Eid using a lunar calendar or the USA's Thanksgiving using the day of week. If one wishes to commemorate an annual event at the same orbital position as when it occurred, then ordinal dates are more effective since the Gregorian calendar's fourth-year 02/29 throws off any anniversary after the first 1/6th of the year. NB: ISO 8601 "leap week" instances occur at a different rate than leap years (a more parallel construction would be "leap week" and "leap day"). "[The] 53 week years occur on all years that have Thursday as the 1st of January and on leap years that start on Wednesday the 1st." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_week_date https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_week_date A higher order number than ordinal and cardinal is ratio. We can also express the current day as how far through the year we are. Since today is 192, it represents 52% of a year, the ratio of current day to days in the current year. Below is an example in bash. $ date '+%j' 192 $ echo "scale=2; $(date '+%j') / $(date '+%j' -d $(date '+%Y')'-12-31')" | bc .52