5 ms·

“Under this system, an hour in the summer is longer than an hour in the winter, reflecting the fact that ‘being able to work during daylight was crucial’” I wo

“Under this system, an hour in the summer is longer than an hour in the winter, reflecting the fact that ‘being able to work during daylight was crucial’” I would be open to trying this as an alternative to daylight savings time.

beAbU 3y ago
What? No! Any timer-based process will completely break down at worst, or be very error prone at best. "Do I bake this bread for 30 summer minutes, or winter minutes?" "This crucial component in your nuclear reactor must he serviced every 10,000 summer hours. Keep in mind that a winter hour is 1.35x longer than a summer hour, so hours spent operating during the winter time must be appropriately factored in." Calendar math in software is difficult enough as it is, and now you want to alter a fundamental physical constant arbitrarily. Some people just want to see the world burn I guess.
- odyssey7 3y ago
  Ha, the scientists would do well to avoid promoting exact correspondences between the models used by everyday people and their own specialist ones. Somewhere there will always be an exception or a divergence of practices between these groups and even within each of them. Case in point: these instruments were used by a substantial number of people for a somewhat lengthy period of time. Even if nobody were to use these instruments again, the interpretation of surviving historic documents which reference a time of day would forever benefit from the ability to understand what those times mean. As an aside, a fascinating detail of the near-ubiquitously adopted iCalendar RFC, an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard for encoding events for calendar software, is a consequence of its development having been predominantly influenced by the Gregorian system. There are major calendar software systems which, in compliance with the IETF standard, are incapable of encoding religious holidays in terms of lunar calendar definitions, resulting in the use of calendar events that approximate the holidays' start and end times instead.

beAbU 3y ago

What? No! Any timer-based process will completely break down at worst, or be very error prone at best. "Do I bake this bread for 30 summer minutes, or winter minutes?" "This crucial component in your nuclear reactor must he serviced every 10,000 summer hours. Keep in mind that a winter hour is 1.35x longer than a summer hour, so hours spent operating during the winter time must be appropriately factored in." Calendar math in software is difficult enough as it is, and now you want to alter a fundamental physical constant arbitrarily. Some people just want to see the world burn I guess.

odyssey7 3y ago
Ha, the scientists would do well to avoid promoting exact correspondences between the models used by everyday people and their own specialist ones. Somewhere there will always be an exception or a divergence of practices between these groups and even within each of them. Case in point: these instruments were used by a substantial number of people for a somewhat lengthy period of time. Even if nobody were to use these instruments again, the interpretation of surviving historic documents which reference a time of day would forever benefit from the ability to understand what those times mean. As an aside, a fascinating detail of the near-ubiquitously adopted iCalendar RFC, an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard for encoding events for calendar software, is a consequence of its development having been predominantly influenced by the Gregorian system. There are major calendar software systems which, in compliance with the IETF standard, are incapable of encoding religious holidays in terms of lunar calendar definitions, resulting in the use of calendar events that approximate the holidays' start and end times instead.