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IMO the best argument for time zones is it keeps calendar days roughly[1] aligned with “natural” days, such that day changes happen when it’s dark outside and m
by whoisyc 1y ago
IMO the best argument for time zones is it keeps calendar days roughly[1] aligned with “natural” days, such that day changes happen when it’s dark outside and most people[2] are asleep and most people won’t be entering a new day during a work meeting.
Why? Because it is confusing if most people’s natural days are divided into different calendar days. If I wake up and the calendar says Tuesday, then I can be sure that I don’t need to worry about the dental appointment on Wednesday afternoon. But if Wednesday starts midday, then I have to spend extra brain cycles to work out which parts of my natural day belong to Tuesday and which parts are Wednesday. It’s a lot of hassle avoided by having days change over when I’m asleep.
If you want real life example of such confusions, look up “early morning flight confusion” on your favourite search engine. It turns out a lot of people are confused by flight times like “Wednesday 1:20am”, because if you are catching an 1:20am flight, you are heading to the airport on the previous day before midnight, and mentally the flight feels like a part of the previous “natural” day. What sometimes happens is people will book a flight on Wednesday 1:20am, head to the airport on Wednesday evening because they think “well the flight is on Wednesday right”, and find out that it is actually Thursday after midnight.
By the way, one successful attempt at addressing this problem is Japanese late night anime schedules. If an anime is aired on Wednesday 1:20am, the TV station will instead write “Tuesday 25:20” on the schedule. It makes no sense from a technical point of view, but feels right for the human because what is the early morning of Wednesday if not just Tuesday night prolonged?
[1] Even extreme cases like Spain are only a couple of hours out of sync, it’s not like the sun shines on Madrid during “midnight”.
[2] the article mentions remote workers and frequent travelers, which I am willing to wager are a tiny (but over represented in nerd spaces) fraction of the society.
- RedShift1 1y agoI don't get the flight example? Wednesday 1:20 AM = Thursday 1:20 (24 hr notation)? Anyway it seems to me this whole problem arises with 12 hour notation.
- lxgr 1y agoTrue, it is less of an issue with the 8,760 hour notation as people usually notice new day’s eve.
- neilpomerleau 1y agoWednesday 1:20 AM (12 hr notation) = Wednesday 1:20 (24 hr notation), or is there another convention I’ve never heard of? Either way, this seems to further validate the original confusion.
- RedShift1 1y ago> book a flight on Wednesday 1:20am, head to the airport on Wednesday evening because they think “well the flight is on Wednesday right”, and find out that it is actually Thursday after midnight. This bit here, I don't understand what Thursday is supposed to do here. If my flight leaves Wednesday at 1:20 AM, I'm leaving for the airport Tuesday evening. But if I'm interpreting OP correctly, people are booking flights for Wednesday 1:20 AM but leaving for the airport Wednesday evening? Why would you be confused about that?
- lokar 1y agoPeople do it all the time
- johnb231 1y ago[flagged]
- Dylan16807 1y agoYou don't see why people would confuse "Wednesday in the middle of the night" with "Wednesday night"?
- RedShift1 1y agoBut the ticket doesn't say "in the middle of the night" or "night", it just has the date and time.
- Dylan16807 1y agoPeople read 1am and then they think and remember "middle of the night" So if you happen to think of it as "middle of the night, specifically 1am", and you fall into mental shortcuts a little bit too hard, oops you might end up there on the wrong day.
- eszed 1y agoI switched permanently to 24hr notation after my buddy asked me to pick him up from the airport at "one-o'clock on Thursday". No problem, I didn't have any classes Thursday afternoon, so "see you then". You see where this is going? At 0-dark-thirty I get a call: "dude, where are you?" Yeah. I still give him shit about it, thirty years later. 24hr time, folks. 24hr time.
- necovek 1y agoIncidentally, this works for someone close to the UTC time (3h off for Moscow) for the reasons you mention. It likely does not generalize at all. They also haven't faced an issue where an event is booked by someone else at a DST-affecting time: as that time changes between two days, you now need an extra "if" in your brain (is it DST there? Europe and US are on different cycles there too). I've tried booking all the cross-timezone meetings in UTC, but didn't get far with it: it was more work for everyone compared to somewhat reduced confusion and suddenly overlapping meetings.
- jorvi 1y ago> because what is the early morning of Wednesday if not just Tuesday night prolonged? This is what really grinds my gears with the official definition of "night" and "morning". Tuesday 21:00-23:59 is considered "night", and then Wednesday 00:00 is considered "morning", which is highway insanity to me. No one would say they were going out 'till "Wednesday morning" if they went to the pub until 02:30 Wednesday. IMO it only starts being "morning" around 05:00, maybe even 06:00.
- mjevans 1y agoDue to the tilt of the earth the length of a solar day is not constant (unless you're very near the equator along a specific, probably wobbly, line). Even now, obtaining solar noon is comparatively easy. Then add half of an earth's rotation* (slightly affected by the earth's orbital period too), and that's midnight. In the days of candle light, midnight wasn't a crazy time to draw that diving line. However these days even people with crazy early AM weekdays to avoid commutes sometimes cross over midnights on the weekend. + You are correct that the modern world really should just start counting the day at like 3 or 4 am, and continue counting past 2359 to almost 2700 or 2800.
- jorvi 1y agoHaha, don't get me wrong, I am not asking for official days to be anything but 24 hours. I guess I am arguing that "morning" "midday" "evening" and "night" should hold no official definition, since they are much more about the vibe rather than an absolute position on the clock. However, if they do remain as official definitions, they should be heavily revised.
- zvr 1y agoIt's usually morning after you sleep. "I woke up very early in the morning at 4am to start work at 5."
- GuB-42 1y agoI like to say things like "13 in the morning" to say "1pm but I just woke up".
- scbrg 1y agoI believe all these problems are caused by time zones, not solved by them. If the current date/day of week wasn't vaguely connected to sleep/wake cycle, we wouldn't be conditioned to assume it was. For instance, we handle 24 hour clock (with 60 minute hours?! WTF?) fine, even if it's insane and we use the decimal system elsewhere. Because we got used to it when we grew up. Many even have the clock reset in the middle of the day, ending up with things like two hour activities spanning from eleven to one! (Don't get me started on shit like "half four" - it means different things depending on where you are, but it never means two!) Heck, there's a whole, huge country that gets by on inches and ounces and pounds and miles and whatnot - a mind boggling amount of extra mental energy required, and with the exception of some recent lapse when selecting their boss dude they seem to be doing mostly as well as (and over the previous century arguably somewhat better than) the rest of us in the thinking department. If we grew up with date/day changing in the afternoon, every kid in preschool would have it figured out already. "Early morning flight confusion" would seize to exist (except, perhaps, for the poor bastards who'd happen to live close to wherever we decided to place the prime meridian), because everybody would know what "1:20" meant, and not randomly guess at something based on when they happen to sleep.
- iforgotpassword 1y agoYes and no, locally it would work because that's what you grew up with, but traveling, and especially communicating would be equally confusing. Currently we have that problem on globe-spanning video calls where "let's schedule another meeting tomorrow" could mean very different things. In the global utc scenario, tomorrow would still mean different things to someone growing up with "midnight" during the day vs. When you're asleep.
- arccy 1y agoi mentally translate tomorrow in a business meeting usually means sometime in the next 8-40 hours...
- scbrg 1y agoAgain, I believe the problem you're talking about is caused by time zones. If you're used to date changes happening "whenever", you'd stop assuming they happen at a fixed point during the day. Any argument that starts with "Today, we're already confused about ... because we're used to date changes occurring while we sleep" is meaningless, since we wouldn't be used to date changes occurring while we sleep. The whole terminology thing would be solved by having two words; one meaning "after next sleep cycle" (which would probably be more common when speaking to people in your own geographic region), and one meaning "after next date change" (which would probably be more common when speaking to people in other geographic regions). The appearance of this second word would likely happen naturally within weeks, if not days after abolishing time zones. As usually happens with language. The argument against abolishing time zones always seems to assume that humanity would be incapable of adapting to a time zone free world. Like this would mysteriously be the first and only change in the history of mankind society couldn't adapt to.
- koito17 1y ago> one successful attempt at addressing this problem is Japanese late night anime schedules Depending on the channel, the "new date cut-off" (more accurately: 日付変更) sometimes varies. Some channels start the day at 5am, others at 4am, and so on. Because of this, one gets to see wild things, such as a time-table scheduling a show at "29:30" whereas another channel would write "05:30". In any case, your claim is correct. The people who stay up to watch late-night shows do not consider their day finished around those hours, and the times are intended to reflect that. However, there is still inconsistency around the hour of the new day. A similar issue exists in video games. I know of one game that "starts the new day", so to speak, at 5am, and another game that does so at exactly 12am. To add further confusion, many Japanese websites and games are designed with the assumption that the user is always in Japanese Standard Time. (Most Japanese do not travel abroad, and Japan itself has exactly one time zone, thus Japanese programmers rarely ever think about time zones). Thus, when overseas, you may see the new day in a video game start at 1pm local time!
- throw0101d 1y ago> It turns out a lot of people are confused by flight times like “Wednesday 1:20am”, because if you are catching an 1:20am flight, you are heading to the airport on the previous day before midnight […] If you use 24-hour ("military") time—00:00 to 23:59—this becomes less confusing. Perhaps an attempt to culturally shift from using 12-hour to using 24-hour time would be useful. (In the US it'd probably less of a challenge than metrification.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_representation_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_representation_b... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-hour_clock#Use_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-hour_clock#Use_by_country
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y agoMaybe it’s less confusing in practice but it’s not clear to me how in theory. It seems like the core issue is still present: an event so early in Wednesday’s morning feels like an extension of Tuesday night so one has to remember “Tuesday before I sleep” when the event details say “sometime Wednesday”.
- gomox 1y agoIts possible your example is wrong and the confusion arises in the "twelves" (i.e. 1230 AM being 0:30 which makes no sense since anyone that didn't learn the quirk would expect the AM/PM bit to roll over at the same time as the hours, not one hour off the mark).