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Time to Dump Time Zones

nytimes.com

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Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#251

Post by vidoc »

Very interesting article, I've wondered about a universal time several times, tons of pros and cons sure, but it's cool to think that people are thinking about such disrupting alternatives.

Reminds me this cool episode of 99% invisible[1] where they talk about calendar design, in particular, Kodak company used a 28-day/13 month design calendar until the 70s and it turns out it was beloved by teams who were doing a lot of forecasts.

1: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-calendar/

When I see how tough it is to move to the metric system in the US, I'm not quiet sure we'll ever see such a change any time soon tho!

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#252

Post by inopinatus »

zanny wrote: post #201
inopinatus wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you don't. You just need multiple clocks on the wall. This remains a widespread solution to determining whether or not your counterpart in Sydney is asleep.

So instead of multiple clocks, you tape sticky notes on your one clock when different cities have high noon. You must always do the translation, with or without a universal time zone. The difference is that with universal time, it discards the entire set of translations around scheduling conversion that already happen, and it fixes the horrible mess of anyone living near a time zone boundary being in perpetual schedu…

Or I could just look at my wall.

Pro tip for solution designers. Don't tell someone what they "must" do. It's the fast track to being ignored. Especially when a) you're badgering them to conform to some hairbrained sticky note engineering and b) they already have something that works.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#253

Post by stephen_g »

cyberferret wrote: post #105
grzm wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"use UTC as a convention when talking about events that happen across time zones" For coordination of events across time zones , perhaps. Would you really want to read international events happening in UTC in the news? In the local time I can put the event in context: is it evening? morning? Middle of the night? If it were UTC, I'd have to either look that up and do some mental math (or maybe the reading device, if I…

It absolutely fixes one of the biggest planning problems I come across all the time (as someone who follows international sporting fixtures a fair bit). If I hear "The US Formula 1 GP will be starting at 2pm local time", I have to then go through multiple steps as follows in order to ensure that I can watch it: 1. Ok, WHERE is the US F1GP being held? 2. I have to identify which timezone Austin, Texas is in 3. I have…

If you have a smartphone or computer, just type '2pm in Austin' into Google - I get '2:00 pm Sunday, in Austin, TX, USA is 6:00 am Monday, in Brisbane QLD'

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#254

Post by ChicagoDave »

Having worked on computers for 30 years and seeing a recent uptick in globalization of system usage, getting rid of time zones would be a fucking awesome change to localization nightmares with data.

DO IT!!!

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#255

Post by wtbob »

dcosson wrote: post #175
ProxCoques wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the impression Americans don't use 24-hour clock much. In Europe it's pretty much standard if you want to communicate time reliably. Or am I mistaken about the American love of am/pm?

Unlike most of the imperial system, farenheit, etc, Am/pm seems to actually make some sense with analog clocks/watches. In places where you primarily use 24 hour time I guess you're always just translating from the clock in your head?

Or you just have a secondary dial. The watch I'm wearing right now has a major 1-12 dial and a secondary 13-24 dial. But my other watch has a 1-12 dial and a secondary 1-24 dial, with a funky secondary hour hand, so perhaps I'm weird:-)

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#256

Post by jhbadger »

sandworm101 wrote: post #207
ProxCoques wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the impression Americans don't use 24-hour clock much. In Europe it's pretty much standard if you want to communicate time reliably. Or am I mistaken about the American love of am/pm?

American English is all about factions. The use of 24hour time gives the impression that the speaker has ties to the military, which is a rather high percentage of the US population. I've had several people correct my use of 24-hour time (ie 0945) as being "dramatic" and that 9:45am is more "friendly". I had one person comment after a talk I gave (lots of slides with timestamps) that they thought I was talking down t…

You are joking, but the French revolutionaries really tried to introduce 10 hour days (with a different value of "hour" obviously) broken into 100 minutes each (again not our minute) along with their new calendar.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#257

Post by codesnik »

grzm wrote: post #7
facorreia wrote: post #5

I think the article makes a valid point but it can't get past Americanisms like "noon" or "4 p.m." If people were to adapt UTC, those would be 12:00 and 16:00 respectively. And that just reinforces the main point, that the numbers are largely arbitrary -- but descriptions like "after mid-day" (p.m.) aren't.

Americanisms like "noon" or "4 p.m." Huh. I had never thought of these as Americanisms (though being from the States I might say that, right?) I've lived abroad in a country that uses a 24-hour clock for more official uses, and 12-hour clocks for more informal, spoken uses, including the use of the concept of "noon". Given my small sample size, I looked at Wikipedia to see how time is referenced in other countries. I…

12pm before 1pm is particulary maddening (says Russian, and we do use 12 hour clock in informal communication)

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#258

Post by imron »

darawk wrote: post #17

Hmm...this is an interesting idea. However, the core of the argument seems to be this: > “The economy — that’s all of us — would receive a permanent ‘harmonization dividend’ ”— the efficiency benefits that come from a unified time zone. But this editorial is pretty light on actually supporting that. The basic argument seems to be that it reduces 'translation costs'. But..does it? What about the benefits of being able…

Let's look at the single data point we have where this sort of system is in place - China.

It's approximately as wide as the U.S. and it has a single timezone - Beijing time.

As you can imagine, if you are living in Beijing, Beijing time works pretty well. It also works pretty well for everywhere else on the east coast.

It's not so bad in the middle either.

For the people living in Urumqi, or even further west such as Kashgar (or actually pretty much anyone in Xinjiang province) it's a mess.

Everything is offset a couple of hours and there is a kind of unofficial 'xinjiang time' that you have to convert to and from in your head depending sometimes on the ethnicity of the person.

It's not a good idea.

http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/11/china-only-...

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#259

Post by eutropia »

bluejekyll wrote: post #160
minznerjosh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This hits the nail on the head. Abandoning time zones would only make sense if there were no more need for time translation. But you'd still need to translate for the sake of biological clocks, and without time zones it would become more challenging to communicate that translation. I would be in favor of doing away with DST and also eschewing AM/PM in favor of a 24-hour clock. I'm surprised this article didn't mentio…

Yeah agree completely. And keeping zones is important to understand workdays. I wouldn't mind dropping named time zones completely in favor of UTC+Offset, I always end up looking that up, annoyingly. Or just name the zones based on the offset. So NY would be -5. We could for humans write time with the ecoding, similar to ISO-8601, but it would just be 15:30-5 for 3:30pm EST. While we're at it. Can we make all the mon…

http://www.mithrandir.com/Tranquility/tranquility.html

I think you're proposing this, 13 months named for scientists, one day outside the year.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#260

Post by lucideer »

ProxCoques wrote: post #116
minznerjosh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This hits the nail on the head. Abandoning time zones would only make sense if there were no more need for time translation. But you'd still need to translate for the sake of biological clocks, and without time zones it would become more challenging to communicate that translation. I would be in favor of doing away with DST and also eschewing AM/PM in favor of a 24-hour clock. I'm surprised this article didn't mentio…

I get the impression Americans don't use 24-hour clock much. In Europe it's pretty much standard if you want to communicate time reliably. Or am I mistaken about the American love of am/pm?

I find this comment unexpected, being Irish, as I would've associated the attachment to 12 hour intervals much more with here than with the US. But I guess it's a British colonial throwback thing; I'd be curious to hear of au/nz/ca/za/in/etc. habits.
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