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Europe pushing for lunar time zone

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Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#131

Post by detrites »

Taywee wrote: post #39
rascul wrote: post #8

I would be happy if we got rid of timezones, got rid of daylight savings time, and got rid of 12 hour clocks.

With timezones: * I want to call my friend in Germany. What time is it for her? I guess I'm UTC-7 and she's UTC+1, so she's 8 hours ahead of me. I know that everybody around the world typically wakes up between 6 and 9 AM and goes to sleep between 8 PM and midnight, and she's an early bird, so she should be awake. * They said the meeting was going to be at 8 o'clock, but they are in a different time zone, did they me…

This is obviously a software problem that could be solved universally at the OS level.

We have all kinds of low-level protocols for coordinating all manner of things. Distilling a coherent system of agreeing on a timezone difference, between two communicating entities and presenting that to the user at any time would be quite basic.

We have location data for all, at all times. We have a local, accurate clock. There's little else we'd need. What remaining issues are all UX. Apple could roll such a thing out parallel on all their multitude devices and it'd be basically trivial.

Is it maybe just habit that we gravitate to a manual process, when an automated one would be rather easy in this situation?

On iOS, the existing clock app already provides a basic form, tapping the plus button allows the addition of multiple zones and provides useful additional context in the form of offsets and what day it is relative to the users local date and time.

That's halfway there, it would only need contact awareness to be able to provide a solution.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#132

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

sen wrote: post #106
alex_suzuki wrote: post #9

Still think life would be simpler if we all just adopted .beats (Swatch Internet Time): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

I was so convinced .beats would take over the world (or solar system in this case). I had their watch, I installed their task-bar clock plugin for Windows 98, I harped on about it to my friends... a surprising number of which actually agreed it was a good idea. Then it just kinda fizzled out. I'm still upset it didn't take off.

It didn’t work in 1793 when it was mandated by the Convention despite the rest of the metric system taking roots.

It was unlikely that a rebrand by a greedy Swiss corporation would make it more popular.

Plus, current time keeping already use superior base systems. 12 and 60 are both highly composite numbers. Using a decimal system would be a step back. I wish we had symbols for 10 and 11 however.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#134

Post by Symbiote »

ACS_Solver wrote: post #124
likis wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Having some sort of agreed upon world timezone would be neat though ..." Don't we already have that with UTC / Zulu time?

Do you encounter people using UTC regularly? While it's the closest we have to a world timezone, in my experience people don't use it much outside of a technical context. I usually see Americans treat Eastern Time as a standard, with references to Pacific sometimes. In the EU, where I am, CET is the usual timezone used for specifying a time internationally. And regardless of the location, it's very common for people…

> let's have a discussion at 16:00 UTC

My colleagues and I do this, but we're often involving 3, 4, 5+ timezones. Everyone knows their own offset from UTC, but I easily forgot whether Australia is on DST this month.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#135

Post by cyberpunk »

cornholio wrote: post #125

I am a proponent of a Martian timekeeping system where each day has 24 hours 39 minutes and 35.244 seconds and all the rest of time units have standard lengths. For example, at midnight your martian clock would show the time as 24:39:35 for a fraction of a second, then wound back to 00:00:00. The calendar then would track the Earth calendar as close as possible, with shortened months to accommodate for the longer day…

I prefer KSR's "time gap". At midnight on mars, everyone just gets a 40 minute period where the clocks don't move.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#136

Post by Stratoscope »

sph wrote: post #114
Stratoscope wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Ticks...why'd it have to be ticks?" I was hiking in Edgewood Park on the SF Peninsula, and when I got to my car and took off my hat, this big fat tick came running out. He must have been the size of a coffee bean, or it sure looked that way in my moment of fear. Is it true that they grow six times larger on the Moon?

If it's true they can just blow up the Moon for all I care.

And now we know the true explanation of the first paragraph of Seveneves:

The Moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full. The time was 05:03:12 UTC. Later it would be designated A+0.0.0, or simply Zero.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#137

Post by TeMPOraL »

Taywee wrote: post #39
rascul wrote: post #8

I would be happy if we got rid of timezones, got rid of daylight savings time, and got rid of 12 hour clocks.

With timezones: * I want to call my friend in Germany. What time is it for her? I guess I'm UTC-7 and she's UTC+1, so she's 8 hours ahead of me. I know that everybody around the world typically wakes up between 6 and 9 AM and goes to sleep between 8 PM and midnight, and she's an early bird, so she should be awake. * They said the meeting was going to be at 8 o'clock, but they are in a different time zone, did they me…

Yeah, I hate timezones with a passion but the more I think about them, the more I recognize they're the least bad option available. They correctly optimize for making most common cases trivial, while rare cases relatively easy.

I think it needs to be said here: cross-timezone scheduling and datetime math are extremely rare relative to people's daily experience. It may not be obvious to us here, because we're much more likely to be dealing with the unusual case - building distributed systems, having international users/customers, working for multinational companies or cooperating with companies from other countries, etc. Almost nobody ever does that, and it makes no sense to make everyone do extra mental arithmetic when thinking or talking about other places, just for the sake of a minority of white-collar workers who can't be arsed to add a second column to their Outlook calendar, or double-check when they have a Zoom meeting.

Getting rid of timezones would make most of everyday matters location-dependent. Timezones allow us to use the same numbering of times of day regardless of where any of us lives. 08:00 is morning. 22:00 is night. 12:00-14:00 is around when people have lunch. Etc. We can talk about our days in all kinds of ways (movies, plays, songs, novels, guides, etc.), retaining a precise numerical scale (vs. much less useful terms like "morning" or "afternoon"), and everyone everywhere can relate. Getting rid of the timezones makes this impossible.

Note the difference between talking about daily experience with people around the world, vs. doing things in sync with people around the world. Timezones make the former trivial, and the latter easy. Removing timezones makes the latter trivial, but the former hard. Hard enough that people would quickly recreate timezones for convenience.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#138

Post by bb123 »

detrites wrote: post #131
Taywee wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With timezones: * I want to call my friend in Germany. What time is it for her? I guess I'm UTC-7 and she's UTC+1, so she's 8 hours ahead of me. I know that everybody around the world typically wakes up between 6 and 9 AM and goes to sleep between 8 PM and midnight, and she's an early bird, so she should be awake. * They said the meeting was going to be at 8 o'clock, but they are in a different time zone, did they me…

This is obviously a software problem that could be solved universally at the OS level. We have all kinds of low-level protocols for coordinating all manner of things. Distilling a coherent system of agreeing on a timezone difference, between two communicating entities and presenting that to the user at any time would be quite basic. We have location data for all, at all times. We have a local, accurate clock. There's…

Why do we need to make it a software problem? The existing system makes it a trivial mental calculation.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#139

Post by claviola »

cornholio wrote: post #125

I am a proponent of a Martian timekeeping system where each day has 24 hours 39 minutes and 35.244 seconds and all the rest of time units have standard lengths. For example, at midnight your martian clock would show the time as 24:39:35 for a fraction of a second, then wound back to 00:00:00. The calendar then would track the Earth calendar as close as possible, with shortened months to accommodate for the longer day…

Do you honestly consider modifying the core idea of the 24 hour day to be a "slight tweak"? I can't even imagine how many different things rely on that assumption.

(and I'm sorry, but what does "naming months and seasons in Mars" have to do with this?)

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#140

Post by cyborgx7 »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #132
sen wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was so convinced .beats would take over the world (or solar system in this case). I had their watch, I installed their task-bar clock plugin for Windows 98, I harped on about it to my friends... a surprising number of which actually agreed it was a good idea. Then it just kinda fizzled out. I'm still upset it didn't take off.

It didn’t work in 1793 when it was mandated by the Convention despite the rest of the metric system taking roots. It was unlikely that a rebrand by a greedy Swiss corporation would make it more popular. Plus, current time keeping already use superior base systems. 12 and 60 are both highly composite numbers. Using a decimal system would be a step back. I wish we had symbols for 10 and 11 however.

Having your unit system in the same base as your number system infinitely outweighs any advantages derived from the having a higher number of factors or whatever. If you want to switch out number system, and then change the unit system alongside that, I'll hear you out. But skipping the number system and doing it at the unit level is always dead on arrival as an argument.
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