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Europe pushing for lunar time zone

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Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#141

Post by cornholio »

cyberpunk wrote: post #135
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.

It's basically the same thing, but harder to achieve technically because many things assume clocks are moving all the time. For example timers and timeouts are frequently implemented as loops polling system time has reached a certain future value. Many things break or malfunction if a large number of things happen at the same time, for example logging, crons etc. Imagine investigating a cybersecurity event perpetrated in the gap and finding all file dates and logtimes as unreliable.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#142

Post by bb123 »

andyferris wrote: post #17
petesergeant wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the EU won’t bite the bullet and just adopt English as the official language, there’s no way they’re pinning this to Greenwich time

I'm confused. English is an official EU language is one of the (few) working languages of the European Commission (French is also used a lot). And the United Kingdom remains a member of the European Space Agency. GMT overlaps with European time zones, with countries like France being big proponents things like UTC (and TAI, and the metric system in general).

He's referring to the current animosity between the UK and Europe. Both groups frequently go out of their way to make life harder for the other. The EU proposing the English GMT would be unlikely in this climate. Also FWIW I think only Portugal overlaps with GMT.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#143

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

"Clocks run faster on the moon than on Earth, gaining about 56 microseconds each day, the space agency said".

I have no technical knowledge about clocks at all, but this sentence sounds odd to me, shouldn't there be a lot of different clock technologies that work in different ways?

Or are they saying this because there is only one "best" technology for NASA purposes and that one is off by 56 us on the moon?

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#145

Post by crote »

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…

Wouldn't that get incredibly confusing with the calendar always being slightly off, despite using the same names? At that point why not just stick to a integer day count for the date.

Having a non-integer number of hours in a day might also get confusing. It would be near-impossible to make an analog clock, for example, and stuff like dividing up a day into three shifts would be really cumbersome. For day-to-day life redefining the second might end up being a lot easier.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#146

Post by cornholio »

claviola wrote: post #139
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?)

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

Time of day and calendaring and discussed together because they allow you to ask things like "what was the date and time on Mars prime meridian on Feb 2 2023 6:00 UTC" and get a recognizable date and time back. It's essentially a timezone, albeit a very strange one with a variable offset.

> modifying the core idea of the 24 hour day to be a "slight tweak"?

Ok, maybe an exaggerated hand-wave on my part. It's a slight software tweak on my desk clock. I was contrasting with the alternative of modifying a fundamental SI unit and more or less rebuilding from scratch all hardware sent on Mars. The fuckups alone resulting from confusing Earth seconds with Mars seconds.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#147

Post by beeneuf »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #143

"Clocks run faster on the moon than on Earth, gaining about 56 microseconds each day, the space agency said". I have no technical knowledge about clocks at all, but this sentence sounds odd to me, shouldn't there be a lot of different clock technologies that work in different ways? Or are they saying this because there is only one "best" technology for NASA purposes and that one is off by 56 us on the moon?

It's not about the technology, atomic clocks are extremely accurate - it's time dilation due to relativity.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#148

Post by phicoh »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #143

"Clocks run faster on the moon than on Earth, gaining about 56 microseconds each day, the space agency said". I have no technical knowledge about clocks at all, but this sentence sounds odd to me, shouldn't there be a lot of different clock technologies that work in different ways? Or are they saying this because there is only one "best" technology for NASA purposes and that one is off by 56 us on the moon?

No it is pesky Einstein guy with his general relativity.

The bigger problem is that our timekeeping is earth based. The time definition should have been based on deep space, with corrections for time on earth.

So earth clock are slow with respect to clocks in deep space. Clocks on the moon are less slow are therefore faster than on earth

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#149

Post by marzipanWhale »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #143

"Clocks run faster on the moon than on Earth, gaining about 56 microseconds each day, the space agency said". I have no technical knowledge about clocks at all, but this sentence sounds odd to me, shouldn't there be a lot of different clock technologies that work in different ways? Or are they saying this because there is only one "best" technology for NASA purposes and that one is off by 56 us on the moon?

I assume this is due to time dilation, so it's not a limitation of the clocks.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#150

Post by davnicwil »

trompetenaccoun wrote: post #126
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.

I never heard of this before but now that I looked it up I think it's a good idea. People will probably still want to keep their local times but at least for coordinating international stuff we should have one standard time for the entire world. It's insane that we still have to look up how certain time zones correlate to our own local times for online meetings and such. This can all be improved. Remember back in the…

For meeting coordination I think we will probably just converge around a defacto standard existing timezone like UTC.

We would all develop an intuition for what different times in UTC 'mean' (first thing in morning, after lunch, mid afternoon, etc) relative to the one we're in so we're not looking it up all the time. Maybe keep a UTC clock showing on relevant devices.

I don't think there's a need for a completely new system.

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