Sending good vibes to the engineers who will have to add Moon time support to the Java DateTime class.
Can't wait for Martian Time support
Then Java will have to support days longer than 24 hours.
Europe pushing for lunar time zone
171–180 of 406 posts
Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone
#172I 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.
Yes but if you work the night shift you get shafted.
And when the clocks go back in autumn you get the 40 minute period twice.
Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In decimal, in general in decimal to write a fractions you need an infinite number of digits (with repetition). We have convenient notation for that repetition. A few special fractions can be written with finitely many digits. Using base 12 or 60 you are in the same situation. If you want elegance, you should cut down on the number of special cases. Hence I would suggest to use a base like 11 or 59. That way more fra…
12 and 60 are both optimal cases for what you are describing.
That's what highly composite numbers are: the set of natural numbers having more divisors than all smaller ones. 12 is the smallest number having 6 divisors and 60 the smallest one having 12.
Both 11 and 59 would be inconvenient bases. They are primes.
Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In decimal, in general in decimal to write a fractions you need an infinite number of digits (with repetition). We have convenient notation for that repetition. A few special fractions can be written with finitely many digits. Using base 12 or 60 you are in the same situation. If you want elegance, you should cut down on the number of special cases. Hence I would suggest to use a base like 11 or 59. That way more fra…
How does base 11 work for counting on your fingers?
Last I checked, most of us have only 10 digits
Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
In decimal, in general in decimal to write a fractions you need an infinite number of digits (with repetition). We have convenient notation for that repetition. A few special fractions can be written with finitely many digits. Using base 12 or 60 you are in the same situation. If you want elegance, you should cut down on the number of special cases. Hence I would suggest to use a base like 11 or 59. That way more fra…
12 and 60 are both optimal cases for what you are describing. That's what highly composite numbers are: the set of natural numbers having more divisors than all smaller ones. 12 is the smallest number having 6 divisors and 60 the smallest one having 12. Both 11 and 59 would be inconvenient bases. They are primes.
12 and 60 just introduce more special cases, exactly because they have so many divisors.
Prime numbers have no non-trivial divisors. So more fractions get handled by the general case, the case of infinitely repeated digits.
> 12 and 60 are both optimal cases for what you are describing.
Optimal in what sense? They are certainly more convenient. I was describing mathematical elegance.
Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Also Ireland, which is important because of Northern Ireland. It would be politically inconvenient if the time in Dublin were ever to be different from the time in London.
Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone
#177I 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?)
The very first entry on the list of falsehoods programmers believe about time[0] is that there are always 24 hours in a day.
[0] https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b...
23:59:60 happens when we add leap seconds to the clock, for instance...
Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone
#178I 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?)
For software that runs on Mars, I think "Mars date/time" has to be a brand new set of APIs and data types. The existing date/time APIs/types are for Earth times only. The "local time zone" on Mars would just be UTC. That way there wouldn't be much possibility of bugs based on confusing Earth and Mars time scales – all pre-existing software would still work with Earth date/times, and anything that needed to deal with Mars date/times specifically would have to be modified to handle them.
Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
In decimal, in general in decimal to write a fractions you need an infinite number of digits (with repetition). We have convenient notation for that repetition. A few special fractions can be written with finitely many digits. Using base 12 or 60 you are in the same situation. If you want elegance, you should cut down on the number of special cases. Hence I would suggest to use a base like 11 or 59. That way more fra…
How does base 11 work for counting on your fingers? Last I checked, most of us have only 10 digits
With your ten digits, it's easy to symbolize eleven digits: zero, one, two, ..., nine and ten. Hence base eleven is very convenient.
Base six is probably most practical for this: You can count from zero to five on your left hand. When you go to six, you close your left hand (go to zero) and increment the count on your right hand by one. Two hands let you count from zero to thirty-five (inclusive).