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Europe pushing for lunar time zone

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Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#201

Post by bonzini »

midoridensha wrote: post #97
Aerroon wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The math would've been a lot easier if GMT+0 had been somewhere in the Pacific ocean. Going from +1 to -7 is a lot more troublesome for most people than from +11 to +19.

Yeah, it would be nice if they made GMT the same as the international date line.

The international date line is where you go from GMT-12 to GMT+11 or something similar.

So, no matter what time zone you pick as the reference, by definition the international date line is 12 hours away from your reference.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#202

Post by epse »

eru wrote: post #159
cornholio wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 perpetrate…

Those things should be on UTC anyway (even on earth). Timezones are just for displaying to humans.

Probably, but even Windows would break in this scenario. It interprets the hardware clock as being in local time and derives UTC from that (you can change that with a registry change, but it isn't very reliable in my experience)

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#203

Post by BurningFrog »

davnicwil wrote: post #150
trompetenaccoun wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have a UTC clock in my Mac menu bar already. I expect I always will.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#204

Post by defrost »

bonzini wrote: post #201
midoridensha wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it would be nice if they made GMT the same as the international date line.

The international date line is where you go from GMT-12 to GMT+11 or something similar. So, no matter what time zone you pick as the reference, by definition the international date line is 12 hours away from your reference.

Except where it's -10 or +14 hours away from reference due to jogging around countries or island groups.

See:

https://www.timeanddate.com/time/map/

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#205

Post by claviola »

manojlds wrote: post #185
claviola wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)

cough leap second cough

Sure, the leap second is a thing. We still represent the day as 24 hours for humans. They didn't seem to be talking about an "under the hood" hand waving of a significant part of the day.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#206

Post by claviola »

yrro wrote: post #177
claviola wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I wasn't talking about software development by itself, but human behaviour.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#207

Post by claviola »

wongarsu wrote: post #163
claviola wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)

You have basically three options for timekeeping on mars: adjust the day, adjust the second, or give up on days syncing with the (apparent) movement of the sun. The first option breaks mostly assumptions made in software and processes, the second mostly assumptions made in hardware, and the third breaks human's circadian rythm (a 23 or 25 hour rythm isn't a big deal, but it has to sync to light). Of those three, the…

I must have missed something. This article is about the Moon.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#208

Post by BurningFrog »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #137
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…

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 mor…

As the world becomes more global, coordinating with people in other times zones will become the norm, not the exception.

I expect time zones will fade away then.

No need to rush it prematurely though

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#209

Post by reportgunner »

noworld wrote: post #194
2000UltraDeluxe wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a whole lot of social conventions tied to local time, sunrise/sundown, and the circadian rythm in general. Sure, it'd be possible but we'd have to concieve a lot of new cultural concepts to replace the ones invalidated by the shift to UTC, and find new ways to remind people that it's impolite to call people in the middle of the night. In the long run, a list of time zones aren't that much more complicated to…

I don't think they meant replace all time zones with UTC, but just put the Moon on UTC.

Yeah, my point being that 1 minute passing is 60 seconds both on Earth and the moon. We have a Lunar calendar and the moon is tidally locked to Earth so it seems trivial to convert Earth time to Moon time. The terms "Earth time" and "Moon time" seem weird to me in themselves, in my view it's "Human time".

I understand having a separate time for Mars or other planets as they have their own cycles.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#210

Post by Kwpolska »

epse wrote: post #202
eru wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those things should be on UTC anyway (even on earth). Timezones are just for displaying to humans.

Probably, but even Windows would break in this scenario. It interprets the hardware clock as being in local time and derives UTC from that (you can change that with a registry change, but it isn't very reliable in my experience)

Keeping the clock in UTC is reliable on Windows 10/11. Windows will happily read and write to the clock in UTC, and things like NTP sync just work.

Source: 2 years of heavy Windows 10/11 usage with that setting.

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