211–220 of 406 posts
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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
We should rename English to "European" while we're at it, or "Standard".
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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…
People under 30 don't use the "circular clock" anyway. Mars will do fine without it.
http://www.mcld.co.uk/blog/2006/digital-vs-analogue-clocks.h...
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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.
It seem to me that the "best" reference point would be "mid-day" (at 12:00), when the sun is perpendicular to the planet. It can be easily "guessed" and synced I think... like it has been for millenaries before the clocks
So I guess that instead of 0h00:00-24h39:35 I would prefer -Oh:20:17 to 24:19:18 (centered on 12:00). Or we can just decorrelate "absolute time" (in h/m/s) and "time of day" (in %) where mi-day is 50% (actual duration in H/M/S to be depending on the planet) and mid-year is 50% of the actual rotation around the sun...
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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…
The worst problem with timezones IMO is that they are way too big [1], compared to what they should be if the world were equally divided into 24 hour "strips". Europe for example has CET which stretches all the way west to Spain, despite UTC+1 ending somewhere along the French-German border - so Spain and France are 1 hour "ahead" despite not needing to. [1] https://www.timeanddate.com/time/map/
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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.
I don’t understand what you mean by special cases and general cases.
R\Q is dense in R so most numbers can’t be written as repeating digits at all whatever the base you are using and in every bases all numbers which have a finite representation also have a repeating one by subtracting 1 to the last digit and adding an infinity of the biggest available digit after (decimal representations are not unique).
Generally you want more divisors for your base. The more divisors you have the nicer the fractional part is likely to look like for common operations.
"Clocks run faster on the moon than on Earth, gaining about 56 microseconds each day" Is this a relativity effect from lower gravity?
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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.
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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/
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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