241–250 of 406 posts
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We should rename English to "European" while we're at it, or "Standard".
If you really want to annoy an English person, use an American flag to represent English-language localization
(joke explanation: this is a reference to the two Chinese writing systems, used in PRC and Taiwan)
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Cue sci-fi dystopia where the totalitarian Mars gov't gases (or somehow otherwise knocks out) everyone for 40 minutes while they search the place and haul off dissidents.
You definitely need to watch Dark City (if you haven't already!) The movie does a variation on this exact plot. Very well, even.
("Great minds think alike.")
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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
Not a physicist, but I was led to understand there is no universal frame of reference. You can't base time on deep space as if time was the same across all deep space, because it isn't. Right? A local time "correction" is easy when you compare against exactly one other point in space but if you want something like an universe-wide UTC that everyone can correct against, it can't be done. Although I don't really unders…
Sending good vibes to the engineers who will have to add Moon time support to the Java DateTime class.
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Those things should be on UTC anyway (even on earth). Timezones are just for displaying to humans.
They really should have been on TAI. I guess it doesn't matter now if we won't get any more leap seconds.
So TAI is not the end all for what I expect to be a very complicated technical problem.
I would be happy if we got rid of timezones, got rid of daylight savings time, and got rid of 12 hour clocks.
So I guess I'm in the "this could work" camp.
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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…
What I hate is DST. That's not only useless, it's problematic. Heck, my old mother never managed to handle the change this last fall, in her nursing home - meals didn't come at the optimal time, she got undernourished, it destroyed her sleep cycles, and her health went all downhill.
"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 a physics thing which affects all clocks. According to special relativity clocks on the Moon will run slower because the moon is orbiting the Earth, so the clock has a higher relative speed. However, general relativity says the clock will run faster , because the Moon has a smaller gravitational field than Earth. In this case the second effect will dominate, so even a perfect clock will run faster: it's not the…
I wonder if, in the future, we will have a group of timekeeping satellites orbiting our sun. Maybe their orbit could be tweaked to have identical time dilation to Earth, and everyone can just sync off that.
Maybe we can derive some time keeping mechanism from the black hole at the center of our galaxy, or maybe we will just realize that our obsession with timekeeping is a silly terrestrial habit, and not really important at scale.
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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
I cannot imagine a world where "the norm" of human interaction would be with people in other times zones.