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Europe pushing for lunar time zone

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Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#301

Post by yencabulator »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #170
cyborgx7 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having your unit system in the same base as your number system infinitely outweighs any advantages derived from the having a higher number of factors or whatever. If you want to switch out number system, and then change the unit system alongside that, I'll hear you out. But skipping the number system and doing it at the unit level is always dead on arrival as an argument.

If it were the case, people would have switched massively to a decimal time keeping system. The fact they did not is proof enough for me that using the same base than our number system isn't relevant. It makes sense intuitively because it's extremely rare that we have to go above 24 for hours and sixty for minutes while we divide these time periods fairly often. I would gladly switch to base 12 just to have simpler m…

Ah, the classic argument for why Amurican Measurements(tm) must also be superior, conveniently ignoring the rest of the world being very metric.

My personal observation is that nobody divides hours into more than halves or quarters, and .5, .25, .75 are pretty simple.

Consider this: 1 USD is 100 cents, and people are just fine with its common fractions.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#302

Post by yencabulator »

alex_suzuki wrote: post #9

Still think life would be simpler if we all just adopted .beats (Swatch Internet Time): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

They might have had better luck if they hadn't tried to define it around the location of their headquarters.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#303

Post by yencabulator »

watwut wrote: post #130
Zr40 wrote: post #98

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. > Without timezones: > * I want to call my friend in Germany. It's the same time here as there. It r…

It is not the same thing. I do not need to reason at all right now, I just look at the clock that shows times in relevant timezones. I know all the information instantly, without any calculations in head at all. In the latter case, you do need to do math, because what you are getting is meaningless number and then you need to convert it to some kind of "how long after typical start of day" format to get information y…

Ah, so you're saying you have a clock showing German time, and it did the "math" for you.

Imagine multiple world clocks, in the typical Hollywood command bunker look. Instead of each clock having hour hands pointing in different directions, they'd all have the same hour hand position, but different highlighted zones for waking hours (or "shift 1", "shift 2", "shift 3", for 24h duty).

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#304

Post by KRAKRISMOTT »

aerophilic wrote: post #284
lolinder wrote: post #276

> There are also technical issues to consider. Clocks run faster on the moon than on Earth, gaining about 56 microseconds each day, the space agency said. Further complicating matters, ticking occurs differently on the lunar surface than in lunar orbit. At first this sounded like they were describing a mechanical issue with analog clocks, but they're not: time on the moon actually moves this much faster relative to E…

This is interesting… and I wonder how this plays out across different planetary bodies. It effectively means how we define a second will be different across the board. Can anyone weigh in on whether the MKS standard of a second is based on something in free space, or here on earth? If universal (based on free space) Would this mean we should all convert to/from this second, and treat our own second as relative?

Not big deal, we already correct for this problem in GPS

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#305

Post by yencabulator »

iainmerrick wrote: post #129
xarope wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the military, there is Zulu (+0 UTC/GMT) and Juliet time ("my" time). Every report with times should always indicate the timezone (whether Z or J or otherwise), e.g. in NYC 2pm would be 1400Y. Any recent/current military folks want to comment?

Is there a different single letter per time zone band? That’s almost elegant if so (as long as you ignore the many places with idiosyncratic time zones).

Unfortunately, there's too many timezones for just A-Z, but nautical time does make an attempt. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UTC_offsets for the funny markings they decided to use when they ran out of letters.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#306

Post by yencabulator »

I really fail to see why they wouldn't just use UTC.

> There are also technical issues to consider. Clocks run faster on the moon than on Earth, gaining about 56 microseconds each day, the space agency said. Further complicating matters, ticking occurs differently on the lunar surface than in lunar orbit.

And all computer clocks need to be corrected for drift anyway. Standard mechanisms for dealing with unruly oscillators should have no trouble with that.

> Perhaps most importantly, lunar time will have to be practical for astronauts there, noted the space agency’s Bernhard Hufenbach.

> “This will be quite a challenge” with each day lasting as long as 29.5 Earth days,

And humans are adjusted for a roughly 24-26 hour day cycle, which UTC handily gives you. Whether it happens to correlate with the natural light/dark cycle, well, you've lost that fight here anyway, it's not like they'd stay awake for 29.5 days and then sleep 29.5 days. Same thing for the ISS: every "day" they get 16 sunrises and sunsets. Of course they'll use artificial lighting to regulate sleep.

Not a single justification for complicating things.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#307

Post by luxcem »

esperent wrote: post #4

For some reason I thought this was going to be about an alternative to daylight savings time and any suggestion of abolishing that always gets my interest. It's not though, it's about giving the moon its own time zone. Which is about that least exciting moon based news I've ever heard although I'm sure there's interesting technical challenges (which I sincerely hope I never have to deal with).

> any suggestion of abolishing that always gets my interest.

I recently learn about the Abolition of time zones[1] proposition too

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_time_zones

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#308

Post by [deleted] »

jxf wrote: post #267
patife wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's the different exactly @jxf?

A reference time describes what standard of time we use. On Earth, for most human use cases, the reference time is UTC. UTC is measured by using International Atomic Time (TAI, from the French "temps atomique international") and adding or subtracting a prescribed number of leap seconds to account for the rotation of the Earth. We don't use TAI in everyday use because it's constantly and continuously changing in small…

[deleted]

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#309

Post by nixpulvis »

Just name the zones after the predominant facing constellations / star at the epoch of this new standard. 12 or 13 zones might be a good amount? Too many?

This is perhaps the least political potential solution I could think of.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#310

Post by hulitu »

jamiek88 wrote: post #111
libraryatnight wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't wait to have to take into consideration the timezone of the moon people when I schedule my zoom meetings in the future. /s

Spare a thought for the future maintainers of liblunar.

And more thoughts for the developers of liblunar1, liblunar2, liblunar3 and liblunar4 each a superset but incompatible with each other (see gtk). /s
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