Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Europe pushing for lunar time zone

apnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 406 posts

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#331

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

yencabulator wrote: post #301
WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, no, it’s not this argument because as you rightfully pointed everyone did switch to the metric system while absolutely no one switched to decimal time. I’m French by the way.

People do divide hours in twelfth, sixth and third all the time. Thinking in blocks of 5 and 10 minutes is very common.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#332

Post by yencabulator »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #331
yencabulator wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, no, it’s not this argument because as you rightfully pointed everyone did switch to the metric system while absolutely no one switched to decimal time. I’m French by the way. People do divide hours in twelfth, sixth and third all the time. Thinking in blocks of 5 and 10 minutes is very common.

Thinking in blocks of 5 and 10 units is very common in metric systems too. The fact that 10 minutes is 1/6th of an hour is not very relevant; that it's a good size unit for pragmatic use is.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#333

Post by jxf »

yencabulator wrote: post #298
jxf wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> We don't use TAI in everyday use because it's constantly and continuously changing in small ways to account for the tiny accelerations or decelerations in Earth's rotation, and that's annoying for computers. So instead we use UTC. Wait, what? TAI is the one time standard that doesn't change. It's just a bunch of atomic clocks averaged together. As monotonic as human kind is able to manufacture, at this time. UTC is…

> Wait, what? TAI is the one time standard that doesn't change. It's just a bunch of atomic clocks averaged together. As monotonic as human kind is able to manufacture, at this time.

That is not the complete story. The calculation used to average the clocks has changed over time, thus amending TAI. The "perfect monotonic" time you're talking about is TT (terrestrial time), not TAI.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#334

Post by Kwpolska »

ElectricalUnion wrote: post #312
Kwpolska wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be a “problem” for people who like arbitrary lines to define their lives. Keeping most of Europe on one time zone lets people from different neighbouring and culturally close countries work together without needing to think about time zones.

If keeping most of Europe on one timezone lets people work together without needing to think about time zones, so does unifying the entire earth on a single TAI or UTC "timezone".

No, that does not scale. Sunrise and sunset are at very similar times in CET countries, meaning they have similar business hours, and I can set up a meeting between Spain, Poland, and the UK (which is on UTC/BST, but that’s close enough) at 11:00 CET and everyone will be fine with it and well awake at that time. If we extended CET around the world, and wanted someone in New York to join our meeting, they would be furious because they would need to ~~wake up~~ (edit: be awake and at a computer) at 5:00 ex-EST, or 1.5 hours before sunrise.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#335

Post by benj111 »

eru wrote: post #179
benj111 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Yes sorry. That's a good, (and obvious) point

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#336

Post by trompetenaccoun »

coldpie wrote: post #279
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…

We already have that, it's UTC. And we don't need to learn a whole new system of time measurement to use it.

Currently you have to know all your timezones and do the conversions in your head if you travel a lot for example. Additionally the organizers of many events and conferences, even very international ones, do not use UTC. So no, UTC doesn't solve that problem in practical terms. If the entire world used UTC for their local time, then it would be a similar solution. I personally wouldn't mind that actually. It would take a bit to get used to but in the long run it makes much more sense in an ever more globalized world.

Same as the world adopting the metric system, and in science specifically SI-units. Surely you agree even though that was a bit of a hassle when countries changed over from their old unique units at the time, in the long run it was the right decision. Imagine what it would be like working in an international team always having to convert units of measurement. It's still an issue in engineering sometimes, because outside of science the US didn't make the switch and it's extremely annoying.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#337

Post by yencabulator »

jxf wrote: post #333
yencabulator wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't use TAI in everyday use because it's constantly and continuously changing in small ways to account for the tiny accelerations or decelerations in Earth's rotation, and that's annoying for computers. So instead we use UTC. Wait, what? TAI is the one time standard that doesn't change. It's just a bunch of atomic clocks averaged together. As monotonic as human kind is able to manufacture, at this time. UTC is…

> Wait, what? TAI is the one time standard that doesn't change. It's just a bunch of atomic clocks averaged together. As monotonic as human kind is able to manufacture, at this time. That is not the complete story. The calculation used to average the clocks has changed over time, thus amending TAI. The "perfect monotonic" time you're talking about is TT (terrestrial time), not TAI.

Wikipedia about TT: "It is a theoretical ideal, and real clocks can only approximate it. [...] TT is indirectly the basis of UTC, via International Atomic Time (TAI)."

So, TAI is what we are able to measure. TT is a theoretical construct. Can't run computers on TT, can run them on TAI.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#338

Post by fluoridation »

makeitdouble wrote: post #329
starkd wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I don't think we should define days around the petty need of humans. Why not? Are you being considerate for alien life? As far as we know, humans are the only ones who are going to use it.

I read it as computers being the primary target for any clock system

Computers don't really care about the current wall time. They just care about measuring time between events. If a piece of software about the current day of the week it's only because a person cares about it and wants to do something special on certain days of the week.

So, yes, time systems should be designed around the needs of people.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#339

Post by jxf »

yencabulator wrote: post #337
jxf wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wait, what? TAI is the one time standard that doesn't change. It's just a bunch of atomic clocks averaged together. As monotonic as human kind is able to manufacture, at this time. That is not the complete story. The calculation used to average the clocks has changed over time, thus amending TAI. The "perfect monotonic" time you're talking about is TT (terrestrial time), not TAI.

Wikipedia about TT: "It is a theoretical ideal, and real clocks can only approximate it. [...] TT is indirectly the basis of UTC, via International Atomic Time (TAI)." So, TAI is what we are able to measure. TT is a theoretical construct. Can't run computers on TT, can run them on TAI.

Yes, I'm just saying that it's not accurate that "TAI doesn't change". It has notably and significantly changed a number of times.

Re: Europe pushing for lunar time zone

#340

Post by zamnos »

Kwpolska wrote: post #334
ElectricalUnion wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If keeping most of Europe on one timezone lets people work together without needing to think about time zones, so does unifying the entire earth on a single TAI or UTC "timezone".

No, that does not scale. Sunrise and sunset are at very similar times in CET countries, meaning they have similar business hours, and I can set up a meeting between Spain, Poland, and the UK (which is on UTC/BST, but that’s close enough) at 11:00 CET and everyone will be fine with it and well awake at that time. If we extended CET around the world, and wanted someone in New York to join our meeting, they would be fur…

[flagged]
Post reply on HN