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Are the Americans Awake?

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Re: Are the Americans Awake?

#151

Post by postmodest »

wpietri wrote: post #87
cvoss wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there's also the decision to use hour-aligned timezones. Why not half hours? Why not two hours? It's very much a conscious decision.

Previous to the rise of the railroad, each place's time was based on solar noon. That is, when the sun was at the highest point. Which worked fine. It only became untenable when you needed to manually maintain and publish a railroad schedule. So time zones became a thing. Initially they were on a per-railroad basis, but eventually they got unified. But now we have computers to do all the bookkeeping. So if we wanted,…

We should discuss this in a zoom call. I've scheduled it for eleven-fleventy χm. Don't be late!

...the need to synchronize global tasks means that either you have easily-offset local times, or you just use UTC everywhere and keep it in your head when local wake / sleep is and refuse synchronized tasks outside those times.

Re: Are the Americans Awake?

#152

Post by wpietri »

postmodest wrote: post #151
wpietri wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Previous to the rise of the railroad, each place's time was based on solar noon. That is, when the sun was at the highest point. Which worked fine. It only became untenable when you needed to manually maintain and publish a railroad schedule. So time zones became a thing. Initially they were on a per-railroad basis, but eventually they got unified. But now we have computers to do all the bookkeeping. So if we wanted,…

We should discuss this in a zoom call. I've scheduled it for eleven-fleventy χm. Don't be late! ...the need to synchronize global tasks means that either you have easily-offset local times, or you just use UTC everywhere and keep it in your head when local wake / sleep is and refuse synchronized tasks outside those times.

No, that's part of the manual-scheduling paperwork. I get that you're used to it, but we could eliminate it. The dialog would go more like: "I looked at our calendars and put it at a time that seems to work for both of us. Feel free to move it if that's better for you." Which is what I often do anyhow with Google Calendar with shared access (as when we work for the same company) or as with Calendly.

Re: Are the Americans Awake?

#153

Post by Timon3 »

adolph wrote: post #119
ethbr0 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why shouldn't we have one timezone? Why not have one worldwide timezone? Your watch hands read '20230710T142847Z', don't they?

No. For one, I use the ordinal date option in ISO 8601 because the whole month and day thing is stupid. Today is 2023-191. Also my watch only reads 14:28 since the date and TZ are typically implied in watches. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 One thing for which I would advocate is removing zero based numbering from hours and minutes. Clocks reading 12:15 for 00:15 is tremendously confusing. Most human oriented…

> No. For one, I use the ordinal date option in ISO 8601 because the whole month and day thing is stupid.

Apart from this being very funny and an interesting idea I have a question: how do you deal with leap years? Many important dates throughout the year (e.g. holidays, birthdays, business quarters etc.) are bound to specific days of months, do you just have to remember that all such days after February are one off sometimes in an ordinal date system?

Re: Are the Americans Awake?

#154

Post by pluijzer »

one_level_deep wrote: post #41
pluijzer wrote: post #10

This site takes into account that Americans get there 8 hours of sleep though some quick googling revealed that the average American only gets 7 hours and 13 minutes of sleep. Just want to preach to those not getting there 8 hours, getting enough sleep really gives an enormous boost to mood, creativity, productivity and health. Give it a try :-)

Could you share your source please? I am getting conflicting results. The recently released American Time Use Survey 2022 [0] has it closer to 9 hours. Those 9 hours also include "naps and spells of sleeplessness." [0] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/atus.pdf

I didn't put any effort in my source. I just googled for 'average sleep time Americans' an quoted the featured result. It wasn't really meant as a statement just a silly segue in to telling about the benefits of sleep. Both sources didn't really make it clear whether this is the time sleeping + trying to fall asleep, or actual sleep. I myself unfortunately take a full hour to fall asleep and wake up at 4 for at least another half an hour. Anyway, it is good to include nap-times because these do count towards your total amount of sleep. It doesn't have to be continues.

Re: Are the Americans Awake?

#155

Post by pseudalopex »

throwaway09223 wrote: post #72
izzydata wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm more perplexed that China decided it should only have 1 timezone. It also decided that timezone should be from the perspective of the eastern coast. When does the sun rise and fall for the western most people?

Why shouldn't we have one timezone? Why not have one worldwide timezone? The sun rises and sets at different times according to both latitude and longitude. Timezones only handle longitudinal daylight adjustments. We already deal with plenty of incongruity around daylight. Why not embrace the variability and let go of the idea that we can predict daylight based on the hour alone? Let people localize the time to disco…

https://qntm.org/abolish

Re: Are the Americans Awake?

#156

Post by pseudalopex »

wpietri wrote: post #152
postmodest wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should discuss this in a zoom call. I've scheduled it for eleven-fleventy χm. Don't be late! ...the need to synchronize global tasks means that either you have easily-offset local times, or you just use UTC everywhere and keep it in your head when local wake / sleep is and refuse synchronized tasks outside those times.

No, that's part of the manual-scheduling paperwork. I get that you're used to it, but we could eliminate it. The dialog would go more like: "I looked at our calendars and put it at a time that seems to work for both of us. Feel free to move it if that's better for you." Which is what I often do anyhow with Google Calendar with shared access (as when we work for the same company) or as with Calendly.

https://qntm.org/continuous

Re: Are the Americans Awake?

#157

Post by throwaway09223 »

Vvector wrote: post #109
throwaway09223 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why have time zones at all, and not simply recognize that day and night occur at different times in different places? This part wasn't a conscious decision, because the reference frame of time and orbital mechanics were discovered long after the practice of timekeeping. We may have a similar problem on a galactic scale some day.

The primary issue is when the day changes in the middle of the local day. Assume everyone adopts UTC. Then in California, midnight will happen at 5pm local time. * Friday UTC 2300 = local time 4pm PST - This is Friday * Saturday UTC 0100 = local time 6pm PST - Is this Saturday? * Saturday UTC 2300 = local time 4pm PST next day - This is still Saturday? When would Saturday afternoon be? We'd have to change our vocabul…

We don't have to change any vocabulary. Noon and midnight happen at different times in different places and that would be fine. We know it's fine, because that's how it currently is in China.

Most servers run on UTC under the hood, and a lot of big organizations have experience already in terms of doing all timekeeping calculations in UTC. It may seem weird, but works pretty well in the long run -- and not having to deal with corner cases like DST or geographical ambiguities around time is extremely valuable.

Have you ever thought about what it's like to live near the edge of a timezone? In a city where half the city uses one time and half uses the other?

Re: Are the Americans Awake?

#158

Post by throwaway09223 »

rpearl wrote: post #133
shpx wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A second is one 86400th of a rotation of our home-planet

A second is defined to be exactly the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom. I don't see anything referencing any planets?

Well, a second is more specifically defined as:

"the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom taken as an average over 11 samples distributed throughout the earth in order to approximate the earth's inertial frame"

Seconds as used in Coordinated Universal Time are in fact defined based on planets, and earth specifically - because they use earth's inertial frame.

Re: Are the Americans Awake?

#159

Post by friendlyHornet »

tiborsaas wrote: post #26
friendlyHornet wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently started sleeping more and the changes in my life have been unbelievable I am - procrastinating less - having less headaches - coming up with more creative solutions at work - being more attentive and present in social interactions - ACTUALLY FEELING HAPPY AGAIN I don't know how much of this is placebo, but ever since the corona lockdown started here in Germany, my sleep has been completely messed up. For t…

I've found that no matter how much I sleep it doesn't affect what people usually report. Last night I was lucky if I had 5 and with 8h+ I feel the same, I do the same.

Have you tried doing it over a long period of time? I found that my mood and general well-being only started to improve a week after consistently sleeping 8 hours. The effect wasn't instant, and in fact, when I sleep 8 hours after a few days of only sleeping a few hours, I notice that I wake up feeling horrible and very tired

Re: Are the Americans Awake?

#160

Post by Ferret7446 »

RegnisGnaw wrote: post #95
chickenpotpie wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 hour is easy to remember, makes the math easier, and not so far apart that it creates radically different concepts of time for people on the extreme ends. With one hour time zones: * If someone is 3 time zones ahead, they're 3 hours ahead * There are 24 time zones and 360 degrees neatly divides by 24 * 2 hours between time zones means that within a time zone, the sun rises on one side at 8 am and on the other side…

We have :30 and :45 time zones though, no :15 time zone. So that doesn't quite apply.

And those exceptions demonstrate why it's a bad idea to go beyond hour offsets. It's just added hassle.
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