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Time to Dump Time Zones

nytimes.com

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Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#201

Post by zanny »

inopinatus wrote: post #150
beambot wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This example fails in my experience. You know not to call international in the middle of the night only after jumping through the mental gymnastics of timezone differences anyway. You'd have to do the same with a single time base.

No, you don't. You just need multiple clocks on the wall. This remains a widespread solution to determining whether or not your counterpart in Sydney is asleep.

So instead of multiple clocks, you tape sticky notes on your one clock when different cities have high noon.

You must always do the translation, with or without a universal time zone. The difference is that with universal time, it discards the entire set of translations around scheduling conversion that already happen, and it fixes the horrible mess of anyone living near a time zone boundary being in perpetual scheduling hell.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#202

Post by oldmanjay »

roel_v wrote: post #176
ci5er wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your impression is pretty much spot on. We have "military-time" and "24-hour time" available to us in all of our application configurations, but no-one seems to use it. I do because it helps me do time-zone translating transforms to/from UTC in my head more easily, but also because I keep failing to see that little "PM dot" or set the "PM Flag" whenever dealing with times in various applications or alarms. Verbally,…

"Verbally, speaking with USians, 15.00 is always pronounced "3pm"." It's like that everywhere in Europe. Nobody says 'see you at fifteen'. 24 hour clock is merely for writing things down. I mean it would already be an improvement if the US would catch up with that, just saying that a 24 hour clock isn't said out loud as such. (not disagreeing or anything with you I guess, just adding some information).

The inprovement in question is pretty tenuous, beyond the bias of believing your preferences are superior.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#203

Post by zanny »

codeka wrote: post #51
edblarney wrote: post #19

The article is upside down. "Perhaps you’re asking why the Greenwich meridian gets to define earth time. " It doesn't. Everybody gets to have their own, proper time. In comparing times, we +/- based on an arbitrary spot, and that's it. Time zones are a great solution to a problem. People want their time in local terms. Everyone waking up and going to bed at different times is an utterly ridiculous concept. FYI - if y…

I agree. The article says there'd be some benefits to switching, but there'd also be costs (for example when I travel I don't have to do mental calculations to figure out what time to eat lunch, or when to set my alarm clock). I think removing daylight savings is a good idea, there's no benefit at all to it, and a lot of costs. But timezones are handy. Maybe you could simplify them a bit, but to rid of them completel…

When you travel now you have to either adjust your clocks anyway. If you have software changing the time, you can also have software adjusting your alarms.

The difference is that your expectation of your circadian rhythm never moves. You know when you classically eat and sleep, and unless other appointments require you to disrupt that cycle it is often best to stick with what you know when traveling than disrupt those cycles for whatever span of time you are away from home.

Even if you do not, it is incredibly simple to shift your planning the number of hours according to the shift in sunrise time wherever you are, because you already have to do that with time zones anyway.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#204

Post by mgbmtl »

roel_v wrote: post #191
axlee wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's like that everywhere in Europe. Nobody says 'see you at fifteen'. Not really? In France it's perfectly normal to say "Rendez-vous à quinze heures" or "Le film commence à vingt-deux heures trente"

OK, it might be a social construct. I'd never say 'treize heures' to set a time with my Parisian colleagues, and neither would they (to the best of my recollection). Sometimes people would say it, yes, but it'd sound strangely artificial, like read literally from a schedule - which in many cases it would be.

In Quebec, 24 hour time has changed from being a nerd thing, to being the standard way of saying time. That's how the media pronounces time, how people write it down, etc. As others have mentioned, cell phones probably have something to do with that too.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#205

Post by oldmanjay »

melvinmt wrote: post #163
minznerjosh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This hits the nail on the head. Abandoning time zones would only make sense if there were no more need for time translation. But you'd still need to translate for the sake of biological clocks, and without time zones it would become more challenging to communicate that translation. I would be in favor of doing away with DST and also eschewing AM/PM in favor of a 24-hour clock. I'm surprised this article didn't mentio…

> But you'd still need to translate for the sake of biological clocks I fail to see what you mean. Do you mean your biological clock needs to see it's 12pm to believe that it's the middle of the day? Why can't your biological clock just settle on any arbitrary number?

The point was that people have a rhythm dictated more by the sun's relative position than the time on the clock.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#206

Post by kccqzy »

emodendroket wrote: post #127
edblarney wrote: post #19

The article is upside down. "Perhaps you’re asking why the Greenwich meridian gets to define earth time. " It doesn't. Everybody gets to have their own, proper time. In comparing times, we +/- based on an arbitrary spot, and that's it. Time zones are a great solution to a problem. People want their time in local terms. Everyone waking up and going to bed at different times is an utterly ridiculous concept. FYI - if y…

> It might be remotely possible to put an entire nation on one time - i.e. put America on 'Mountain Time' - it might be possible to convince New Yorkers and Californians that they are getting up earlier/later etc.. But even that wouldn't be very useful in the end. China does this, but I think for more or less the same political reasons they falsely claim that everyone in China speaks one identical language and everyt…

China officially does this, but if you travel to some western provinces, you will find that people still secretly keep their own informal local time.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#207

Post by sandworm101 »

ProxCoques wrote: post #116
minznerjosh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This hits the nail on the head. Abandoning time zones would only make sense if there were no more need for time translation. But you'd still need to translate for the sake of biological clocks, and without time zones it would become more challenging to communicate that translation. I would be in favor of doing away with DST and also eschewing AM/PM in favor of a 24-hour clock. I'm surprised this article didn't mentio…

I get the impression Americans don't use 24-hour clock much. In Europe it's pretty much standard if you want to communicate time reliably. Or am I mistaken about the American love of am/pm?

American English is all about factions. The use of 24hour time gives the impression that the speaker has ties to the military, which is a rather high percentage of the US population. I've had several people correct my use of 24-hour time (ie 0945) as being "dramatic" and that 9:45am is more "friendly". I had one person comment after a talk I gave (lots of slides with timestamps) that they thought I was talking down to the many military and former military people in the room. But the slides were originally created for Canadian university students. I'd used them several times north of the boarder. There, nobody noticed the timestamps as anything other than functional.

Whatever you do, don't mention metric time in the US. The 10-hour days and 100-day months that we find so normal drives them insane.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#208

Post by maxerickson »

roel_v wrote: post #199
maxerickson wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also analog clocks with 24 divisions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_analog_dial I guess 12 hour clocks are an easy trick to make them easier to read and manufacture and so on.

Sure, as a novelty. Who here has ever seen one like that in the wild? And yes, I think 24 is much harder to read, and not necessary either - in those situations where you don't know (when looking at a clock) whether it's 3am or 3pm, you have much bigger issues to worry about :)

My point was more in the second para, that 12 hour clocks aren't a platonic ideal, they are likely a result of practical demands. We make 12 hour dials rather than having them thrust upon us.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#209

Post by ISL »

bluejekyll wrote: post #160
minznerjosh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This hits the nail on the head. Abandoning time zones would only make sense if there were no more need for time translation. But you'd still need to translate for the sake of biological clocks, and without time zones it would become more challenging to communicate that translation. I would be in favor of doing away with DST and also eschewing AM/PM in favor of a 24-hour clock. I'm surprised this article didn't mentio…

Yeah agree completely. And keeping zones is important to understand workdays. I wouldn't mind dropping named time zones completely in favor of UTC+Offset, I always end up looking that up, annoyingly. Or just name the zones based on the offset. So NY would be -5. We could for humans write time with the ecoding, similar to ISO-8601, but it would just be 15:30-5 for 3:30pm EST. While we're at it. Can we make all the mon…

12*30+1 = 361.

One solar year: 365.24219 x (86400s days).

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#210

Post by perilunar »

bluejekyll wrote: post #160
minznerjosh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This hits the nail on the head. Abandoning time zones would only make sense if there were no more need for time translation. But you'd still need to translate for the sake of biological clocks, and without time zones it would become more challenging to communicate that translation. I would be in favor of doing away with DST and also eschewing AM/PM in favor of a 24-hour clock. I'm surprised this article didn't mentio…

Yeah agree completely. And keeping zones is important to understand workdays. I wouldn't mind dropping named time zones completely in favor of UTC+Offset, I always end up looking that up, annoyingly. Or just name the zones based on the offset. So NY would be -5. We could for humans write time with the ecoding, similar to ISO-8601, but it would just be 15:30-5 for 3:30pm EST. While we're at it. Can we make all the mon…

> 30 day months, with 1 New Year's Day

And the other 4 days?

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