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Time to Dump Time Zones

nytimes.com

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Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#331

Post by flukus »

eutropia wrote: post #259
bluejekyll wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

http://www.mithrandir.com/Tranquility/tranquility.html I think you're proposing this, 13 months named for scientists, one day outside the year.

Aldrin gets a day but Gargarin doesn't?

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#332

Post by reflexive »

Houshalter wrote: post #301
bluejekyll wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

28 is perfect because it's divisible by 7. So every day lands on the same day of every month and every year. Every 1rst is a Sunday. But really, while we are on the topic of reform, is there any particular reason the week should be 7 days? Or that there should be a week at all? Time keeping is also weird. Base 24 and 60 is so arbitrary. Make it base ten, and you can express date and time easily. Right now is 6.976. T…

> let's do away with base 10 entirely and go to 12

Why not hexadecimal, to help accelerate the singularity?

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#333

Post by cyberferret »

jameshart wrote: post #275
cyberferret wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 kids. They are grown up now, but when younger, they were actually cared for by family or a friend of the family who was a professional carer. We were fortunate enough to be able to dictate their care times to suit our schedule. I daresay that if your childcare centre only offered a 11am to 7pm slot then your work schedule would shift accordingly. And why wouldn't a child care institution offer split shifts like thi…

Don't kids go to school where you live?

Well, I was thinking babies and toddler aged kids when talking about this. School aged kids are a different kettle of fish, but then again - school here finishes at 2:30. We have a generation of 'latch key kids' because of the gap between the time when kids come home and their parents do.

I've posted elsewhere here that my business tries to cater for this, by allowing earlier start time and/or reduced hours for parents who want to be home for their kids, or collect them and take them home themselves.

Must admit I find it strange that social implications like this aren't more of a focus in modern society. Surely we can make the whole working/school cycle more effective?

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#334

Post by inimino »

the_watcher wrote: post #239
apaprocki wrote: post #220

Maybe I'm the contrarian. I don't mind timezones at all. The thing that throws us for a loop is changing the timezone either temporarily due to some custom (Daylight Savings, Ramadan, elections, etc.) or permanently with little notice (populist tendencies in governments). I maintain timezone infrastructure and what I'd rather see is an international treaty that all changes to country timezones require some standard p…

No, you aren't contrarian. Remove timezones, and it still doesn't help me sort out if it's morning in Italy yet, or if business hours have started. In fact, it's more difficult, since I'd then have to figure out what Italian business hours are.

It becomes slightly easier. You need to know when morning is in Italy (the time zone offset in the current system, in the new system this would be a "solar offset") and when businesses open. It would become a little easier because you and an Italian would both use the same numbers to describe those two facts.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#335

Post by inimino »

inopinatus wrote: post #252
zanny wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 schedu…

Or I could just look at my wall. Pro tip for solution designers. Don't tell someone what they "must" do. It's the fast track to being ignored. Especially when a) you're badgering them to conform to some hairbrained sticky note engineering and b) they already have something that works.

You could still have your wall of clocks. They would all show the same time but each clock face would be shaded half black and half white to show the average daylight period in that city.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#337

Post by saretired »

This editorial seems to assume that clocks were more or less synchronous prior to the introduction of time zones -- this is completely false. Time zones were introduced (at the behest of the railroads in the U.S.) because communities had their own local mean time, and often those communities were not distant from one another. In other words, there were an indeterminate number of time zones worldwide. The current time zone map, for all of its peculiarities, is hardly difficult for people to grasp: it gets light in the early hours, etc. China has a single time zone for the entire country--perhaps the author expects a Maoist ``harmonization dividend'' worldwide but speaking to Chinese friends over the years I'm not convinced that such a happy dividend ever materialized there.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#338

Post by laurieg »

I think less reliance on clock time would be a good thing for the modern world, but I don't think getting rid of time zones would achieve that.

It's amazing how much of modern life is unnecessarily affected by the time on the clock. When daylight savings time rolls round in the UK you can make 60 million people change their schedule by an hour, and even miss an hour of sleep while doing so! Who would have thought the humble clock had such control over people?

In the modern world of plenty, why is it so incredibly rare to meet someone who goes to bed when they're tired and wakes up when they're not?

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#339

Post by raldi »

macspoofing wrote: post #329
raldi wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without Standard Time, it would have been dark out until 7:40am today here in SF. That's really tough on people (or children) who have to be at work/school by 9 or even 8. By mid-December, sunrise wouldn't be until almost 8:30. In Seattle, it would be dark outside until 9am. Losing an hour of sleep in the spring is rough, but I'd rather do that (and get an extra hour in the fall) than have to get ready in the dark al…

>That's really tough on people (or children) who have to be at work/school by 9 or even 8 In what way? People (and kids) survive wars and famines I'm sure we can handle a little bit of darkness. But if you really really can't, there's no reason why in winter, school couldn't start an hour later. Probably a good idea regardless.

> People (and kids) survive wars and famines I'm sure we can handle a little bit of darkness.

I never claimed otherwise. To use your own rhetoric: People, including kids, survive wars and famines; I'm sure we can handle changing the clocks twice a year.

But to clarify my position, it's that when asked to choose between two hardships:

* Gain an hour of sleep every fall, lose an hour of sleep every spring

* Have an extra hour of morning darkness all winter long

...the majority chooses the first.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#340

Post by nfixx »

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…

Actually, in ETHIOPIA, it already is 13 MONTHS always!

https://encrypted.google.com/#newwindow=1&q=ethiopia+13+mont...

I was shocked, being a visitor here, when sometime about a month ago, we celebrated new year (after the 13th month), while the rest of the world was in the middle of the Gregorian calendar!

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