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Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

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Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#361

Post by IgorPartola »

Tor3 wrote: post #211
IgorPartola wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because you personally are used to a specific type of clock doesn’t mean you can’t imagine a different kind. Submarines use 24 hour clocks and give no hecks about where the sun is. The solution is to just use UTC. That’s it. That means in NYC you’d get to work at 13:00 and go home at 21:00, which used to be 9am-5pm. That’s it. Your whole transition has been completed. The rest is just what your calendar says. Ni…

>That means in NYC you’d get to work at 13:00 and go home at 21:00, Fine.. so I'm going to have a teleconference with a company in NYC. Due to what you wrote above I now have an idea of what UTC time window to plan for - after all, I want to be able to reach them during their working hours. Then on Friday I have to schedule a teleconf with a company in Japan. When do they work, relative to UTC? You forgot to add that…

You got it exactly right up to the last sentence. Yes it is exactly the same amount of work to figure out how to make a long distance phone call or schedule a meeting.

Except for most people it is almost never a problem because most people aren’t scheduling phone calls or meetings with unfamiliar locations.

The benefit is obvious: things that happen at the same time have the same number associated with them. Just like we currently coordinate dates using a shared calendar, we coordinate times. And that has a local benefit as well. Aside from no more daylight savings time which we can achieve using other means, we also know when world events happen as they are being reported, we know when certain things take effect for countries that span multiple timezones now, we know the exact difference between any two given time points without asking “but where are they happening?”

Again, imagine that we had unified time and some country somewhere said “hey we are using the same format but doing our own variable offset from it”. That would be absolutely asinine. We are used to timezones and think they benefit us because of that familiarity. In reality we have had variable time even in the same timezones before and it was universally a bad idea that was shut down soon as people started traveling.

Oh and consider that due to cultural differences your example of scheduling meetings is already flawed: do you know if Tokyo wraps up the workday at 4pm or 6pm? Is there an hour or two hour lunch break in Barcelona? When do people actually come to work in Rome? Are banks open on Saturdays in Baghdad? Timezones do not solve these issues whatsoever so you still need to do the lookup of “when are people actually around” when scheduling a meeting outside of your culture.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#362

Post by IgorPartola »

vundercind wrote: post #170
IgorPartola wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because you personally are used to a specific type of clock doesn’t mean you can’t imagine a different kind. Submarines use 24 hour clocks and give no hecks about where the sun is. The solution is to just use UTC. That’s it. That means in NYC you’d get to work at 13:00 and go home at 21:00, which used to be 9am-5pm. That’s it. Your whole transition has been completed. The rest is just what your calendar says. Ni…

Traveling would be so much more disorienting. Forgetting what the local daytime range is and checking the position of the sun to guess whether you're closer to the front or back half of the day. Having to consult a table to figure out exactly how much you're going to inconvenience the person giving you a ride from the airport. Accidentally running into rush hour because you forgot that 1100 is 5:00 here. LOL.

So like when you fly from London to NYC and have no idea how long the flight actually is because it leaves at 10am and arrives at 9am? Timezones explicitly make travel harder, not easier.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#363

Post by IgorPartola »

hugh-avherald wrote: post #162
IgorPartola wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because you personally are used to a specific type of clock doesn’t mean you can’t imagine a different kind. Submarines use 24 hour clocks and give no hecks about where the sun is. The solution is to just use UTC. That’s it. That means in NYC you’d get to work at 13:00 and go home at 21:00, which used to be 9am-5pm. That’s it. Your whole transition has been completed. The rest is just what your calendar says. Ni…

Why don't people just do this then? There's no overwhelming obligation on individuals to use the local timezone. I also think that your using the example of submarines -- notoriously an onerous lifestyle that very few are capable of living -- pretty much torpedoes your implicit suggestion that this would not be too much of a change.

The reason it is hard being on a submarine isn’t because of the clock. That’s like saying that it is hard to be a construction worker because the hard hats aren’t fashionable.

And the reason why people don’t just do that is because it is a network effect problem. We all need to buy into it. Like the metric system or driving on the same side of the road.

And people do this. Haven’t you seen people who routinely talk to people outside their timezones sign their email with their location and/or UTC work hours?

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#364

Post by Tor3 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #358
Tor3 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would that look insane at all? It's like saying that letting everybody everywhere be able to say "I work from nine to five" is insane. Or that saying that the date changes to the next day when it's midnight is insane.

Because we had that. The reason GMT exists is because train stations in England all ran on different clocks. The train could leave at 11am and arrive at 10:55 at the next station because the clocks could be that far apart. And that was confusing so they said “hey you know what’s a good idea? Having a coordinated time!” Going back to that would make things more confusing. You take it for granted that we all use the sa…

Huh? We're arguing that timezones make sense and that keeping the world in a single timezone ("UTC everywhere") would not be a good option. You seemed to argue that if timezones hadn't already been invented then the idea of a local time would be insane. That's what I was replying to.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#365

Post by maratc »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #307
nerdponx wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes it more logical? The wheel turns all the same no matter where you mark the beginning. In the Northern hemisphere, there's actually something nice about starting the year in the dead of winter: it feels like the year is born in the spring and then dies away the following winter, not unlike a lifetime.

If the year is “born in the spring” then surely you would want the year to start in the spring (if not the spring equinox, then March) and not winter?

Of course, and -- if you were Roman, for instance -- you could, for example, call the 8th month a name with "octo" (Latin for "eight") in it, or the 10th month something with "decem" (Latin for "ten").

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#366

Post by maratc »

delecti wrote: post #284
nerdponx wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes it more logical? The wheel turns all the same no matter where you mark the beginning. In the Northern hemisphere, there's actually something nice about starting the year in the dead of winter: it feels like the year is born in the spring and then dies away the following winter, not unlike a lifetime.

> it feels like the year is born in the spring Then shouldn't the start of the year be when the year is "born"? Or alternatively, the end of the year when the year "dies"? January 1 is neither.

January 1 is so close to December 25 (when Jesus is believed to have been born) so if we wanted to count years since that -- and call it AD for "Anno Domini" (the Year of Our Lord) -- we could declare the year to begin on January 1st.

Which is exactly what we did.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#367

Post by autarch »

Loughla wrote: post #354
autarch wrote: post #348

> It’s not like programming languages support representing 61-second minutes anyway This is not true. Someone already noted that Raku supports leap seconds. I think this may be partly my fault, because Perl 5's most popular datetime library, `DateTime.pm`, supports leap seconds. It's my fault because I created `DateTime.pm` and implemented its leap seconds support. In retrospect, this was almost certainly a mistake.…

I like that you did it and can look back with a more elegant solution. What was the thought process originally? Were you just too focused on the problem? I find that if I'm too close to the problem and too focused for [arbitrary timeframe], this is the type of thing that happens. The joy of fixing something before it's broken takes over.

I wrote this code in the early 2000s, so I don't remember the exact thought process. But I think my thinking was something along the lines of "this is a thing that exists, therefore I should model it 100% accurately". But I think the right way to think about it is "this is a thing that exists but most developers would be better off never thinking about, therefore I should omit it entirely".

Of course, the _real_ correct solution is to split up a date/time library into a number of closely related classes/structs, and allow users to pick the one that meets their needs. So most folks would pick the leap second-free class, but a few would use the one with leap seconds baked in.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#368

Post by mbrubeck »

bloppe wrote: post #237
wakahiu wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is common across East Africa, including Kenya where I’m from. The night ends at 6:00AM, with 7:00AM being saa moja (first hour) of the day. Similarly, the day ends at 6:00PM (thenashara). Intuitively, this clock makes much more sense than the English clock. There’s rarely confusion between times because it’s embedded in the language.

I would probably be a bit confused by the fact that 6pm is 13 hours after 5pm, but I'm assuming Swahili has better ways of communicating time

You already have to deal with the fact that 12pm is 13 hours after 11pm.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#369

Post by xd1936 »

entuno wrote: post #80

The time zone in Palestine is a bit weird as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_the_State_of_Palestine They have DST, but it's not on fixed dates, the government just announces each year when it's going to start and end. Sometimes with less that a week's notice, which must cause all kinds of interesting problems for people.

Which leads to an interesting phenomenon where two people living in the same physical place might observe two different current times depending on how they identify ethnically and geopolitically. Israeli and Palestinian daylight savings times don't necessarily begin or end on the same day.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#370

Post by Tor3 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #361
Tor3 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That means in NYC you’d get to work at 13:00 and go home at 21:00, Fine.. so I'm going to have a teleconference with a company in NYC. Due to what you wrote above I now have an idea of what UTC time window to plan for - after all, I want to be able to reach them during their working hours. Then on Friday I have to schedule a teleconf with a company in Japan. When do they work, relative to UTC? You forgot to add that…

You got it exactly right up to the last sentence. Yes it is exactly the same amount of work to figure out how to make a long distance phone call or schedule a meeting. Except for most people it is almost never a problem because most people aren’t scheduling phone calls or meetings with unfamiliar locations. The benefit is obvious: things that happen at the same time have the same number associated with them. Just lik…

1) Daylight saving time has absolutely nothing to do with this, and in any case a lot of people, me included, are of the opinion that DST is a Bad Thing and should be abolished.

2) If you want to let everybody in the world know when something specific happens (e.g. the launch of the first manned Mars mission), then you specify the time in UTC. But.. that's what we do already. Or at least those with some sense. There's still no need to force Joe Nobody to get to work at 14:00 (assuming a single world time zone) when the sun rises.. there's no advantage for people elsewhere in the world. You yourself argued that "most people aren't scheduling phone calls or meetings with unfamiliar locations". So, what's the advantage here?

3) I happen to use a calendar which is coordinated with others - it happens automatically, when they schedule something. And it has zero problem with the time - it's not just date. There's zero to gain by using UTC as localtime everywhere. That does nothing for the calendar.

4) Cultural differences in work hours: They absolutely exist. So what would having everybody use UTC help with? You still have to know those differences. It's even worse then, because if my stepson tells me "I have to work to 10AM" then I know it's late, for him. I know it instantly. If he had said "..have to work to 13 UTC" then I'm lost. I don't immediately see that he's actually working very late. I'll have to think "let's see.. he's in Tokyo, so that would be, hmm, this many hours difference from here.. is there an issue here? Oh wait, "you're working really late, will you be you okay?"

5) And that statement ".. most people aren't scheduling phone calls or meetings with unfamiliar locations". That's false. We're not in the 19th or even the 20th century anymore. The internet is a thing, and tons of people are in daily contact with people from all over the world. Just a moment ago I got a message from an airbnb guest, for example.

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