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Time to Dump Time Zones

nytimes.com

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Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#371

Post by Grue3 »

djrogers wrote: post #353
solatic wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 9 o'clock this morning Changes to "two hours after sunrise". Which is more accurate in a globalized world anyway, because 9:00 is sometimes an hour after sunrise and sometimes several hours after sunrise, depending on where you live. > Mental sanity checks If you're setting a remote meeting with someone several hours flight away, you will have access to their calendar. Their calendar will include their normal and e…

> Changes to "two hours after sunrise". Which is more accurate in a globalized world anyway, because 9:00 is sometimes an hour after sunrise and sometimes several hours after sunrise, depending on where you live. Depends just as much or more on the time of year - sunrise/sunset varies a lot by season. I think it makes less sense to base things relative to sunrise when it's so incredibly varied.

And there are parts of the world where there's no sunrise/sunset at all during certain seasons.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#372

Post by hollander »

mahyarm wrote: post #370
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…

You can do 19 months with 19 days with a 4 or 5 day holiday time in between. That way the number of months are equal to the number of days.

The only problem is that nobody would agree on the holidays.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#373

Post by qb45 »

pixie_ wrote: post #45
pfarnsworth wrote: post #29

Getting rid of Daylight Savings makes complete sense, and it's something we should really pursue. Getting rid of Time Zones is ridiculous. People know that 6am roughly is morning, and 6pm is roughly the evening. When you're dealing with someone internationally, you know not to call them at midnight their time because there's a high probability they may be sleeping. Having time roughly follow a standard around the wor…

We need permanent daylight savings time. Yesterday sunset was around 6pm in LA. Today it will be at 5pm. At least I had a little bit of daylight after work, now it's just depressing.

> We need permanent daylight savings time. Yesterday sunset was around 6pm in LA. Today it will be at 5pm. At least I had a little bit of daylight after work, now it's just depressing.

I would like to decouple waking up earlier and leaving work earlier from changing numbering of hours such that midnight and midday happen at 1:00 instead of 0:00/12:00. But considering that some countries already adopted permanent DST for reasons you described I'm not holding my breath.

Now it remains to be seen if they will keep living like they do now or slowly drift back (in terms of solar time, not official time) to where they started from.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#374

Post by fsiefken »

kleigenfreude wrote: post #303
darawk wrote: post #17

Hmm...this is an interesting idea. However, the core of the argument seems to be this: > “The economy — that’s all of us — would receive a permanent ‘harmonization dividend’ ”— the efficiency benefits that come from a unified time zone. But this editorial is pretty light on actually supporting that. The basic argument seems to be that it reduces 'translation costs'. But..does it? What about the benefits of being able…

> Overall, is there really an efficiency gain to be had here? Not immediately. Any change from the status quo hurts businesses. There is no require change to code, logic, data, etc. that "helps". You can, however, make changes that inflict serious pain but are good long-term. Here is the short list of those: * Everyone going fully metric and use ISO for everything not metric. This would help things not crash into Mar…

Garamond I get, even though I think Quikscript would be even better. But what's to like about Inuinnaqtun that would make it suitable for an auxiliary or default languague? Wouldn't Lojban, Elefen, Toki Pona or Ithkuil be better candidates?

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#375

Post by m_eiman »

grzm wrote: post #360
m_eiman wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every 1rst is a Sunday. Except the week starts with Monday. At least in the civilized world…

ISO, and many places, yes, but not everywhere. Is it necessary to add "At least in the civilized world"? Seems unnecessarily inflammatory. And the gp is proposing a new system anyway.

The point was that the proposal is based on assumptions that don't hold true in ever culture, but would be forced onto those cultures if it were implemented. This is of course true for most, if not all, proposals for changing the way we handle time.

According to Wikipedia there are at least three "first day of the week" in use, sorted by (my assumption of) affected population:

Monday: EU and most of other European countries, most of Asia and Oceania

Sunday: Canada, USA, Korea, Japan, Israel, South Africa, most of Latin America

Saturday: Much of the Middle East

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#376

Post by kec »

solatic wrote: post #327
darawk wrote: post #17

Hmm...this is an interesting idea. However, the core of the argument seems to be this: > “The economy — that’s all of us — would receive a permanent ‘harmonization dividend’ ”— the efficiency benefits that come from a unified time zone. But this editorial is pretty light on actually supporting that. The basic argument seems to be that it reduces 'translation costs'. But..does it? What about the benefits of being able…

> 9 o'clock this morning Changes to "two hours after sunrise". Which is more accurate in a globalized world anyway, because 9:00 is sometimes an hour after sunrise and sometimes several hours after sunrise, depending on where you live. > Mental sanity checks If you're setting a remote meeting with someone several hours flight away, you will have access to their calendar. Their calendar will include their normal and e…

> Changes to "two hours after sunrise". Which is more accurate in a globalized world anyway [...]

That's not really any better as solar time varies by season and latitude, and becomes totally meaningless at the extremes. "Two hours after sunrise" is a meaningless statement for about half of the year in the attic circle for instance.

> There are older people who go to bed at 19:00 right after their supper and are up by 5:00, and there are younger people who will be out partying all night, go to sleep at 5:00, and wake up at 12:00. Expecting everyone to abide by the same 9-5 schedule, even in the same current-day timezone, is social tyranny.

Humans are diurnal and "9-5" covers daytime (i.e., when people are active) at most latitudes during most seasons in most timezones. Businesses will center their schedules around this window no matter what it's called.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#377

Post by stretchwithme »

I've been thinking this for years, as dealing with time has been a chore in software development.

But I think it would make life simpler for those with the resources to deal with time zones and harder for those with less resources.

You wouldn't want a change made in medicine that made life easier for doctors but harder for patients, would you? I'm mean, which is trained to deal with complexity and is well paid to do it? And which is often overwhelmed with what's happening to them?

Of course, software is going to make time easier and easier to deal, so perhaps it doesn't matter if we change how we deal with it or not. Not in the long run anyway.

Software may get so good at dealing with time that we each can deal with it exactly how we want to and the software we used to share information will seamlessly deal with all the translation back and forth.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#378

Post by Asooka »

bluejekyll wrote: post #274
eutropia wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes. Perfect. I've never seen that before. Thanks for sharing. It will never sell in the US though, the mere inclusion of Darwin will make it a political nightmare as people would be convinced we're atheists trying to kill their god.

Or, we use Latin names of numbers. So, Unusber, Duober, Tresber, Quattorber, Quinber, Sexber [rename as necessary for America], September, October, November, December, Undecimber, Duodecimber, Tredecimber.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#379

Post by Asooka »

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…

Having Sunday as the first day would mess up our week, because we call Tuesday, Thursday and Friday second, fourth and fifth respectively. If you really want 1st each month to be first day of week, either America will have to adopt Monday as first, or vary the day of week by region.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#380

Post by scottmf »

grzm wrote: post #361
scottmf wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to switch time to base 10 and everything else to base 12 even though you consider it to be arbitrary? We use 12, 60 (and 360deg) because our fingers are divided into 12 sections on the palm side. You can use your thumb to point to each section on your right hand, counting to 12, while using the number of fingers on your left hand to keep track of how many 12s (up to 5) hence base 60.

This sounds interesting, but I'm skeptical. 12, 60, and 360 have nice mathematical properties independent of human morphology. Do you have references to cite this?

The articles I've read all seem to cite print books. The Wiki articles on finger counting, and duodecimal list some:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal

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