Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

aol.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 221 posts

Re: Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

#91

Post by koenigdavidmj »

zeveb wrote: post #69
chimeracoder wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why permanent daylight savings time? Why not just permanent real time? Clock noon should be roughly the same as solar noon, all year round. 'Daylight savings' is an impossibility. Because if my commute involves driving fifty miles east in the morning and fifty miles west in the evening, I don't want to have to adjust my clock by about 5 minutes twice a day. (At the equator, this would be 3 minutes - the further you…

> Because if my commute involves driving fifty miles east in the morning and fifty miles west in the evening, I don't want to have to adjust my clock by about 5 minutes twice a day. You seem to think that I'm arguing against time zones. I'm not (here, anyway): I'm arguing that the time within a time zone be that of noon at its midpoint, so that no point within the timezone is more than 30 minutes from true noon (yes,…

And life gets interesting if your time zone crosses through anywhere populated. (That's why northwest Indiana is on central time: it basically exists as a bedroom community for Chicago, so it's most sensical to be on Chicago time.)

Re: Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

#92

Post by incompatible »

shmerl wrote: post #63
poulsbohemian wrote: post #2

Personally, it would be brilliant if we'd just go to permanent daylight savings time nationwide. The transition is hard on the kids and living in the northern part of the country, the extra daylight is appreciated.

Yeah, this whole DST shift is pointless. Just keep it constant but standard, not DST. Also, I'd prefer a switch to 24 hour time notation. AM/PM is cumbersome.

I'd just pick the timezone that gives 12:00 closest to the local solar noon and leave it at that, year round. Calling that time of the day 12:00 is completely arbitrary, but any other number would be equally arbitrary, and 12:00 is a long-standing convention.

Re: Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

#93

Post by pointytrees »

tzs wrote: post #81

One of the main purported benefits of DST is that it in effect moves some of the extra sunlight from the longer days of summer from the morning to the evening, where most of us are in a better position to use it. That's because without DST as the day lengthens the extra daylight is split evenly between morning and evening. But WHY does it split evenly? It's because we historically use noon as our reference. We think…

What you have written here is what I came to logically myself as well. However, it would then be more difficult for someone in Sacramento to ask someone in San Francisco what time the train leaves. Plus, all sorts of similar issues.

Mental math of "train arrives at 3pm, takes me 30 minutes to walk there, fifteen minutes to pack. Gotta be sure to be out of my meeting by 2:15" but if you live 30 sunrise minutes west, you and your coworker would have different 2:15 times.

You are 45 sun minutes west, but you go out to a job site with coworkers which is another 15 sun minutes west. You think you're able to leave on time to get home for your daughter's birthday, but forgot your clock that is calibrated to your current gps location, is going to make you 15 minutes late when you get home.

Good luck.

Re: Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

#94

Post by incompatible »

mcny wrote: post #57
racer-v wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Noon should be the moment when the sun is at its highest altitude in the sky, or a close approximation thereof.

> Agree. Noon should be the moment when the sun is at its highest altitude in the sky, or a close approximataion thereof. I too want the same time worldwide but I guess the best we can do is UTC. I mean we could do it but I fear we'd just be sweeping the ugliness under the rug. I don't want this kind mess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China > Currently, timezone usage within Xinjiang is roughly split along th…

We already have UTC when you want the same time worldwide. Using UTC in everyday life would be somewhat confusing when travelling. I guess it would take quite a while to get used to things happening at a different time on the clock.

Re: Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

#95

Post by comicjk »

pointytrees wrote: post #93
tzs wrote: post #81

One of the main purported benefits of DST is that it in effect moves some of the extra sunlight from the longer days of summer from the morning to the evening, where most of us are in a better position to use it. That's because without DST as the day lengthens the extra daylight is split evenly between morning and evening. But WHY does it split evenly? It's because we historically use noon as our reference. We think…

What you have written here is what I came to logically myself as well. However, it would then be more difficult for someone in Sacramento to ask someone in San Francisco what time the train leaves. Plus, all sorts of similar issues. Mental math of "train arrives at 3pm, takes me 30 minutes to walk there, fifteen minutes to pack. Gotta be sure to be out of my meeting by 2:15" but if you live 30 sunrise minutes west, y…

You could still have sunrise-based time zones the same way we have noon-based timezones now.

Re: Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

#96

Post by tzs »

Retric wrote: post #85
tzs wrote: post #81

One of the main purported benefits of DST is that it in effect moves some of the extra sunlight from the longer days of summer from the morning to the evening, where most of us are in a better position to use it. That's because without DST as the day lengthens the extra daylight is split evenly between morning and evening. But WHY does it split evenly? It's because we historically use noon as our reference. We think…

Calibrating a sundial to noon is a one time effort. Calibrating a sun dial to dawn requires an update every single day. Further, dawn depends on local geographic conditions making it an ambiguous term.

I'd expect that a sunrise-based system would use the calculated time that sunrise would occur for an observer at the middle of the time zone on perfectly spherical planet. Well, if we did one today, anyway. If it had done it in ancient times it would probably be based on sunrise in the capital city as observed each day by some designated religious office such as a high priest at the main temple of the dominant religion.

Re: Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

#97

Post by minikites »

This is an unpopular opinion but I'm a big fan of DST for most of the reasons enumerated in this article: http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2013/03/why-i-like-dst/

>If we stayed on Standard Time throughout the year, sunrise here in the Chicago area would be between 4:15 and 4:30 am from the middle of May through the middle of July. And if you check the times for civil twilight, which is when it’s bright enough to see without artificial light, you’ll find that that starts half an hour earlier. This is insane and a complete waste of sunlight.

>If, by the way, you think the solution is to stay on DST throughout the year, I can only tell you that we tried that back in the 70s and it didn’t turn out well. Sunrise here in Chicago was after 8:00 am, which put school children out on the street at bus stops before dawn in the dead of winter.

Re: Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

#98

Post by grzm »

comicjk wrote: post #95
pointytrees wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you have written here is what I came to logically myself as well. However, it would then be more difficult for someone in Sacramento to ask someone in San Francisco what time the train leaves. Plus, all sorts of similar issues. Mental math of "train arrives at 3pm, takes me 30 minutes to walk there, fifteen minutes to pack. Gotta be sure to be out of my meeting by 2:15" but if you live 30 sunrise minutes west, y…

You could still have sunrise-based time zones the same way we have noon-based timezones now.

Would you elaborate on how this would work? I feel like I'm missing something obvious. The sun is roughly in the same position in the sky at noon each day—at least it's going to be midday for any human approximation of it. Sunrise (and sunset) vary throughout the year, and increasingly so with latitude along the same longitude. If the idea is to be sunrise-based, sunrise isn't going to be at roughly the same time along longitude lines, while midday sun is at roughly noon.

Re: Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

#99

Post by racer-v »

tzs wrote: post #88
racer-v wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just a problem of schools starting too early. You can't fix stupid. Although isn't the idea of "permanent DST" an oxymoron?

I agree that middle/high school is arguably starting too early (especially since research has shown, I believe, that teens really should be sleeping later). In the case of elementary school, though, you are dealing with kids young enough that they probably cannot reliably be counted on the get ready and leave for school on their own, and so you need to fit school times in with their parent's work schedule.

As long as we're trying to fix all the world's problems, I'd submit that the ideal domestic partnership has one parent able to focus full-time on childcare and home life. It doesn't have to be the same parent all the time, but I find the expectation of dual incomes to be one of the great rip-offs of modern life.

Re: Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone

#100

Post by mkempe »

shmerl wrote: post #73
mintplant wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched my own "native" time format to 24 hours years ago, in my head and on all my personal devices. Now I'm able to convert between the two formats effortlessly, and doing mental math on times is easier when I don't have to mix in a bunch of modulo-12 operations. (I live in the US.)

Same thing here. I use 24 hour system anywhere I can. Converting it isn't an effort for me. But I wish everyone around would use it.

In Europe we use the 24-hour system to write time, but a 12-hour system to speak about it. So you're invited to dinner on Saturday at 6 (nobody in their right mind would show up at 0600). Everybody learns at an early age that 4 o'clock in the afternoon is 16, 5 is 17, etc. It's easy when there are analog clocks in all public, walkable spaces, as well as in the kitchen and/or living room.
Post reply on HN