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Extra Daylight Savings May Confuse the Gadgets
CrimeDoggy writes "In the energy bill to be signed by the President today (August 8), changes are to be made that extend daylight savings time. The bill would start daylight time three weeks earlier and end it a week later as an energy-saving measure. Many devices such as VCRs, cell phones, and watches would still operate on the previous schedule, potentially causing problems."
...I don't have to bother with daylight savings. The heat sucks but hey it's a tradeoff.
Nothing is impossible. It just hasn't been figured out yet.
Swatch started such an initiative a couple years ago.
Internet Time
What?
"Daylight savings time is an idiotic solution to a non-existent problem."
And while every other aspect of the gregorian calendar can be described in just a few lines of code, the daylight-savings time requires a 450KB database just to find out which timezone you're in, with entries like "during the second world war, London experimented with double daylight-savings time..." (admittedly most of that 450K is comments)
Time is clearly not meant to be decimal-based. You can of course separate a day into arbitrarily many sections and call these sections anything you like. A 1000 wobbles per day perhaps. The bigger units of time are the real problem: The year can not be described by an integer number of days. If you don't want to do away with months, these are based on the moon and the only way to have an integer number of months per year is to not have them be precisely synced to the moon phase. Then you have the problem that a reasonable good approximation of the moon phase leads to a number of days by which the number of days per year isn't divisible, so you get months with more days and months with fewer days by dithering the error over the year. It's really hopeless, in terms of numerical elegance.
60 and 24 at least have some nice numerical properties:
60 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15 and 30.
24 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 and 12.
Try that with 100: 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25 and 50. Much less flexible.
base 4. started using base 4 math in my head as an experiment a few years ago, so much easier, makes hex trivial. all addition has 4 possibilities, add quarter, add half, add 3/4 or shift up. the human brain is better at thinking in quarters than percents or 1/8'ths or 1/60's, whatever. seriously try it, takes like a day to figure out, and you can upconvert to hex by just grouping digits on top of each other
ex.
0 3
2f = 2 3
just my 2c, but made math hella easier, and helps even more with higher dimensional math because you can visualize and manipulate halves and quarters much better than 2/5 and 7/10.
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
Silly mods. This shouldn't have been modded 'Funny' but 'Informative' See here:
o n%20the%20left.htm
http://users.pandora.be/worldstandards/driving%20