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U.S. Scientists Call for a Time Change
saqmaster writes "The BBC reported yesterday that U.S. scientists want to change the current system which keeps clocks in sync with solar time by adding a leap second every 18 months or so. This has rattled a few cages with the scientists and operators involved in GMT-related projects and facilities as it would effectively remove the importance of the meridian from timing. "
The only semi-compelling argument that I can think of is that solar time might be more stable -- the rate of change of the Earth's rotation rate isn't a constant (varies during the year and solar cycle) so the Earth-time leap second process occurs with some irregularity.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Didn't swatch introduce something like that "for people who communicate over the internet" in the '90s?
Maybe they were too early and now there might be a new audience for that idea?
(just found a link explaining swatch internet time and what is swatch internet time)
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Interesting, and in China they only have 1 time zone for the whole country (Beijing Time)
All these inaccuracies are the direct result of primitive imperial measurements. It is high time for metric time!
How ya like dat?
I would disagree.... The problem with the current system is that numbers get passed around without the frame of reference, with the tacit assumption that it is known. So, when I say it's "5pm", it's like saying, "the temperature is 13" or "the wind speed is 49". 49 what? Using a timezone suffix (3pm PST) provides the necessary and sufficient information, but still requires extra knowledge to do the math -- what is the time difference between PST and where I'm at right now? It doesn't help that daylight time gets turned off and on, so you have to remember which "mode" you're in, but your wristwatch doesn't tell you at a glance. Using a numerical timezone delta (5pm GMT+5) provides the necessary information in a convenient manner. But, at that point, we might all as well just use GMTs.
Why dont we all take out our photon drives (laser pointer) point em westerly and fix the real problem?
You dont quite understand, you dont goto school at 8am, you goto school at 5pm, or 1pm, or whenever it is light out It wont make a difference what time people goto work, you ASK what time they goto work, there are people in the same time zone that I have to ASK what time they work because they work at odd times in the day You dont change when you do things, you change the time that REPRESENTS what you do.
There is no sig
Intead of saying, it 8:00 here, what time is it in Hong Kong.
You would say "We get to work at 1:pm, what time to people in hong kong go to work??"
thus still doing the same math.
Exactly, so for purposes of working out whether it's a reasonable time to call someone around the other side of the world, things would be exactly the same. No better and NO WORSE.
But for other purposes we would get major advantages. If I tell you that I plan to call you at 8:00 am tomorrow then you only have to worry about whether that's a convenient time for you, not whether I mean my time, your time or someone else's time. If I post on my web site that a major announcement will be made at 12:00 midnight tonight then everyone would know when it would be - again no need to worry about time zones. If I know the departure time for a flight and the duration of the flight then I would be able to tell the arrival time without worrying about time zones, or if I knew the departure and arrival times then I would know the planned duration.
Time zones make things more complicated with no real advantages.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
I believe it's a world record or something.
More than mere navel gazing.
As of current, the leap seconds are added as we need them. High presission systems thus need to be updated every time such a correction occur... The high presission systems in general likely don't depend upon the sun or the stars position, so instead of having all systems update to follow the stars and the sun, it would be simple to device a offset system for those needing to adjust for positioning beyond the earth...
The final system may indeed be simpler this way on the expense of Greenwich loosing its role in time keeping. I don't really believe many others would be affected as we are talking thousands of years for a leap hour, which should correspond to a minute or two during the lifetime of a person...
What it matter for is only what we have today. Not a problem as I see it - the two systems should be able to run side by side, whereas the legacy systems requiring the leap second today could syncronize the time with leap adjusted clocks...
The overlap may be the correct time to call a telecon, but you don't seem to live in the real world where whoever is in charge calls the meetings and you need to be there. It's one of the biggest problems of being a worldwide organization, or even just nationwide.
If the West Coast finds an urgent problem and needs to solve it before the end of their day, and the East Coast has to be involved, it usually doesn't matter that it will keep the East Coast workers late. West coast already knew exactly when the East Coast was working.
We have both regular and Zulu clocks around. We don't need to adopt a universal time, we already have one--UTC or Zulu. Those who need to use it do so. Those who don't, use local time. Problem solved. Besides, for those not aware, the current system keeps a common reference. If you call someone and they tell you "it's 2am!" then you know you picked a bad time to call. Under a single system, it's 5pm in both locationa--"it's 5pm!" just doesn't have the same impact across the world in that system.
Our founding fathers removed the guys in charge. Be American. Vote incumbents out.
Computers should use an internal clock running in TAI (International Atomic Time), rather than UTC. Time values should be stored and computed in TAI. TAI advances by one second every so many vibrations of that cesium atom, and that's it. No time zones, no leap seconds, no nothing. If you want to find the number of seconds between two points, you just subtract. Then when a user asks for time, the OS should 1) add/subtract the accumulated leap seconds (which gives you UTC) and then 2) add the time zone offset (which gives you "local time"). But most OS's don't do this, and most (all?) programming languages seem to barely support UTC, let alone TAI. POSIX for instance doesn't do this right, NTP doesn't do this right. NTP handles leap seconds by just re-sending the same time values for 1 second. Not important to most of us since the accumulated leap seconds add up to, what, 11 seconds since this was started a few decades ago. But if you want to think precisely about time, that's the answer. Here's a simplified way to think of it: UT = universal time. the "actual" time according to the movements of the planet (a continuous wobbly variable that can only be known by measuring it). The distance between each second is never exactly the same. TAI = atomic time. advances forward one second every second uniformly. UTC = an approximation of UT created by adding/subtracting leap seconds with TAI.
You completely missed his point. He's suggesting we have a universal world time. He's not suggesting everyone in the world adopts the same *schedule* -- it'd be mad for all the reasons you mentioned.
I live in New York. If we used UTC then I'd be getting up at about 1400 and going to bed at 700 but that would still correspond to going to bed at night and getting up in the morning. My friend in London might get up at 900 and go to bed at 200 but if I arrange to call him at 2100 it would be completely unambiguous -- even though it'd be night where he was and day where I was.
No. Base 12. That's what the asyrians used when they invented the time units we use to this day. They supposedly chose it because it gave reasonable sizes for the units and were easily divisible by 2,3,4, and 6 which gave you the largest usable number of whole numbers as results of the operations. Also since hours and minutes were 60 units in length, you can easily divide them by 5 so you get whole units for any oirtion of an hour ot minute from 1/2 to 1/6.
We've seen suggestions in this thread that we use Zulu time, GMT, and UTC.
;-)
So why don't you people make your minds? Which is it to be?
If we can't settle this choice, how do we expect the rest of the world fo follow our lead.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.