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Ask Slashdot: Could We Deal With the End of Time Zones?
First time accepted submitter hairyfish writes "Do we still need time zones? Time zones are a relic of the past, when different parts of the world were isolated, and 12 p.m. was whenever the sun was directly above your specific location. Now, in the Internet age, time is just an arbitrary number, and time zones are just unnecessary complexity. Why can't we scrap time zones altogether, and all just use UTC across the board? So here on the eastern seaboard of Australia, lunchtime will now be at 2 a.m., In New York it will be 4 p.m., and in Moscow it will be 8 a.m. There'll be some pain with the initial changeover, but from then on it's all good. Got a meeting with colleagues on the other side of the world? 4 a.m. means 4 a.m. for everyone. Got a flight landing at 3 p.m.? 3 p.m. now means 3 p.m. for everyone. For DST, you simply change your schedule rather than the clock (i.e. work and school starts an hour earlier during DST months). No confusion ever again. For someone whose work involves travel or communication across time zones, this is the best idea I've ever heard. So why aren't we doing it?"
In the U.S. it is because the Federal Government oversteps its bounds on everything, including telling us what the clock shall say.
Is this the type of crap we can come to expect now that CmdrTaco is gone?
DST is a beast. Worse, the rules change over time!
Do we really want the date to change in the middle of the day? No, that is not practical. Most of the world still runs based on sleeping when the sun is down, so the time zone system still works.
Scrap AM & PM - most people can figure out a 24 hour clock. Time zones, on the other hand, make perfect sense.
So why aren't we doing it? Because it's a stupid idea. We still want noon to be when the sun is overhead, and midnight to be the middle of the night. Internet be damned, it's arbitrarily more convenient for most people, because most people don't travel all that often, and spend most of their time in their local time zone.
Morphing Software
99.9% of the people never have a meeting with people on the other side of the world. Changing time zones would bring them only confusion.
This story doesn't refer to an article? So Timothy just pulled this out of his ass because he's too dumb to figure out time zones? What an idiot.
If I disagree with you it's because you are wrong.
Our computer clocks are all using UTC already
The displayed time is adjusted to local time for the benefit of us humans
We can say "the best time to feed the animals is at 4 PM" and that applies to everyone on the planet. With your scheme we would have to give a much longer-winded explanation.
The rest of the world had no problem...
telling us what the clock shall say
I, too, find it completely ridiculous that they actually TOLD people what their clock shall say. I heard about this one guy who didn't listen, they killed him, last I heard. Fucking fascist with their standards. I am interested to here what great insights the good roman_mir has to say on the subject.
Also,Qba'g guvax V qvqa'g frr jung lbh qvq gurer.
The function of time zones is that humans generally operate on Diurnal schedule. So wherever we are, we are going to wake in the morning and sleep at night. As such it makes sense to calibrate time to that. 08:00 is "morning", 20:00 is "evening". Change that, and it gets confusing any time someone travels. Even just across the US and you'd find everything gets thrown off.
What we have right now works well. Local time is always similar in terms of what is day and night. In the event you are communicating across time boundaries there's a simple answer: Specify the time zone. UTC is a good choice, or depending on what you are doing something else might be convenient. In online games it is usually "server time". The game server maintains time in the timezone it is physically located and will tell the player what it is. So you just reference to that.
Eliminating time zones wouldn't work mostly because people just wouldn't listen. They'd still use their time zone. If you desire universal time, just use it, use UTC. I do when I'm posting something to people from multiple time zones. However if you walk around and try to use it in daily life, people will just ignore you.
With time zones you can simply look up the time at a given location to know which part of the day it is, time corresponding to a part of the day is extremely useful, especially when you're moving through different countries or working with foreign people. It's much easier to change the time zone of your clock than to adjust to a day that starts at 16 o'clock. The different time zones give you more information, and given that most electronic devices can convert between them easily and display multiple at the same time, it's not really harmful.
DST is the beast that needs to die, because it makes it hard to represent the exact time me with the local time plus a simple offset. After DST dies, we should try to deal with unusual time zones that do not match the local solar mean time that you have in countries like Russia or offsets that have half an hour in them like you have in Iran.
If time zones make it difficult for you, work on the better integration of the tools dealing with them.
Yeah. Why bother trying to improve anything? If it isn't completely broken, don't try to fix it.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
If Time Zones in Indiana are not broken, then I don't know what is. I mean, if the times could change if you commute from one place to another. Ridiculous.
Zero longitude gets noon at noon, date line gets new day at noon. He said UTC which would make it thus.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Uh, the clock is just a number, if you believe the day should start earlier, talk to your management. Your colleagues would most likely disagree, but if they don't, you might convince them. It makes most sense if 12:00 is exactly at noon and the time matches the sun, not your work preferences.
Wasn't time based on the rotation of the earth and the relative position of the sun in the sky? The hours of the day were tracked long before people started setting up multiple time zones...look at a sundial and there are numbers and those numbers were pretty much same. Time zones only date to the mid-1800's so they certainly aren't a "relic of the past".
Don't get me wrong, there certainly are advantages to using a standard time (and plenty of scientific, military, and technical applications use either UTC or GMT), but the average person will want to track time in relationship to their day as they experience it. And face it, the average person does very little traveling, very little interaction with people outside their time zone, and probably never interacts with someone in a significantly different time zone (i.e. on the other side of the world).
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
First thing that came to mind on reading this article was "1998 called, they want their suggestion back".
Back in 1998 when the Web was new and cool, Swatch were attempting to market a metric alternative to the 24 hour clock, which they excitingly referred to as 'Internet Time'. It divided the day into 1,000 'beats', and was based around the Central European timezone (GMT + 1) on the basis that Swatch's headquarters are in Biel. Unsurprisingly, the concept went down like a lead balloon.
FWIW, you'd have to think about different timezones anyway. No amount of universally-shared timezones are going to change the physical reality, so they may as well reflect it.
But why keep the antiquated 24-hour day at all? Why not decimalize all of our time units? 10 hours per day, I say, 1000 days per year. Who cares if none of it lines up what we observe in our daily lives? That's what we all have smartphones for!
BTW, the premise of the question is wrong: time zones were not introduced for when different parts of the world were isolated. When locations are isolated, they don't need to agree on a time. Time zones were introduced for when different parts of the world were getting connected... specifically by railroads.
If you want to get up an hour early in the summer, get your ass out of bed!
Why should the rest of us screw up our sleep rhythms because you don't want to reset your alarm clock?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Ugh, this is one of those silly ideas that lead to all those jokes about computer people having no social skills, living in the basement, etc.
The only people that think about this are a small minority of computer geeks - a teeny, tiny fragment of the population. For the vast, VAST majority of humans... this will never even be something they'll spend more than a few seconds thinking about; and those few seconds will be when they're talking to a computer geek. There's no real benefit to the average human in switching to UTC - instead, it would probably be more trouble for them.
Those supposed "benefits" to frequent travellers... right now, lunchtime is around noon most places. So you fly some random distance, and someone wants to have a lunch meeting or a working dinner - unless they tell you what time that is, you're not going to have a clue. You say "of course they'd tell you what time the meeting is"... well, that's the same thing that happens right now, so there's no real UTC advantage there. If you need to schedule things in advance (say you're arranging a conference that's significantly far away from you), you'll need to figure out what the time-zone-equivalent time shift is to that location so you can schedule meals, select reasonable conference room reservation times, and the like.
Bottom line is - time zones aren't an arbitrary creation. They exist because they match how we tend to function. For most people they're actually advantageous.
#DeleteChrome
Submitter gets it wrong anyway. From TFS: "Time zones are a relic of the past, when different parts of the world were isolated, and 12 p.m. was whenever the sun was directly above your specific location."
Um, no. Time zones were *created* to deal with the problem of local noon being whenever the sun was directly above your specific location. That's what the world used for thousands of years, until rapid transit and communications made that impractical. With the coming of railroads, for the first time, people were frequently outrunning the sun. Time zones became a necessity. You can't have a rail time table if everybody's clock is different.
Also, I think the proposal is just moving the problem around. Currently we have to think, "Okay, they're 3 hours ahead of me, so 9 AM here is 12 PM there." With this proposal, we'd have to think, "Okay, they're 3 hours ahead of me, so when I'm starting work they're going to lunch".
And nobody's stopping anyone from doing everything on UTC. I know at least one person who sets his schedule that way.
DST -- as others have said -- that we can do without.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Wow, nice subtle troll. I believe the French and Belgians would beg to differ with you.
Belgian cartographer Gerardus Mercator published the first modern atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, in 1570. He showed the Prime Meridian running through Antwerp. The Royal Observatory in Greenwich wasn't commissioned until 1675 -- 105 years later.
The Paris Observatory was commissioned in 1667 and completed in 1671, a good 4 years before the British even started on theirs.
The Greenwich line is used because when the vote was taken in 1884, over two-thirds of all ships and tonnage used it as the reference meridian on their maps. That is, British economic dominance was at its peak and most of the ships already used it. Oh, and it pissed off the French, which was always a plus to the Brits back then.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Either way, you have to know where you are to determine when stuff happens.
For example, I'm on the east coast. I travel to California, set my clock back 3 hours (or for a cell phone it adjusts its self possibly.. some phones do some don't). I still know stores open at 8 or 10 am.. lunch is at 12, done working at 5.. stores close at 9.. etc.
Now with the op's idea.. I have to constantly remember the stores open at 5am or 7am, lunch is at 9am, done working at 2pm, stores close at 6pm.. how is that *any easier*? Instead of changing one factor and the rest fall in place, you're now keep that one the "the same" and having to remember to adjust *all* of the rest that are typically a given constant.
And if you can't figure out UTC +/- then you have other issues.
You are presuming a metric time where a metric day is an earth day - in a world where people live on many planets - that may not be the best option.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
What's wrong with saying 4 deciliters?
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
What's wrong with saying 4 deciliters?
or using what's done in most metric countries, namely use 250ml or 500ml ?
... 12:07 in Springfield, 12:08 in Arlington, 12:09 in Marystown, 12:10 in Winchester, 12:11 in Martinsburg, 12:12 Union City, 12:13 in St. Lawrence, ...
"The metric system, being decimal, is not well-suited to working with fractions.
Half-metre, quarter-metre, third of a millimetre. It's easy. What you meant - I hope - was that some fractions don't represent an integer number of some smaller measurement. This can happen with imperial measures too; try telling me what one tenth of a foot is.
Officially, you aren't even supposed to say "1/3 meter," but rather "333 millilitres."
Officially? Pah. The only official proscription that would apply here is against a millilitre being a subdivision of a metre. Apart from that there's no reason you can't ask for a half-litre of something, like beer.
For everyday uses, such as cooking, it is much more natural to use fractions.
What's natural depends on your upbringing: I have no problems whatsoever in measuring out 100g of flour or a kilo of mince or anything like that.
Metric units are not always appropriate amounts for convenient use. The 2-liter bottle seems to have become "natural," but if you want to buy a single drink, it's easier to say "a pint" or even "a 12-ounce cup" rather than "400 milliliters." The metric system's rigidity prevents designing units for convenience.
Bull crap. A half-litre of milk is close enough to a traditional* pint as to make no real difference and a standard measure of spirits here has been 25ml since before I was born. No-one asks for 25ml, one just asks for "a measure of X". It's not systemic rigidity that makes things hard, it's your own: if you just accepted a slightly smaller/larger drink as being sufficient then there'd be no trouble at all. For example, our corner shop recently stopped selling pint cartons of milk and started offering 500ml ones instead at a reduced price: no-one really cared. Granted, I get perhaps one cup of coffee-worth less out of them but so what?
These practical issues lead to the use of "folk units" alongside the official metric units, which can lead to conflict when laws are too rigid."
You'll have to forgive me but I've yet to see any practical issues using metric alone or with imperial. The only conflict we've had is when a grocer refused to give prices for metric quantities of produce and started claiming The Man was persecuting him as part of some EU conspiracy when in fact the government had no objection to giving prices per pound so long as there was a price per kilo there as well. It didn't take long for people to see him for the attention-seeking fool he was.
*Refer to what I said about upbringing; simply being traditional adds no objective value to anything.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Officially, you aren't even supposed to say "1/3 meter," but rather "333 milliliters." For everyday uses, such as cooking, it is much more natural to use fractions.
Well, 333mm or 330mm, depending on what precision you need. As for the "more natural", I guess it depends on tradition, decimal is more natural to me - 0.25L or 250ml, but not 1/4 L.
The 2-liter bottle seems to have become "natural," but if you want to buy a single drink, it's easier to say "a pint" or even "a 12-ounce cup" rather than "400 milliliters."
Is the "pint" some absolute unit or is it an arbitrary one (~473.2mL). Could you drink 0.5L of beer? That's how you can get beer where I live (completely metric country) - 0.3L, 0.5L, 1L (if we are talking about a bar). I have no trouble asking for "one beer, zero five" (literally translated) or a "one big beer" if the bar offers only two options (very common, 0.3 and 0.5). The bottles are 0.5L, and cans are 0.3 or 0.5.
Stronger drinks are often measured in "grams", or at least when someone says 100g of vodka they mean 100mL (because 100mL of water would weigh 100g), gram is shorter than mililiter.
Currently I cannot think of any "folk" units in use (in my country) that do not correspond directly to some of the metric units.
I live in North Germany, 54 20 North, 10 8 East which is more to the north than Winnipeg and a little south of Calgary. So we have long days in summer and short days in winter. And DST has never helped by anything. It just costs a lot and people need weeks to adjust. If you have kids, you will observe that one day before the switch, they are awake before the "time" in the morning and the next day they are almost an hour late.
In short DST sucks. Why should anyone have jet lag every 6 month? It is just ridiculous.
Paraphrasing, "An impertinent question often leads to a pertinent answer."
Corollary: "Sometimes an impertinent question is so mind-bendingly fucking stupid that to waste time discussing the many ways in which it is stupid is an affront to all human endeavour."
Next time on "Ask Slashdot": "Why doesn't everyone just belong to the same religion? We could consolidate all the churches, temples, synagogues and mosques and use the space to build affordable housing!"
Fahrenheit is more accurate than Celsius and one degree Fahrenheit is the amount of temperature change humans can sense.
Says who? I definitely can't sense a change in the amount of 1 F. Heck, even 1 C is so subtle that it takes a while to register (e.g. when setting up air conditioner).
As for accuracy, the only case I'm aware of where you need to divide one degree centigrade into fractions is when measuring body temperature. On the other hand, I'm not sure what you guys do with Fahrenheit there, since 1 F sounds like it would be too rough of a measurement for that as well (but then I'm no medic).
Celsius just takes two arbitrary points for water and divides by 100.
Water freezing point has a profound effect on weather, so having it on an easily located point of the scale is very convenient specifically when talking about weather (which is probably half of all contexts in which temperature is used in day to day life). Boiling point is somewhat more arbitrary even for cooking, but at least it's consistent. Compared to points that Fahrenheit took for his scale, those two are the pinnacle of rational thought - I mean, freezing point of brine? what the hell is that useful for?
It starts with 1am, 2am, 3am... 10am, 11am... what would you expect next? Well, considering it's a base 12 system, you'd expect 12am, followed by 1pm. Nooooo, what you get is 12pm, 1pm, 2pm... WTF? Did we do a #define 12 0 and found a compiler that allowed that?
AM = ante meridiem = before midday
PM = post meridiem = after midday
The Romans numbered the hours from noon in each direction. What we call "10:00 AM" today was "2 a.m." for them -- two hours before midday.
At some point, people decided it was easier to always count forward. I'd guess the invention of mechanical clocks might have had something to do with that. But they kept the a.m./p.m. convention for writing down times. It refers to which half of the day you're in; it's *not* another decimal place in the time itself. The confusion around turnover prolly wasn't such a big deal back then: Digital clocks hadn't been invented yet, and precise timekeeping was rare. It usually wasn't needed when the fasting thing around was a horse.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
It is well known in time synchronization circles that by default Windows stores the time in the BIOS/RTC in the local time zone but there is a registry hack for Vista and above to make Windows use UTC in BIOS/RTC. However Windows uses UTC internally.
What's your idea of a "pure" food? Food comes from animals, dirt, or fungus.
If you don't like the idea of drinking secretions from a cow's mammary glands, just come out and say it.
For some people (not all), the idea of drinking milk from a TB-free herd as it came from the cow is appealing. It's cooled to halt bacteria growth.
>potentially deadly
You've got to be kidding. I'd love to hear if you support armed raids on sushi bars. Sushi being raw fish, of course. Oh, and fugu, too.
As long as the product is properly marked, and people do know exactly what they're getting, what's the need for busybodies to bother themselves?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Ask yourself this. If tomorrow we (meaning "humanity") were to go colonize another earth-like planet someplace, and set up a bunch of settlements dotted all around the planet according to the local resource availability etc, do you think we'd also have a universal time reference that we'd all use all over this new planet? We'd probably align it to some natural cycle - for instance, the day as defined by an axial revolution determining sunlight/night-time distribution. Would this just be an initial convenience or would it persist past the colonization period for the rest of the time the planet is occupied?
Interstitial spaces are filled with cream.