Slashdot Asks: Is It Time To Dump Time Zones In Favor of Coordinated Universal Time? (nytimes.com)

Last Sunday, those of us in North America, Europe and some areas of the Middle East rolled back the clock an hour in accordance with Daylight Savings Time (DST). The tradition -- first imposed in Germany 100 years ago -- has been around for so long that many of us fail to question its significance. What is the importance of Daylight Savings Time? Is it still relevant in today's world? Is it time to dump time zones in general? James Gleick makes the case via the New York Times for switching to Coordinated Universal Time, or U.T.C.: When it's noon in Greenwich, Britain, let it be 12 everywhere. No more resetting the clocks. No more wondering what time it is in Peoria or Petropavlovsk. Our biological clocks can stay with the sun, as they have from the dawn of history. Only the numerals will change, and they have always been arbitrary. Some mental adjustment will be necessary at first. Every place will learn a new relationship with the hours. New York (with its longitudinal companions) will be the place where people breakfast at noon, where the sun reaches its zenith around 4 p.m., and where people start dinner close to midnight. ("Midnight" will come to seem a quaint word for the zero hour, where the sun still shines.) In Sydney, the sun will set around 7 a.m., but the Australians can handle it; after all, their winter comes in June. The question has been posed before, but given the timeliness of Daylight Savings Time, we think the question may evoke some new, heartfelt attitudes and beliefs: Is it time to dump time zones in favor of Coordinated Universal Time?

Comments

I think we should do this

[Chrisq]

I think we should do this right after everyone in the world learns Esperanto and we adopt base 12 counting.

Re:Perhaps

[rossdee]

"No, lets start with metric measurements."

So do we speed up rotation of the earth, or move it further away from the sun
(to get 100 days to the quarter)
Metric time isn't as easy as length and mass.

Re:Perhaps not

[hoggoth]

60 is a great number, evenly divisible by many factors. 10 is terrible. I propose we switch from counting in base 10 to a much easier system such as counting in base 60. We will need more digit symbols but that's a small price to pay for easier arithmetic, and we didn't have any good use for Zapf Dingbats anyway.