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

Perhaps

[Anonymous Coward]

But first, can we finally kill the pointless, arbitrary, and downright absurd concept of daylight "savings"?

Re:Perhaps

[Joce640k]

But first, can we finally kill the pointless, arbitrary, and downright absurd concept of daylight "savings"?

No, lets start with metric measurements.

Re:Perhaps

[Big Hairy Ian]

Can't people just go to work an hour later during winter and quit all this screwing around with the clocks!

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

[cmiller173]

Hardly pointless: http://www.popularmechanics.co...

Re:Perhaps

[dbialac]

IMO, we should get rid of standard time. Why? Nearly everybody is awake at sunset, but not so with sunrise. As a corollary, in most places below the Mason-Dixon line, this gives you at least an hour of daylight once you get home from work to spend doing things outside with family. Yeah, I get this doesn't help when you're up north.

Re:Perhaps

[flopsquad]

But first, can we finally kill the pointless, arbitrary, and downright absurd concept of daylight "savings"?

No, lets start with metric measurements.

Even that, in small steps. We could start with the least beloved English units: weight and volume. Ounces, cups, quarts, and bushels can all suck it. If we're honest, probably no one here knows how many cups are in a gallon without looking it up--and we're an abnormally unit-conscious subset of the population. We can kill DST while we make this transition.

Then we can work our way up to the most contentious units. People are not going to give up their inches and miles and degrees F so easily, but they'll eventually come around.

And then, after that, we can go ahead and never adopt the idea from TFA because it's pointless, ridiculously hard to accomplish (and yet only works) on a global scale, and somehow manages to give the abstract notion of time even less meaning.

Instead of doing a bit of mental math or looking up what time it is in London, I have to know what everyone around the globe does at the (now meaningless) hour of 4pm. I touch down in Sydney at 10:45am, great! What do people do here midmorning? Because the moon is almost directly overhead, and the gate agents are vacuuming up a deserted concourse.

I'm trying very hard to think of a problem, big or small, that this nutty ideas actually solves for us. I guess it would save you the step of selecting a city in your time zone when you install a new OS? Sysadmins rejoice!

Re:Perhaps

[RatherBeAnonymous]

I see your article and raise you another.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

There are some benefits to DST, but the preponderance of medical and energy policy research I've seen shows that DST has a net negative effect.

We have also been living with DST so long, that I'd wager that most businesses have adjusted their hours to open later than they would have otherwise, so the extra hour of daylight after work has effectively been nullified. I have not been able to find a good source of numbers for business opening/closing times before DST was implemented, but according to Snopes (http://www.snopes.com/science/daylight.asp) "far fewer businesses stayed open into the later evening hours, so most people tended to rise and retire earlier than they do today, negating the practicality of shifting an hour's worth of daylight away from early morning." You can't fool the body with a clock change alone. People's circadian rhythms follow light, not a clock. I suspect that a fair portion of the reason that people stay up "later" these days is that the clocks are wrong.

If Ben Franklin wanted to have more daylight, he should have just set his own alarm clock ahead and left the rest of us the hell alone!

Re:Perhaps

[Oswald McWeany]

probably no one here knows how many cups are in a gallon without looking it up

What is the "here" you're referring to? A school for the retarded?

2 Cups = 1 Pint
2 Pints = 1 Quart
4 Quarts = 1 Gallon

Bonus Tip: 1 Pint weighs 1 Pound since 1 (fluid) Ounce of water weighs 1 Ounce.

Your explanation just proves the superiority of the metric system. You don't need to do three calculations to convert between say "mL" to "L" it's obvious. If you want to convert cups to gallons, you either have to do 3 separate calculations OR memorise a whole bunch of conversions. How many cups in a pint. How many cups in a quart. How many cups in a gallon.

As for how many cups in a gallon? I would have to do the maths or look it up. Even with your "conversion chart" above. Looks simple maths, but I haven't bothered to calculate it yet.

As for a pint (of water) weighing a pound. It approximately weighs a pound, it's not exactly a pound, and that's another problem. It's not exact.

Now try calculating the number of cups in 1756.4598 gallons. It's doable with some simple arithmetic. However calculating the number of ml in 1756.4598 litres is easy- you just move the decimal place. Simplicity. Much more efficient.

Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

The summary is so fucking stupid, I'm not reading the article.

This moron wants to change the numbers, but wants to continue to call 12:00 "midnight" and "noon"?

As an Australia, I say "Get fucked, you cunt". The fact that our Winter comes in June is completely irrelevant.

Re:Nope

[cptdondo]

Yeah, this. OK so I know it's 8AM on the US west coast where my daughter lives, and in Japan where my MIL lives, and in the Czech Republic where my parents are. That still doesn't tell me a damn thing about what time it is over there - can I call them? Are they home? At work?

This is an idiotic solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

It's like the Tennessee legislature passing a law that pi equals 3.

Re:Nope

[wosmo]

This is exactly the problem. Basically three options.
1) We align everyone to London time, but day to day operations still occur according to daylight hours - people sleep during dark hours, work during light hours. So I still have to remember that it'd be impolite to call New York before (my) lunchtime, or Sydney after my breakfast. I'd still have to refer to a list of what hours are office-hours in various .. zones. We actually achieve absolutely nothing, other than the entertaining side-effect of the calendar day in Sydney changes at lunchtime.
2) We align everyone according to London, and day-to-day operations occur according to the clock. West-coast USA should probably get up at midnight if they want to get to work on time. Australians finish work at dawn, so can enjoy a few hours of daylight before heading to bed at noon. My code would depend on one library less, but we've severely reduced quality-of-life for three quarters of the planet.
3) We don't align everyone to London - we change nothing.

No.

[infernalC]

I have access to UTC whenever I need it, of course, but local time is an invaluable tool. It tells you something about the temporal state of your surroundings, which UTC just doesn't do. I'd much rather set my phone alarm for 7:00 AM local time, and when I fly to the west coast, not have to remember to adjust it back 3 hours... It's easy to remember that Western Europe is about 5 hours ahead and California is 3 hours behind. The cost of adjustment is simply not worth whatever benefits it affords.

Re:No.

[quintesse]

Don't agree. You'd lose any idea of what a certain time of day actually means to others. It's 2 am where you are? Why are you still up? Aren't you tired? No, now I need to know where you live and figure out what time of day... oops, can't do that anymore... figure out where the sun is positioned in your part of the world. Wtf? Wasn't that what sundials and later clocks were for in the first place? Like you say, animals live by the sun, and so do we. I don't care what the *actual* time is where you live, I only care about what part of the day it is so I can adjust my communication with you accordingly.

The only thing I want is that when people *publish* times, like for international events, they (also) use UTC. It just happens too often that people will say : the live stream will start at 7PM PST and then I have to go look up what the heck that is in my local time zone. With UTC that would be solved, you'd only need to remember your offset to UTC and that's it. (Btw, they could even just mention *their* offset to UTC, eg: 7PM PST (UTC-8), because really Americans' we here in Europe have no idea what all those abbreviations mean ;) )

Re:No.

[DarkOx]

Well what gets me is e-mails that go out that say "Conference call at 4pm EDT" and well its November 8th today. So I have to wonder does this person really mean 4pm EST? or do they mean 5pm EST? I don't know if they are mistaken about their time zone. If everyone would just agree to provide both UTC and local time when they are communicating with folks in multiple timezones it would be possible for people to "correct" errors.

Which solves what exactly?

[r0kk3rz]

No more wondering what time it is in Peoria or Petropavlovsk

Except, you'll no longer know what that time means, wow its 11am does that mean people will be at work in Petropavlovosk?

NO NO

[Paul Rose]

Sure, kill Daylight Savings. But keep timezones. The date ( 8th ) and day (Tuesday) changes at midnight ( 00:00 ). Having the day change in the afternoon is stupid. "Do you work this Saturday?" "Yes, and no!"

Good luck with that

[hodet]

It only requires cooperation of the entire world and asks people to change. hahaahahahahaahah

Some mental adjustment

[OpenSourced]

Some mental adjustment will be necessary at first.

That's the understatement of the year. I've rarely read a more nerd-centric, normal-human-ignorant proposal. I suppose some things have to be written to scare the spiders away from keyboards. But giving them attention and consideration is a step beyond reasonable.

If you haven't managed to convince people in the USA to switch to metric, which is in use in the rest of the world, easier and more convenient, good luck making them wake up at two p.m. Oops, sorry, there won't be any a.m. or p.m, of course.

When?

[Gonoff]

Last Sunday, those of us in North America, Europe and some areas of the Middle East rolled back the clock

No they didn't. The USA now changes its clocks at a different time from most of us. The end of "Summer Time", to give it the English Language title, is in the morning of the last Sunday in October. This year, that is the 30th. The USA changed a week later because GW Bush thought it would be funny to make the USA non-standard in yet another way.

Earth-centric nonsense

[BenJeremy]

We should be using Stardates. The concept of a 24 hour "day" is quaint and antiquated.

Use statistical methods: Time Zones win

[west]

UTC has one big win: co-ordination of an event between different time-zones.

*Every* other use of time is either neutral or heavily in favour of Time Zones. Since for the vast majority of humans, co-ordination of non-local events is a trivial amount of their references to time, Time-zones win hugely.

This aside from the obvious problems during travel. Set your watch once (if your phone doesn't do it for you) when you arrive at a new time zone? Or learn the scores of "usual times" for meals, business hours, etc. for the new location.

Please kill daylight working hours instead

[Kjella]

Sunrise: 08:23
Sunset: 15:43

I arrive at dawn and leave at dusk, work all day inside in an office. Fortunately it has a window, but when I get off work it's dark. I'd rather work 00-08, leisure time 08-16, sleep 16-24 but it's hard when everybody else is on a different schedule. Any "savings" is bullshit because I spend just as many hours in the dark in the evening, it's just a question of where I spend them. I suppose it's different in construction or agriculture but they're the exception not the norm anymore.

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.

Perhaps not

[frovingslosh]

No. Lets confuse the issue by not making this a simple clear discussion of getting rid of bullshit daylight "savings" claims by adding to it the much less popular discussion of telling everyone to use Coordinated Universal Time (U.T.C.). That way we can go from two separate things that are both about time but easily discussed separately to one ugly discussion that most people will hate and accomplish nothing. While we are at it we might as well try to get rid of this stupid 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day thing and switch to a simple decimal based metric system of time keeping. It is important that we discuss all of these things as if they had to be discussed together.

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.