Slashdot Mirror
How India's Single Time Zone Is Hurting Its People (bbc.com)
"The BBC reports on the detrimental effects of all of India being in one time zone since British Colonial rule," writes Slashdot reader dryriver. From the report: India stretches 3,000km (1,864 miles) from east to west, spanning roughly 30 degrees longitude. This corresponds with a two-hour difference in mean solar times -- the passage of time based on the position of the sun in the sky. The U.S. equivalent would be New York and Utah sharing one time zone. Except that in this case, it also affects more than a billion people -- hundreds of millions of whom live in poverty. The school day starts at more or less the same time everywhere in India but children go to bed later and have reduced sleep in areas where the sun sets later. An hour's delay in sunset time reduces children's sleep by 30 minutes. Using data from the India Time Survey and the national Demographic and Health Survey, [Cornell University Economist] Maulik Jagnani found that school-going children exposed to later sunsets get fewer years of education, and are less likely to complete primary and middle school. He found evidence that suggested that sunset-induced sleep deprivation is more pronounced among the poor, especially in periods when households face severe financial constraints. "This might be because sleep environments among poor households are associated with noise, heat, mosquitoes, overcrowding, and overall uncomfortable physical conditions. The poor may lack the financial resources to invest in sleep-inducing goods like window shades, separate rooms, indoor beds and adjust their sleep schedules," he told me.
USA does it and we're successful by most definitions.
Timezone is the same... But is everyone FORCED to start school at the same time? Is there a law saying school on the west coast must start at the same time as school on the east coast? Is there a law saying parents must send kids to bed at 8pm regardless of season and location? Timezone enthusiasts are so dumb
You want to be stuck on this planet forever? Because being so obtuse is how you get stuck on this planet and go extinct.
When we start living off this planet we will need to be able to synchronize activities AND take care of our needs, and we will be in places where there isn't a ~24 hour day.
It's not even complicated, people are just being stupid about it.
it spans 5 time zones. Its kids must have even more problems.
"The U.S. equivalent would be New York and Utah sharing one time zone. Except that in this case, it also affects more than a billion people -- hundreds of millions of whom live in poverty."
I didn't think that many people actually lived in Utah... /kidding
I have to admit the first thing I thought about, after reading this, was Futurama:
Mars was a dreary uninhabitable wasteland much like Utah. But unlike Utah, it was eventually made livable.
#DeleteChrome
Simply get up based on sunrise and go to bed based on sunset.
Schools should start at 1.5 hours after sunrise and get out out 7.5 hours later if the school day is 7.5 hours. No need for time zones.
US farmers have been doing this for decades. Time zones were invented to make life easier for railroad companies and not the general population at the time.
BBC is in merry old England which has 1 time zone.
India is fine. India does not need Daylight savings or multiple timezones. We've often adapted ourselves even before the concept of the modern time zone or clock was born.
We can totally do this. Try not to talk about a problem which is NOT a real problem.
Try living in the Western US, or Canada, where stuff happens.
Now, get rid of Daylight Savings Time and then we can discuss India and time zones, whilst the entirety of China, which is much much much wider, is in a single time zone.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
If later sunset is an issue then the DST is compounding that. Children at risk mentioned in this article still see sunset much earlier than in USA with DST. You see most of high latitude India falls near the center of the India and hence they are not affected. The only people affected are West zone mid latitude who may see about 30 minute time delay (95% of India population is within +- 30 min of mid longitude). So most people see sunset before 7:30 pm (95%). Now compare that to US with DST where more than 80% see sunset later than 7:30 pm.
A country can try to solve more than one issue at once.
Exact opposite. You didn't read the article, did you? DST will worsen the situation. In fact, if the paper is correct, it is a strong case to abolish DST in US and other countries.
I suggest a little Slashdot Poll here: who's in favor of sending creimette to India to help them with their problems?
Who really don't want to get rid of DST, they want to make it year round. Because they live on the eastern edge of their time zone and hate seeing the sun come up before eight o'clock.
A country can try to solve more than one issue at once.
Especially when the solution is obvious: Just start the school day an hour later in the west.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Well, I guess it's different by about a billion people.
We do it and it's a PITA. Just start school at different times, no need to jack with the clocks. DST is especially problematic when the timezone splits a densely developed area, the time shouldn't change by an hour just because you cross a street.
I don't see how he could help with regards to the problem GP mentions given his massive production and output.
Oh! I get it, you are joking right?
> Except that in this case, it also affects more than a billion people
Seems like that's more of a problem.
In Canada, Quebec and Ontario are both in Eastern Standard Time, also nearly a 30 degree span.
No. Well...maybe. Actually, yes. It really just depends.
Ghandi was an admitted child molester. Quoting him is unacceptable in modern society.
Perfect! Finally, someone with common sense :)
Our university used to adjust our times in India based on Summer/Winter as well, to optimize for daylight. It basically just followed the Sun.
A country can try to solve more than one issue at once.
Especially when the solution is obvious: Just start the school day an hour later in the west.
That's just a different time zone then. Only you don't call it a different time zone.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
And did I mention 1 time zone and no Daylight savings crap?
Give each city a good time to start / stop schools and work. Let them also be given the flexibility to stagger this twice through the year, if they wish to avoid DST.
The sun and earth move independently of what human made clocks say, period. One thing that always ceases to amaze science and research is how adaptable humans are. We simply adapt to schedules given to us. Where I grew up in northern Canada in summer, it's light out, period. 4am the sun is shining and 11:30pm the sun is still shining. In winter it's just dark, period. You see the sun maybe 3 hours a day. All my schools had at least 1000 students and I don't remember anyone trying to say timezones were fucking anything up. Kids are adaptable to starting and ending and sleeping times. No need to say this is somehow affecting poor people or some crazy BS in the article.
Exact opposite. You didn't read the article, did you? DST will worsen the situation. In fact, if the paper is correct, it is a strong case to abolish DST in US and other countries.
Are you in the south? People in the south tend to not like DST because their daylight hours aren'tas variable as those in mid-north latitudes. Some places like Minnesota would have their kids waiting for the school bus in pitch black during the winter, and even in Pennsylvania, during the summer, there would be 4 hours of daylight before many people get up.
The DST and now single Time zone proponents are like a mild form of anti-vaxxing. We could all go on UT, but as an Amateur radio operator, we have to, and it just makes for different complexities.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The portion exposed to later sunsets, by 30 minutes are the states of Rajastan and the kutch of Gujarat. The most arid, dry parts of India that includes the Thar desert. At the border is Pakistan, in a different time zone giving children across the border better sleep time.
One would think compare the achievements of children across the border of India and Pakistan to see the effect of time zone, while keeping remaining geographical influences the same. Instead the researcher compares the densely populated fertile parts of India with the desert part of India and tries to attribute the differences to the time zone.
It is a thesis from Cornell. I read only the abstract and the intro. I did not see any indication the researcher is controlling for this. Hope there is a good explanation for it.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The same is true for Europe. Dvoriste in Macedonia (22.55 E) and Fisterra in Spain (9.15 W) are both on the same time zone. There is also another example with Canada. Natashquan in Quebec (61.48 W) and Pickle Lake in Ontario (90.10 W) are on the same time zone.
Can we stop with always trying to find any excuse possible to bash the evil white man? This systemic racism against white people is becoming seriously annoying.
>"The school day starts at more or less the same time everywhere in India"
Well, perhaps THAT is the main problem then? Perhaps they should start school an hour later or earlier on the fringes. Or is there some law not allowing that? Wow, such a complicated problem.
~Ghandi~
Ghandi was ...
Do you mean Gandhi? Mahatma Gandhi?
The AC I can understand. But a so called senior editor?
...Minnesota would have their kids waiting for the school bus in pitch black during the winter...
TIL that Minnesota apparently doesn't have street lamps.
That's just a different time zone then. Only you don't call it a different time zone.
And yet it has none of the confusion of "now is that time in Time Zone 1, 2, or 3?". But, I suppose it does introduce the confusion of "what do you mean 6p is too late to call you??".
Canada's Easter Daylight Time zone goes from the eastern most edge of Quebec to 100km west of Thunder Bay. The zone is a little longer in the summer than in the winter due to the far east end not doing daylight savings time. https://www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/eng/services/time/time_zones.html
That was really done to make the entire St Lawrence Seaway be in the same time zone.
and its not pitch black, its snow white during the winter
Only if you ignore most of the problem. It's not the hour on the clock, it's the daylight.
I beg to differ.
--
T. May (Mrs).
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Is there anything about India that "just works" or "makes sense"? Is it just me or does this country seem held together by duct tape and people doing everything by the seat of their pants? Everything about Indian national and local government seems inept, and culture (outside of corporations) seems so captured to the norms that you cannot change things because people have grown used to the chaos.
There is no reason that we cannot have a single time zone across the world, and people simply adjust the times they go to work or school. This antiquated idea "may" have been valid when it originated, but it holds less than zero value today. In fact, it holds negative value for the extra cost and confusion it causes trying to synchronize and schedule on a global or even national scale. Let's get rid of it. People can easily learn to adjust their time they go to work, come home, and go to school. Businesses need a consistent time frame to transact and log data. It's ridiculous in this day and age to keep using this process. I thought this would be the one thing that Trump would actually be able to achieve, but apparently not even that.
You would have to take into account the difference of culture (religion, education) and politics (education startegy) into the impact which would make it far worse to compare than a west/east indian comparison.
Don't forget that India is 5:30 off from GMT and that half hour messes up things royally for international contacts.
I am an Indian and can say that this is issue with Individual schools not the India sticking with same time zone. In summer my school was from 7 am and in winters it was from 10 am. I used to get good sleep. Most of the schools follow similar timings. If schools in east or west are opening early it has be blame on school on the IST. Government doesn't force any opening or closing time per se. It is an independent decision. I am not aware how different time zone will solve any issue?
Europe CEST is also 30 degrees, from eastern border of Poland to western border of Spain
The problem is that you just swap one problem - different time zones for another one - not knowing the hours of operation of the place you're calling.
For example, if you ring someone in a different time-zone now, you can just ask what time it is there, e.g. it's 9am there but 10am where you are, and you immediately know they're 1 hour behind you and that office hours there are still "9 to 5".
However the "no time zones but everyone works different hours based on the sun" system would in fact be more confusing than having time zones. Then, if you ring someone they can't just say "it's 3am here" and you know you've rung at the wrong time. "3am" could be the middle of the afternoon there, or it could be the middle of the night, you have no way of working that out without additional information that the call hasn't provided. Instead of knowing the time offset of each place, you'd have to have a chart for every city for what is considered "work hours" there.
Some towns would be 9am-5pm. Some towns would work 9pm-5am. Some would work from 6pm-3am. Yeah, great, so we got rid of "timezones" so now it's the "same time" everywhere, except we've lost all additional layers of context for what a time of "5pm" actually means, which means we have to convey additional information on calls, not less.
The "researcher" is trying to invent the problem where nothing exists. Most likely he has already written his paper before collecting data, and fit the data to suit his theory. He tactfully adds that problem is for "poor" people, so that anybody will think twice before rebutting his theory.
India is perfectly fine with a single time zone. Our east wakes up when the sun is coming up, around 4 AM. In the west they may normally go to bed couple of hours after sun goes down, regardless what the clock says. Our day light hours vary very little with season with maximum deviation of about 4 hours in northern latitudes. So India is much better placed with number of night hours than most of US.
The real problem is for the IT slaves working night shifts to cover US time zones, which no time zone tweaking is going to fix.
Ha! The Evils of TimeZones!
In the military it was Zulu time. One learned it and figured out how to deal with it. Where I work we have international operations, had to work out the business timeflow and fit the cron jobs properly. Fun times. Any other system is just that: a different but similar set of methods and operations needed for communication and resource allocation.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Most of the EU is in the CET time zone, and people here seem to manage fine. Life in Spain starts âoelaterâ than life in Poland. So it is all down to flexibility, not the time zone.
They should delay school by 2-3 hours across the whole country so the kids can sleep better, it's standard practice to start school a few hours before the time (research shows) that kids are actually wide awake.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
This is similar to Europe.
Rigio, in Greece, is at 26.5 E, and Campos in Spain is 9.28 W, so that's a difference of over 35.8 degrees. They are roughly the same lattitude (41.4 vs 43, respectively), and they are in the same time zone.
In India's case, it's all one country. So you can understand why they might have the one timezone.
In the case of Europe, there are many countries in between these two points, so there's is more reason to have multiple time zones across here.
There are several countries in Africa that are equally as wide as these 2 point in Europe that all share the same timezone.
Yet the UK and Ireland, and other parts of Africa, that share the same longitudes as these counties has a different timezone again. Sure the "home timezone" of GMT runs though several of these counties, and these countries are an hour ahead of it...
This is a problem that needs to be fixed in many more countries that just India.
India is not all that wide in terms of time zones. The bulk of the country is in UTC+5, with the eastern side in UTC+6. India time is UTC + 5:30 So the western half of India the time is 30 minutes later than it should be. Given its fairly central latitude, the variation in day length is also less pronounced.
The study raises some interesting points, but a skim-read suggests it's based on sleep models rather than actual human data recorded in the regions. Human behaviour may vary here. The suggestion is that it doesn't. There is certainly something to be said for correct time zones. Portugal tried the same time zone as Spain in the 1990's but it was not a success.
Norway should theoretically have the same problem exacerbated by the eastern regions also being the furthest north with the largest variation in day length (going from 0 hours to 24 hours). Is this the same problem?
The big problem with India is it has a population of 1 and therefore only 1 person can address 1 problem at any given time.
Some places like Minnesota would have their kids waiting for the school bus in pitch black during the winter
Oh noes, won't someone invent the lightbulb to save us from this heinous darkness! Seriously though, what kind of a screwed up city doesn't have lighting at bus stops?
The school day starts at more or less the same time everywhere
Private schools can choose their starting time - unless the time is prohibited by law, or local district regulation. School laws fall under state subject - which means the state is the primary legal entity responsible for creating such laws. None of the states measures 3000 kilometers. 800 km is rarely or maybe never a distance in any direction to any direction in a state - let alone latitudinally.
District collector can order schools to start at times deemed convenient for kids - no district measures more than a few hundred km in any direction.
E.g. https://indianexpress.com/arti...
There are many multi-shift schools - which have 2 sessions per day. So within a school, there are kids in multiple "time zones" - e.g. 7am to noon, and 12:30 pm to 5:30 pm.
Ask 10 children in India their school timings, and you will likely get 12 unique answers.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
But why not then have a system based on the location of the sun across the globe. Of course you're then going to have to factor I. Other issues at the pole compared to the equator about sunrise to sunset timings but we live in a modern world ... You would Google the company or the person and see ... THEY'RE ONLINE, AT WORK. Its actually not that complicated.
From the language you used, I doubt you have ever been military.
No - banks, factories, post-offices, transportation offices, agriculture all may have different requirements. If every other aspect of life is affected just because an idiot badly studied only schools - that is not called a different time zone but pure madness.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Oh man, you've totally gone ballistic, if you think that googling should be the only way to find out open times.
the only thing i hear is google and facebook and who else invinting all these weird constructions to get 'poor' people in those countries onto internet.
that money would be better spend on other basic needs, like curtains etc.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
How about they fix the system where bribery (and looking the other way) is part of the normal municipal process. How do you fix a failing sewer system? You bribe the inspector so he gives it a passing grade. How do you fix a crumbling building falling apart due to poor workmanship and building materials? You bribe the inspector so he signs the occupancy certificate and dozen of poor families move in.
No it isn't. It's already the case that many institutions, companies and so on have differing opening hours for various practical reasons. This doesn't mean that the local logistics company that opens at 6:15 because goods have to ship and reach port in time for transport to Europe is in a different timezone than the school which opens at 8:00 because kids are hard to wake up and wouldn't be learning much that early in the morning anyways. Institutions should just set sensible opening hours.
Meanwhile, a single timezone still has the benefit of avoiding confusion when discussing times between people in various different parts of the country, and simplifying things railroad trip planning and trade logistics. In other words, you'd have the benefits of separate time zones without the harm.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world...
"In 1942, the Spanish dictator General Franco moved Spain onto Central European Time to follow Nazi Germany." ...and they remain there today. That is, Spain is West of Greenwich, but on the time zone one East of Greenwich. And its a 2013 article about this costing productivity, but they remain there today.
The timezone does not force kids go to the school at the same time all over India. Stupid people do.
IMHO having a single timezone and not having to deal with conversions is mostly beneficial. But you need to let go of the idea that everyone works from 9 to 5 or goes to school at a set time.
In the tiny Netherlands, which is certainly within a single timezone, schools vary their starting times however they see fit. Even their holidays vary, though that is determined regionally and not per school.
"The DST and now single Time zone proponents are like a mild form of anti-vaxxing..."
Just remember, it takes all kinds of people to keep humanity afloat. You put all your eggs in a single evolutionary basket (eg. one narrow way of thinking) and you're risking the future of your species.
what kind of a screwed up city doesn't have lighting at bus stops?
American ones. I live in a mid-size city, and there's *zero* special lighting at bus stops. A lot of them are just signs at the side of the road.
And that's the official city bus stops. School buses have a different (more extensive) set of bus stops. Many of those are just "the corner of these two streets" or "in the driveway of XYZ Nth Ave" without even a sign.
And, Rural people go to school, too.
Why would the kids be waiting in pitch black for the bus? Is Minnesota some third world location where they dont have lighting, or even fire?
And why does school have to start when the clock says 9? why can't school start at 10?
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Yeah, it happens to be both pitch black and snow white *and* bus companies are still stupid enough to pick stops where it is pitch black with no sidewalk in the winter. (Yes, I drive by one of those every morning, and yes, the kids stand out in the street. The whole situation is just stupid.)
2100 km according to Google Maps .
Unless I'm missing something?
"The school day starts at more or less the same time everywhere in India but children go to bed later and have reduced sleep in areas where the sun sets later."
Yes, this is an artificial problem. One time zone doesn't mean every single school has to start at exactly the same time.
Start the school at the time that makes sense. Problem solved.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The problem is that you just swap one problem - different time zones for another one - not knowing the hours of operation of the place you're calling.
I already have that problem. Some of the places I work with follow the canonical "9 to 5" schedule, but by no means all. Other places start the day at 8:00. Some places even start at 7:00. And a lot of places have flex time; some people I know even get in to work at 6am.
Many offices have "flex Friday," where some Fridays (but not all) you can't call them at any time of day, but other days they work an extra hour every day.
Knowing how to read the clock does not substitute for knowing the business hours.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
What about businesses and schools that have a 7 hour day? BOOM, mind blown!?!
Being a little smarty pants in this post, apologies. Seriously though, what's the big deal? I think children going to school is more important than any inconveniences the flexible hours solution calls for.
Example
I want to talk to my cousin's school in another city, I call, they don't answer, I call back an hour later. Maybe even listen to their answering machine that would tell me their office hours. End of the world averted.
Example
I need to talk to a widget supplier on the other side of India. Well, I could email, or I could call. I don't know when to call India now without DuckDuckGoing some info... but if it was a regular part of my job I guess I'd want to know when that business worked.
except we've lost all additional layers of context for what a time of "5pm" actually means, which means we have to convey additional information on calls, not less.
No, it's less info, and far less complicated info.
Currently around the world we need timezone, whether or not they use DST, whether or not either of you are using DST, and the hours of operation of the business/person you're calling. You need to do all the fucking mental arithmetic to add up all those things and account for all that shit to see if you're going to both be around at the same time. Then once you find that common time you need to convert into each person's timezone so it makes sense to them.
In the scenario you think is more complicated, all we need are the hours of operation of the business. Then we compare to our hours, and we're done. If they say 8am-5pm, and we say 1pm-9pm, it's pretty damn easy to see that somewhere between 1pm-5pm we're both going to be available.
If they say 8am-5pm in UTC-1 with DST and you say 8am-5pm in UTC+6 without DST, what time are each of the parties available in common?
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
you can just ask what time it is there
If there were no timezones, you could just ask them what times they're open and do no calculations.
I'm from that general area. DST is annoying except for people who want an extra hour to drink at the bar. School doesn't have to start at "7:30am" all year long. It can start at 7:30a at one time of the year and 8:30a at another time. Problem solved. Does the same thing without the retarded obsession of trying to match time with the sun. Why the fk would you care about where the sun is when you only get 6 hours of it?! It's gone almost all day during the time of year that DST is meant to help. Even when the sun is up, I can't see it through these thick winter clouds.
Yay, noon time matches peak sun.... for a few days of the year. I know, lets go full retard. Daylight shifts by 3 minutes every day. Lets have a dst for every day of the year, that'll be even better! Can you imagine of the utopia?
DST is unnecessary complexity for a simple problem that is only a problem because people make it to be a problem.
The whole of society doesn't want to start the fucking day a 10am. The little bastards need to go to bed at night instead of staying up late. I know, I was one of those little bastards not long ago.
I would stay up on my computer until midnight or worse and gee, wonder why 1st period was always so difficult.
Now as an adult, I work at 5:30am. I know that if I don't go to bed by 9 that I won't have much sleep and will basically be putting my next day on hard mode.
Want kids to do better in school? Then they need to fucking go to bed at the right time and not when THEY want to go to bed. Children clearly do not know what is best for them otherwise they wouldn't be children. For that matter, many adults do a poor job at it.
As we all quickly realize, the world does not revolve around your sensibilities.
I had to look up some examples to get a good feel for what you were talking about:
Pennsylvania
https://www.timeanddate.com/su...
dec 31, 2019:
7:30 AM rise
4:51 PM set
June 15, 2019:
5:37 AM rise
8:38 PM set
baton rouge:
dec 31
7:01 rise
5:14 set
june 15
6:02 rise
8:08 set
miami:
dec 31
7:07 rise
5:39 set
june 15
6:29 rise
8:13 set
Minneapolis:
dec 31
7:51 rise
4:41 set
june 15
5:25 rise
9:01 set
That's just a different time zone then. Only you don't call it a different time zone.
No it is not.
Trains, planes etc. are scheduled to the "time zone" not to the opening of schools.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Instead of knowing the time offset of each place, you'd have to have a chart for every city for what is considered "work hours" there.
Yeah, and that is surprisingly easy. Everyone in Europe has that in his mind. Or do you really think some one in Greece entering office at 9:00 is calling one in Berlin, Paris or London right away? (And that are actually 3 real time zones difference).
Instead of knowing the time offset of each place, you'd have to have a chart for every city for what is considered "work hours" there.
If you are to stupid to realize that your call partner is 2000km away -- either west or east -- then you probably should not call him anyway?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Especially when the solution is obvious: Just start the school day an hour later in the west.
Indeed, and I've always thought this would be the proper solution, not just for India, but regarding schools in the rest of the world instead of having the Daylight Saving Time switch. I think mainland US could run on one time. Just use central time. The work day doesn't have to be 8 to 5; it can be any time, if it's 11 to 8 on the West coast, and people don't go to bed until after midnight... so be it. From a logistics standpoint, it seems adjusting what hours people work makes more sense than having "time zones" across a country.
For anyone that might whine and say "but 12pm is supposed to be when sun is at peak in the sky", I don't care, mostly because for the majority of the year that isn't true already. We're already an hour out of sync with "scientific noon" most of the year because of Daylight Saving Time- it hasn't caused planes to fall out of the sky.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
The whole of society doesn't want to start the fucking day a 10am. The little bastards need to go to bed at night instead of staying up late. I know, I was one of those little bastards not long ago.
Unfortunately children are biological organisms and not machines. You can send a child to bed two hours earlier, and even do it consistently, but they still won't fall asleep at that time. Having a routine set is only part of the problem, the other part of the problem is millions of years of evolution that makes our sleep cycle correspond with the sun.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
There's got to be more to it than that. I put my kids to bed at 8 every day. In winter, that's 3 hours after sunset. In summer, that's an hour before sunset. On average, they actually get to sleep at roughly the same time in either season.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Also, if you actually travel to a time zone, you have to recalculate everything. Bedtime, meal times, get up time, work time, etc. It's doable, but potentially exhausting, and it would be pretty easy to slip up occasionally and think "2 p.m." is as reasonable as "3 p.m." for waking up when you're halfway across the world without realizing you've miscalculated by an hour.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
I think we should get rid of timezones, all together, and just stick with UTC. The problem is humans have been conditioned to think that the sun rises around 7am (yes it varies depending on the time of year etc). But there is no reason we can't change our thinking. For someone living in NYC, it means the sun rises at 12UTC. But it would 12UTC around the world. It's mental thing. No one will like it. It would save such confusion about "what time is there".
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
Example
I need to talk to a widget supplier on the other side of India. Well, I could email, or I could call. I don't know when to call India now without DuckDuckGoing some info... but if it was a regular part of my job I guess I'd want to know when that business worked.
After two or three mistakes like that, you should have learned.
After two or three complaints about calling at inappropriate times, you get a stern notice.
After two or three stern notices you are fired, and I hope you find a job where "guessing what is the right time to call" is more easy.
What actually is your job that you are to stupid not to know not to call in early morning or early night hours?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
If they say 8am-5pm in UTC-1 with DST and you say 8am-5pm in UTC+6 without DST, what time are each of the parties available in common?
You figure that only once, and write it into your address book in the contact info, using your local time.
Wow, that was easy again.
If you are in doubt you make an appointment for a phone call via email, you can even delegate that to your secretary and she will talk to the secretary of the other guy ... I really wonder if anyone here on /. with "timezone problems" lives in the real world or on a moon orbiting jupiter, you are hilarious.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
So I guess you feel is the same as mine :D I luckily did not need to look it up.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I mean it kind of does. I always had a hard time going to sleep on time at night and waking up early for school. In fact, I was one tardy away from failing high school and I was late to my own graduation when I avoided failing!
And you know what? When I got jobs, I found that the real world wasn't like school. I started working at 9, 11, 12, 14. I hate waking up early so now I don't.
Yes, his grammar is better than most that have been in the military.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
And to think The last 6,000,000,000 year on earth we've been hurting ourselves this whole time!!!
Only until now, when large assholes appear, that we've been harming the children the whole time!!
Oh God.... won't someone think of the children?!?
The do, but they are solar powered, so during winter not enough is collected to have them last til morning dark
There is slightly more to it. If people are going to sleep before sunset, you'll need to block out the light from the windows. :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I really wonder if anyone here on /. with "timezone problems" lives in the real world or on a moon orbiting jupiter, you are hilarious.
And you obviously have never had to schedule virtual meetings with people in different timezones. You've never had your laptop fail to realize that you're a timezone over and that it needs to update meeting notification times. You've never encountered multiple people within the same timezone that both do and don't do DST that you need to schedule a meeting with.
I have done that, and I've worked with a lot of people who have done that. You thinking that this is easy is what's hilarious. You apparently have never done it if you do. It would massively simplify communication if we just all used UT. No figuring anything out - ask once when they're available, and you're done.
Your "easy" solution is a "figure it out once" which involves a bit of math and a table to account for DST being on and off at different times of the year in different countries. That's not easy, especially if it involves people in more than one location.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
I really have to emphasize how short day light is up north. A 1 hour shift does absolutely nothing. In fact, it makes it worse. Day light gets to be so short that centering around the noon time sun means it's dark when I went to school and dark when I left school and same for work. I rarely got to see the sun because it was often too cold to play outside according to the school. If DST never happened, I'd actually get about 30min of sun outside of school/work hours.
In practice, DST reduces the amount of sun I get to see. And don't get the farmers started. They almost don't even care about time in the same way most do. They start work when the animals need them. DST is an ivory tower idea that misses the finer details resulting in it making the situation it attempts to help, worse.
And you obviously have never had to schedule virtual meetings with people in different timezones.
Yes I have.
And I wrote software for flight schedules and crew assignments 30 years ago, where all departures and landings are in local time
Sorry, people who can not even schedule a business meeting should simply change the job.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
There is slightly more to it. If people are going to sleep before sunset, you'll need to block out the light from the windows. :-)
That alone might not work. The colour of the sunlight changes throughout the day. There are more blue tones at mid day and more red tones in the evening.
Even if you're blocking out all light into the room, the body clock is set by the colour of light it is exposed to. Now if you bring them inside and block off all access to outside light for several hours before bed- probably have some of those ugly yellow lights the colour of the old incandescent bulbs from before we had LEDs around the house- to trick the brain into thinking it's later than it is.
Some people are more sensitive than others- but the bottom line is; most kids won't sleep if you just block out the light. If they saw bluish- day light a few hours before, their internal clocks are still thinking it's too early to sleep.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
...Minnesota would have their kids waiting for the school bus in pitch black during the winter...
TIL that Minnesota apparently doesn't have street lamps.
Tonight you learn that not every road everywhere, anywhere has street lamps.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
and its not pitch black, its snow white during the winter
I always though Snow White was kinda hot, but never liked those weird cartoon fantasy porns about the seven dwarves running a train on her. Know what I mean homie?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
That's just a different time zone then. Only you don't call it a different time zone.
And yet it has none of the confusion of "now is that time in Time Zone 1, 2, or 3?". But, I suppose it does introduce the confusion of "what do you mean 6p is too late to call you??".
No matter what people come up with, there is no really good solution. Because the earth is a tilted globe, and people tend to have a solution based on their local conditions. Meanwhile, most of us have a system that works. I can call anyone around the globe while they are at work, by simply doing about 500 milliseconds of math, and correlating with my time. I've had to do it for years. If we all went to say Universal time, which is one time zone for the whole planet, I'd have munltiple tables to look up, more work, and gain nothing. India is kinda the example of the issue on a small scale.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Ha! The Evils of TimeZones!
In the military it was Zulu time. One learned it and figured out how to deal with it.
Yup. I use Zulu or UT a lot. For Military or radio work, you sometimes have to do that when the two or more sides simply have to connect at a certain time. But of course that means some times the same Zulu time means that what is convenient for one place during the middle of the day means other countries might have to change their entire scheduling to the business day being in the middle of the night.
So next we'll be arguing which country gets the prime daylight hours.
Where I work we have international operations, had to work out the business timeflow and fit the cron jobs properly. Fun times. Any other system is just that: a different but similar set of methods and operations needed for communication and resource allocation.
Exactly. There will be something "wrong" with any system we come up with.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Some places like Minnesota would have their kids waiting for the school bus in pitch black during the winter
Oh noes, won't someone invent the lightbulb to save us from this heinous darkness! Seriously though, what kind of a screwed up city doesn't have lighting at bus stops?
Cities are not the only place that have people in them.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
No - banks, factories, post-offices, transportation offices, agriculture all may have different requirements. If every other aspect of life is affected just because an idiot badly studied only schools - that is not called a different time zone but pure madness.
Correct. Kinda. Humans have evolved to be primarily daylight animals. So we have evolved to work while it is daylight out. That part is simple. It means that in any given area, the people will work most efficiently during the day. So the whole concept that some have espoused of having one time zone for the whole globe means more of that madness you speak of. Not only would some people be forced to start and end work at varying light or dark hours, they would have to come to grips with the fact that the next calendar day will start at any time during that light/dark cycle. Imagine it's Tuesday, and an hour after you get up it's Wednesday. or the day changes in the middle of the work day, so you get to stagger hours. You are at work for 8 hours a day, but 4 might actually be from the day before, and four of your hours might be on the next day. It's insane.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Why would the kids be waiting in pitch black for the bus? Is Minnesota some third world location where they dont have lighting, or even fire? And why does school have to start when the clock says 9? why can't school start at 10?
Siddown and pay attention. Not everyone lives in a brightly lit up city. A surprising number of people live in the countryside.
Of course, this is just your way of showing that you aren't capable of thinking that there is anything other than what you see when you look outside the door.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I'm from that general area. DST is annoying except for people who want an extra hour to drink at the bar.
Cute. I use it to do work around the house. It's a little strange, people that go to bars around here do it regardless of light/dark times.
School doesn't have to start at "7:30am" all year long. It can start at 7:30a at one time of the year and 8:30a at another time. Problem solved.
So do parents of children have to adjust their personal work schedules to accommodate your continuously variable start and end of the school day? Sorry boss, we'll have to have that big meeting three hours later because School starts at 10:00 a.m. today.
Does the same thing without the retarded obsession of trying to match time with the sun.
It's kinda how people evolved, Spanky. And you see nothing other than what filters in for you personally via your tunnel vision. Have fun.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
That's just a different time zone then. Only you don't call it a different time zone. No it is not. Trains, planes etc. are scheduled to the "time zone" not to the opening of schools.
You are reading it too specifically. If you are in a certain time zone that is covering an area that is too large for it, and set the western time as the same time zone, but send them to school an hour later than in the eastern portion, you are doing the exact same thing as sending them to school at the same numerical time in a different time zone number.
Either way, the students in the western portion are going to school an hour later. No difference in effect. Students in the east - 8:00 a.m. Students in the west, 9:00 a.m.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Absolutely false. What is insane is the idea that just because it is certain o'clock, one must start working irrespective of sunlight, nature of work, season, health etc. Once this insane idea is gone, banks can work when it makes sense for banks to work, and agricultural irrigation water can be supplied when it makes sense for it to be supplied. And of course, schools in India can be and are ordered at district level to change their timings according to local conditions.
I was feeling sleepy today at 4pm. Shockingly, I just went to sleep instead of setting my clock to 10 pm before going to bed.
Stop the obsession about o'clocks.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Absolutely false. What is insane is the idea that just because it is certain o'clock, one must start working irrespective of sunlight, nature of work, season, health etc.
Oh you throw the pejoratives around there Sparky. Sorry, child, but it is not at all "insane" or "retarded" to want to do work when it is light out. Good day, Sparky.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
"Insane" comes from your own post. "Retarded" from your imagination. And light can be out at any o'clock. So just work when light is out if it matters to you. My server was down at 3 am : light out did not matter.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
you are doing the exact same thing as sending them to school at the same numerical time in a different time zone number.
Obviously. That is actually the point of the linked article, or isn't it?
Either way, the students in the western portion are going to school an hour later. No difference in effect. Students in the east - 8:00 a.m. Students in the west, 9:00 a.m. ...
The point is: at the moment they all go at the same time to school
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Cities are not the only places that have lightbulbs in them.
So do parents of children have to adjust their personal work schedules to accommodate your continuously variable start and end of the school day
We already do this with DST. Is that so hard to grasp?
Cities are not the only places that have lightbulbs in them.
But the countryside - are you telling me that they have streetlamps just like cities? Note - I grew up in the country - it isn't like urban areas. We had a streetlamp near our house, but many places along my bus route did not.
All of you guys arguing that everyplacehasstreetlamps are either trolling, or are stretching the limits of being obtuse.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
So do parents of children have to adjust their personal work schedules to accommodate your continuously variable start and end of the school day
We already do this with DST. Is that so hard to grasp?
twice a year equals weekly? Depending on how granular you demand. Not to mention, in order to make your reply make sense, you would be forcing businesses to start and end at different times all of the year, as well as wildly gyrating times in northern latitudes.
Hint - moving forward 1 hour and backward one hour has everyone moving. So everyone is coordinated. Everyone shows up at the right time. Continuously varying needs a lookup table for each location, and then there is the weirdness inflicted on people without children.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
There are lights in the countryside too, even small villages in third world countries have light provided by charging up batteries from solar panels during the day, or even by igniting fires.
And is there some overpowering force that prevents schools from opening when the local clocks aren't displaying "9" ? How about basing your school opening on the availability of daylight in your area rather than some arbitrary numbers?
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There are lights in the countryside too, even small villages in third world countries have light provided by charging up batteries from solar panels during the day, or even by igniting fires.
And is there some overpowering force that prevents schools from opening when the local clocks aren't displaying "9" ? How about basing your school opening on the availability of daylight in your area rather than some arbitrary numbers?
Why I have to keep explaining the same thing over and over again? Why you demand that kids wait under a streetlamp at all, that tiny communities have to spend the tax dollars so that you demand, when they have a system that works.
Now - since you are the last person I am going to even address this to, try working out the details of how parents are going to get their children to day care or return from school for the variable times over the year? Should businesses change their starting and ending times? Work out how this will interface with the world at large.
Y'all are experiencing tunnel vision based on a very narrow view of the world. People with families work, their businesses and their workplaces start at particular time, other places across the world know when they can contact them, the world knows when, and not having to have to listen to people of short sight come up with short sighted non-solutions that merely create other problems. And for what?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
But the countryside - are you telling me that they have streetlamps just like cities?
Streetlamps? I thought we were talking about bus stops. And yes they did in my state. Had little solar panels on them too and works quite well since they didn't need to run all night.
But hey I'm sure those kids in Finland only get education for half a year too. Won't someone think of those dark children.!
> But why not then have a system based on the location of the sun across the globe.
Uh, we have that. it's called timezones. The *local time* has all the contextual information contained in it, and it actually makes it easier to relocate around, since no matter where you are "9 to 5" is normal operations hours.
To get rid of timezones, and make a system where you have to memorize the unique specifics "sun offset" of every possible place, or google when things are open in the town you're visiting, is just re-inventing the wheel, except as a hexagon rather than a circle.
To be fair, it's by no means the only thing that does that.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Having timezones is like setting something once, in a header file or something.
Not having timezones is like copy-pasting code to calculate local solar noon in 27,436 places all through your app.
See also: fluoride, vaccination.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The DST and now single Time zone proponents are like a mild form of anti-vaxxing.
I guess that is a valid way of looking at it.
I look at it differently. I have lived a majority of my life without having to deal with DST. Every time I have to deal with it (DST), I get headaches and weariness and I can never concentrate because I always have to worry about when the time is going to change again.
From my point of view, changing time is like changing reality. Fuck that. Reality is. Change yourself. Don't like waking up with the sun in your eyes? Go to bed earlier. Don't try to redefine time itself. If a country feels the need to coordinate large masses of people, then tell them to come in an hour later, don't try to pretend that the time itself has actually changed.
In short, DST is a mental manipulation that REALLY fucks me up. I wish that where I live now did not follow DST. :(
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
The DST and now single Time zone proponents are like a mild form of anti-vaxxing.
I guess that is a valid way of looking at it.
I look at it differently. I have lived a majority of my life without having to deal with DST. Every time I have to deal with it (DST), I get headaches and weariness and I can never concentrate because I always have to worry about when the time is going to change again.
From my point of view, changing time is like changing reality. Fuck that. Reality is. Change yourself.
This reminds me of how many people here on slashdot shit their pants about metric versus Imperial. Stand by for the shitstorm I just started with that comment. What the issue is a marked rigidity in thinking.
Me? It is all arbitrary, and it all works, so I switch 100 percent seamlessly between Metric and Imperial. Time zones mean nothing to me - If I want to speak with someone anywhere around the world, I just look it up once, and it is committed to memory. About the only thing that is a teeny bit more weird is remembering that for significant parts of the day, places like Oz are a day ahead.
If you want a real head scratcher, imagine the world going to Universal time, and the new day starting for you say, at 9:00 in the morning - or what used to be 9:00, now 0000 hours. Or perhaps at what used to be noon, so that you have to put in 4 hours labor on one day, then 4 the next day for one local workday. your timesheet.
Despite modern conservative thought, the world is not flat. It doesn't get light and dark over the entire earth at the same universal time. And I still haven't received a well thought out plan to put the entire world on one time.
And I'm beginning to think that the rigidity of thought so many here have means that they just decide the local time and screw the rest of the world. The chaos of that is why we started time zones in the first place. But so few here seem to remember or appreciate why that happened. Perhaps if we returned to pre-civilization days, we could go back to pre-civilization timekeeping. I suspect that some think that is a good idea as well.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I think my point was not as clear as it could have been.
I only referenced DST in my response to your discussion of time zones and DST. I don't want localtime to be moved around based on the position of the sun in the sky. I am sympathetic to people wanting their days to be defined by daylight. It can be done by agreeing to go work an hour earlier or later rather than saying that time itself has changed.
I will address time zones now. The military has all of this figured out just fine. You use Zulu time (essentially GMT) for everything of note. You use localtime for everything else. Zulu time is essentially one time zone for the entire planet. Localtime is whatever craziness the local authorities decided upon, such as Kabul being a half hour, rather than hour off from the previous timezone.
It is desirable for an Administrative Unit, such as a country like India, or an ISP such as HE.net, to want to simplify administrative tasks, through a single unified time zone. This has nothing to do with flat Earth thinking; although I am sure some arrive at the same conclusion through flat Earth thinking.
TL;DR. Don't fuck with how time is measured. Use localtime for non-important stuff like scheduling lunch and use GMT for logs, International Treaties, etc.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
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