Today we had to go through the dreary routine of setting the clocks back by one hour as we move from daylight time to standard time. And then in the spring , we move the clocks forward by one hour again. I was interested to learn that in China they tried doing this biannual shifting from 1945 to 1948 and then again from 1986 to 1991 but then gave it up and now no longer shift the clocks.
But what was even more interesting is that while China is big enough that it should comprise five time zones, they have only one time (Beijing time which is UTC+8) for the entire nation. This was adopted by Mao Zedong in 1949. This results in an enormous simplification since one does not constantly have to specify the time zone when specifying the time for any event anywhere in the country.
What this means is that each region decides the time for when schools, businesses, and offices operate. So in some western regions of the country, schools might begin (say) at 11:00am. Since most people live in just one time zone, that would be easy to get used to and travelers would not have to reset their clocks when they go from one part of the country to another.
Of course, this uniform policy would never be tolerated in the US since so many people are so resistant to changes that go against the things that they have done for centuries. There would be armed groups of people taking to the streets saying that having one time for everyone smacks of socialism and violates their constitutional right to have breakfast at 8:00am whichever part of the country they might live in. They would not know that before the advent of rapid railroad travel in the US that required coordination of time for scheduling purposes, each town set its own local time, setting it to noon according to when the sun was at its highest point over that town. Initially, the standardization was used for just railroad schedules and people in a town would have both ‘railroad time’ and ‘local time’ but soon people adopted railroad time as the standard.
It would be even better if we went even further and the entire world adopted a single time. It would surely make a lot of things simpler when it came to scheduling events. Again, there would be huge arguments as to which time should be the single global time with the US likely insisting that one of their time zones should be the global standard. But whichever time was adopted, it would not take long to learn the local times for the daily routines.
I think it would be wonderful to have a single global time and no biannual shifting of clocks.
Of course it is unlikely to happen but I can dream, can’t I?
I would not mind if FTB started with a small change, setting all comment times to UTC.
There is a chance that the EU will abolish the winter time/summer time switch. The EU Parliament has voted to do so, but there needs to be agreement by the Council of Ministers too.
UTC FTW!
Currently, FTB has “Somewhere Whatever Time” .
I am going to add this comment just to see what time FTB shows for the comment having been posted. As I type, it is 8:57 am, PST (just turned the clocks back last night).
As I understand it, each FtB blog site can set the time zone that they want. Although I live in the Pacific time zone, I used to be in the Eastern time zone and never bothered to change it after I moved here.
I never did understand the whole thing about time zones. What a stupid idea. I’d be quite comfortable getting up at 2:00am and going to bed at noon, as long as that was my schedule, who cares? The idea that everyone needs to get up at 8 and go to bed at 10 is just stupid -- time is just a number, people!.
To slightly alter an old joke, “If time zones were good enough for Jesus, …”
Yeah, lots of folks would see a single world time as a plot by the New World Order, or maybe even the Illuminati, to take over the world using mind control.
What we might be able to do is totally get rid of daylight saving time, which doesn’t save any daylight, and just complicates things for folks who forget to reset their clocks.
In a similar vein, Isaac Azimov once proposed a “world seasonal calendar.” Every year would be divided into four seasons of thirteen seven-day weeks; and each year would have a New Year’s Day that’s a holiday and not part of any week. Every fourth year would also have a Leap Day that’s a holiday and not part of any week. Folks would quickly become able to tell what weekday it is given a date: the weekday would just be the remainder of the date divided by seven; and even folks who don’t know enough math to know that that’s they’re doing would soon do it as a matter of habit.
But again, lots of religious folks would scream bloody murder because there would occasionaly be eight days between sabbaths.
I don’t know, if I had to get up at 3 pm and go to bed at 7 am, I would find it distressing and very difficult to adjust to. Saying that “time is just a number” is kind of like telling a person with psychological issues that “it’s all in your head” -- technically true, but meaningless. Times of day have real meaning and emotional resonance for some people.
Of course! I dream of a single world government with a socialist constitution, regional boundaries that make sense, and legislators chosen at random from a pool of qualified people, who serve a single term, and are answerable for their actions at the end of the term.
Others dream of a global time, or the abolition of pi.
All really good ideas, in dreamland.
Well, except for the pi thing.
“the US likely insisting that one of their time zones should be the global standard.”
I would hope even the USA could understand why current UTC is the best and only sensible option : it puts the date line down the middle of the Pacific,the best place for it.
UTC is evil: let’s use GMT!!!!
Getting rid of daylight saving? Sure.
A single global time, however, doesn’t seem to me to actually solve anything. You still have to deal with the fact that people organise their lives roughly around the presence or absence of daylight, and that happens at different times in different places. All it would mean is that instead of having to work out what the clock time is in a different location, you’d have to work out what the clock time means there instead. I don’t see how that makes things any easier.
The Swiss clockmaker Swatch tried to propagate its own time system, where each 24h day is divided to 1000 “beats”. It wasn’t a success. Probably because midnight was defined by the location of their headquarters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
@8
Asimov’s calendar seems to be a variant of the Shire reckoning used by Hobbits.
Of the countries I’ve lived in and visited in Asia since 2001, none of them have “savings time”, and I don’t miss it one iota. Then again, the most northerly of them is Japan, and the northernmost island of Hokkaido is only 43°N. It’s mostly countries north of 45°N that benefit from changing the clock.
I’m all for permanent standard time, but people would likely resist not having localised time, 6AM to 6PM days. And along with standard time, have consistent and better defined time zones. Parts of British Columbia, the entirety of Saskatchewan and parts of Arizona (and probably others) stay on standard time while others switch. Half the year northeast BC is on PST, half the year on MST. Why? Mano isn’t the only one with dreams of time reform, I’ve ranted on calendar reform which will never happen. But can we at least get rid of half and quarter hour time zones (e.g. Australia, Newfoundland, Nepal, etc.).
Watch Tom Scott’s take on programming and time zones. It’s legendary comedy.
I’m at 55°N, and I think it’s completely pointless. In summer it’s almost always light, in winter it’s almost always dark. Doesn’t matter a damn if you change the clock by an hour.
Marcus @#7 -- I’d be quite comfortable getting up at 2:00am and going to bed at noon, as long as that was my schedule, who cares? … Just a number
‘Noon’ is not a number, it’s the part of the day when the Sun is highest in the sky.
A single world time would change language along with habits.
And a single world time was recently attempted -- do you recall the ‘tik’ or ‘click’ that there was an attempt to get everyone to use online, thus setting a world wide standard? It didn’t use hours or minutes but a simple number (as in “I’ll be online at 5140”)
Sank without a trace in moments.
Never had a problem with changing clocks, twice a year I spend 15 minutes on the 10 or so analogue clocks around the house and in the cars. Internet connected devices take care of themselves. I’m comfortable with daylight saving at 35 degrees south.
I don’t see a problem with time zones, and nowadays, when many time-keeping devices set their time via remote signals there are very few clocks to reset, whether due to travel or daylight savings.
The happiest day in the year for me is when the clock is moved forward and I get to have daylight after work, the most depressing are the days immediately after moving the clock back. One of the few things I feel thankful to GW Bush is expanding the time in the year during which the clock is forward.
Back in Israel daylight savings was yet another area of contention between secular and religious Jews, where the secular folks wanted to move the clock forward because in the summer it gets bright and hot very early so most people can’t sleep in the morning hours anyway (closed societies such as kibbutzim shift their work hours accordingly -- starting the workday at 6 am or even earlier, and ending by 2 pm or earlier, but general society lack that kind of control over their schedules), while religious Jews were concerned that if the clocks were to change it would clash with the prayer schedule (there are extra-early prayers for the month leading to Rosh Hashana, prayer times are set relative to sunrise). Eventually they decided to do the clock change and religious Jews manage somehow.
“people would likely resist not having localised time, 6AM to 6PM days”
People resisted decimalised currency and metrication. Eventually those people adapt, or are dead, and things are better.
“general society lack that kind of control over their schedules”
Well that’s bloody capitalism for you.
“religious Jews manage somehow”
Funny that.
I’m the exact opposite, because I hate having to get up before sunrise more than I hate leaving work in the dark. I’m not a morning person.
It’s a small thing, but hours should go from 0 to 11 rather than from 1 to 12. We could also represent “10” and “11” with a single character for each, so they’re like the others which are decimal numerals. Perhaps (T,E) or (A,B), but a pair of unique/different symbols would help to avoid some confusion.
Or, we could ditch the am/pm thing and use 0 to 23 for a boring old 24-hour clock. That’s okay too.
Lassi Hippeläinen @15
No, what Asimov proposed allows beginning every week on the same weekday. Shire reckoning doesn’t do that.
Intransitive @16: about 8:45 into the video you linked to gives the answer: use a public domain library that already exists. Problem solved.
But, yes, I guess it does blow the minds of non-programmers. It doesn’t occur to them that “what time it is” depends on what time it is 8-), and it’s geographical and cultural, not temporal or physical. A mathemetician who retired from Fermilab once told me (and maybe Mano can confirm it) that there’s not even the concept of “a point in time” in physics, or at least there’s no unit to express it.
consciousness razor @23
Old news, but probably not going to happen. And there’s also the problem with minutes and seconds which are written as decimal-coded sexagesimal.
Already done most places in the world, even in the U.S. in particular cases.
Well, it doesn’t have all that much to do with physics per se. Mathematically, that’s not a unit of anything, because a unit should act like 1 under addition, not like 0 (or some nonzero multiple of 1). Obviously, we can and do use coordinates and the like, to distinguish one point and another.
But if what you’re really looking for is a duration between two such points, which can behave like length (and not “location”) does with respect to physical space, then of course we have time for that, which officially comes in units of seconds. (And instead of that you could use minutes, days, decades, orbital periods, or whatever arbitrary durations that you may find useful/convenient in different contexts…. like the time it takes to heat up a tea kettle, under certain specified conditions, for example.)
What Dunc wrote at #14:
Fact is, the solar cycle is an inescapable fact of our orbit. And no matter how one sets clocks, people are overwhelmingly diurnal.
Yep, I know. The most common option in music is using T and E…. Maybe someday. But switching from 1-12 to 0-11 does seem more likely.
billseymour @25:
Huh? Ever heard of initial conditions? You know, like values of stuff at t=0? And of course, the initial time needn’t be zero. It could be any number, but then you would have to specify units.
And given special relativity, wouldn’t “no concept of a point in time” lead to “no concept of a point in space”?
Further to #29: Sorry, that should have been billseymour @24.
Maybe the mathematician was talking about simultaneity?
Dunc @#14,
The problem you are raising would only be for the person seeking to find a Global Time that works for some event to be attended by people from different parts of the world. That person would have to find the convenient GT ranges for each of the relevant zone sand fix a time within the overlap of those ranges.
But once that GT is obtained, everyone would know exactly when it was happening without doing any more research.
The times of most events are fixed locally and the problem would not arise. So if a sporting or other event event is said to start at (say) 14:00 GT, that time would be the same the world over.
What about the date line?
sonofrojblake @21:
Well, said lack of control applies to government employees and government-owned companies as well. And small businesses have to obey a bunch of local ordinances regarding opening times.
@ 32 John Morales
There wouldn’t be one. The date line is an artifact of separate time zones. Mano is proposing a single universal time zone with no edges.
Silentbob, but there would be some place where noon is still when the sun is overhead, and that particular longitude would still be a de facto date line — where the clock matches the diurnal cycle.
AM and PM would stop being meaningful over most of the planet, though; for them, the next day would tick over during the middle of the day.
(Imagine public holidays as an example of the complications arising)
billseymour @24
“No, what Asimov proposed allows beginning every week on the same weekday. Shire reckoning doesn’t do that.”
It does, on Saturday. If you meant that every month begins on the same weekday, that is also true in SR. Which weekday, depends on the month, but it is always the same, year after year.
FYI: The British Navy used to change the date at noon. When reading old logs that can be confusing.
Mano
No it wouldn’t. All you would do is replace one minor hassle -- adjusting your watch etc. whenever you travel and taking note of the time at another location when trying to contact someone -- for another: having to look up the ‘global time’ offset when travelling or when contacting someone. In either case, the task remains the same, but executed in a different manner: how to account for the fact that the Earth is round.
I agree with getting rid of daylight savings though. As an example of how ludicrous it gets, take Australia’s silly setup. South Australia and Northern Territory share a time zone of UTC+9:30, which is unusual in itself, but of the two, only SA has a DST shift, becoming UTC+10:30. The east coast states also share a time zone, UTC+10:00, but Queensland does not bother with DST… which means South Australia overtakes the more easterly Queensland.
And then there is Eucla time…
Have you heard of the long running efforts to promote Mecca as the global standard?
___
Marcus #7
No it isn’t, it is an indicator of how far through the day/night cycle a certain longitude is.
I don’t think a universal time would simplify anything.
Now, if I want to schedule a video conference with someone on the east coast US, I need to remember it’s 6 hours earlier there. So I shouldn’t plan at 11 AM cause he’s likely to still be asleep at 5 AM.
With a universal time, I’d need to remember that working hours on the east coast US are from 2 PM to 10 PM (or in summer, from 1 PM to 9 PM) So I shouldn’t plan at 10 AM cause he’s likely to still be asleep at that early hour.
Also, the brief glimpse of sunlight I get cycling to work just after daylight saving time kicks in is one of the few things that keeps me sane in winter.
Mano, @ 31:
This is just a special case of the general problem of trying to communicate across time zones… (Calling my mother in Tasmania from here in Scotland, for example.)
But if you’re not trying to communicate across time zones, why do you even care? What problem are you actually trying to solve here?
As someone who in a previous life (i.e., before I retired) had to deal with times all over the world (and converting between time zones), I found time zones as such not that hard to deal with. I just remember that Europe is GMT+1, Tokyo is GMT+9, New Zealand is GMT+12, Bangalore is GMT + 5:30.
At least, when they’re not on DST.
The different DST rules used to drive me crazy, though. Different countries (or parts thereof) switch on different dates, plus those dates get changed every now and then, sometimes every year. E.g., last I heard Brazil doesn’t announce when they go on and off DST until a few weeks (or less) before the DST switch. A number of nations in the Middle East do time shifts for Ramadam. And the USA changed its rules not all that long ago — I still have computers that use the old rules. DST rules make programming date-time calculations a nightmare.
It was a pain having to keep track of which of the three possible time offsets I had to use on any particular date. And date-times in the past. (Quick: if an event happened in São Paolo at 13:47 April 9, 1990, what date-time was that in Aukland?)
For all the complaints about dealing with time zones, it’s a whole lot better than what came before — when each town would have its own time.
Thank you, Sandford Fleming. (There’s a plaque here in Toronto the proclaims ‘The Birthplace of Standard Time’, because Fleming was the railway engineer who pushed the idea through. Granted, what people eventually settled on was a bit of a compromise between Fleming’s A-Y time zone ideas and something that people would accept.)
Regarding programming: yeah, ‘find a library that already handles it’ is the best advice. I’ve still had to do things for calculating timeouts where I took the current time in UTC, adjusted it to local time, moved the day forward one if the hour was later than a certain value, removed the DST flag so it would be recalculated based on the current date and location, got the library to ‘normalize’ that time, and then changed that back to UTC again in order to calculate ‘how long do I have to wait until the next 7am’. That’s WITH the library doing the most complicated parts like keeping the database of when the DST change happens.
billseymour @25:
By ‘no concept of a point in time’ I presume you’re referring to the fact that in Special Relativity, the concept of simultaneity doesn’t exist: two events happening at different points in space cannot be said to be happening ‘at the same time’ in a global sense, because their relationship in time can be different depending on the observer. (So can their relationship in space; the only constant is a ‘duration’ that combines both time and space and is invariant under relativistic transformations. Time and space can each still vary by themselves.)
Lassi Hippeläinen @37:
So do astronomers, to this day as much as possible. Which makes sense, considering that observations traditionally happen overnight.
Mano
For the benefit of your readers I am from Sri Lanka so I look at these things from a distance.
An election- related question:How does the 3-hour time difference in the US affect the elections and the counting /releasing of the results.
By the way does Hawaii also follow California time?
I believe there were instances in the past where the New York results were out while California was still voting; correct me if I am wrong. But I think this situation should not be permitted.
Amal
Amal @#43,
In the US, each state gets to set its election rules, including how the elections are run, the times that the polls are open, when and how the counting is done and results released. So it will be the case that since Florida and Georgia polls close at 7:00pm Eastern time (which is 4:00pm in California), they can release results after that, even though polls in California only close at 8:00pm local time.
This happens every election. It is possible for the federal government to pass a law that governs the entire nation but you can be sure that it will face many constitutional challenges as to whether such a law violates states’ rights.
Hawaii is two hours earlier than California so the problem for them is even more acute.