Get rid of political time-zones and DST and simply define 6:00am to be sunrise world wide. Each day starts at 6am and counts from there.
(If you are really brave let the length of the hour vary by latitude so that sunset is always at 6pm as well. In the winter up north the night hours are simply longer than the daylight hours. But this is too enlightened I think.)
We have the tech to do this. The first one is very practical. What time is it? How many hours since sunrise in this location +6?
@futurebird you might find this interesting
For an agrarian society, that would make sense.
For an internationally-connected, business-based society? Not in the slightest.
@andreabroad @futurebird
Yes, you'd have to have schools and work start at different times every week over the year. And you'd run completely different clocks at different latitudes of the same country.
Time zones are fine.
@futurebird "Good evening from the North Pole - it's 2178:36 PM, and you are listening to the Chill Vibes Radio, broadcasting live from the top of the world..."
EDIT: Ooo, and on ISS, with sunrise every 90 minutes, it's even better :D
@futurebird Hmm, there'd only be one minute difference between my home and my work so that's not so bad, bus timetables can probably fudge it, but Zoom calls with other cities would be a fun scheduling challenge if it's like 9:50 in Dunedin, 10:00 in Christchurch, 10:10 in Wellington, and 10:20 in Auckland. (Examples guesstiproximated but long country is long.)
I'm in favour of Universal Earth Time so eg UK noon could be at 12:00, work 9-17, while NZ noon is at 24:00 and work 21-5.
Uh oh, you said the *real* sensible proposal at the end there. If we were used to that, changing back to time zones would sound as ridiculous as changing back to variable-length hours.
Of course we have the tech to do this. The Bronze Age had the tech to do this. We know because they did this (the version with variable hour lengths).
@futurebird Better: abandon timezones as well. Set midnight to be sidereal midnight on 180° longitude, so in London, the point of highest sun is 00:00, and simply set e.g. the work day to what works best for your country. (So the work day in New York might run from 14.00 to 22.00, with noon at 17.00).
Then there'd be no need to worry about "are you 5 hours ahead or behind us?" -- your 18.00 meeting is the same time as my 18.00 meeting, but the sun's in a different position.
@futurebird The necessary tech? Sundials?
We'd still need railway time, of course; that got learned the hard way.
@futurebird this, but also keep UTC around for logistics: flight schedules or intercity calls: UTC; local business hours or your school/workday: local time.
You can even use different notations/words: "half past eight o'clock" or 8:30am for the local time at UTC-5:00, "thirteen-hundred thirty" or 13:30 for UTC time
I don't want the variable length hour, though, because (while it won't hit so hard in the education sector with the typically reduced summer workload, or agriculture that's already working longer summer hours), I don't think most folks would trade longer summer work hours for more winter time off now that we have electric lights.
Even fixing to noon makes the offset vary by date, although not by latitude. (Between the invention of mechanical clocks and the invention of time zones, the convention was to fix to the *average* noon, which depends only on longitude.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_time
I'd be okay with this, but I expect that we'd get real time zones -- 24 of them following lines of longitude -- before we'd really get "earth time." People who won't accept 24 time zones are probably even less likely to accept a single time zone. But once we're all on the same time plus or minus an integer number of hours, we'd halfway to "earth time" already, and it might be easier to get people to accept that final change.
@gleick @futurebird *taps watch impatiently*
*watch is displaying Swatch Internet Time*
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
(aka those who do not remember French Revolutionary Time are doomed to repeat it)
@phooky @gleick @futurebird
I wrote an iOS app a while back, MultiClock, that is available for free on the App Store. No ads, collects no data.
It displays the current time in conventional form and in metric (a count of 100-microday units elapsed), as well as the solar time at your location (noon when the Sun is at its highest point) in ha:mm and metric. Also sunrise and sunset.
I got kind of clock-obsessed for a while. Was a fun project.
What about ignoring the annoying dayball and defining a chronotype-based day length? I revert to a 25-26 hour long day. Waking up is always hard unless I wake up later than yesterday.
@futurebird We already have the code to handle the second one:
JS version:
https://github.com/hebcal/hebcal-es6/blob/main/src/zmanim.ts#L226
Golang version:
https://github.com/hebcal/hebcal-go/blob/main/zmanim/zmanim.go#L141
References:
https://hebcal.github.io/references.html
(Originally written in Emacs Lisp in the 80s (possibly, tho maybe this was just dates and zmanim came later), because of COURSE it would have been initially written by a Emacs users who eLSE)
(Heavily used by people in every Jewish community I've been part of as https://www.hebcal.com .)
(There's also https://www.myzmanim.com , so at least two implementation out there -- tho that one's proprietary.)
@futurebird A subtle detail you missed that's needed for both systems, though -- you need both latitude AND elevation.
Also we don't have any implemented (or possibly: any particularly clean halachic) solution for when you get to high enough latitude. The math sorta falls apart there:
https://www.hebcal.com/shabbat?geo=geoname&geonameid=2729907&zip=
https://www.myzmanim.com/day.aspx?askdefault=1&vars=86672323&q=murmansk
@futurebird Also, the people who are mentioning Trains! as an objection should watch Unrueh (2022).
It won't argue against them or change their opinion in any way, it's just directly tangentially relevant to specifically the topic of community timekeepings and trains,
and is a good movie.
@futurebird my version defined 7am as sunrise.
@futurebird Edo period Japanese clocks had variable hours. There was always the same number of daytime and nighttime hours. Its just the length of the hours changed with the seasons.
And somehow they managed to build mechanical clocks that could do that adjustment which is also impressive
@futurebird (slightly more) serious suggestion: replace the current timezones (UTC -12 to +12) with international dateline based timezones (IDL +0 to +24)
(#include They have played us for fools, stop doing negative timezones meme template)
@futurebird or just have one time zone for the entire world. #EarthTime
It would be much easier to communicate and coordinate meetings, events, etc. It would be 2PM / 1400 everywhere
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