Comment on Handy temperature conversion scale.

• hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Counting days suck ass. Quick, how many days during next 3 months? How many weeks is 95 days? How many weeks is 666 hours?

  Our time and date is pretty much locked in, but it does have some limitations

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  • merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    During the French Revolution they tried to create metric time units, but it didn’t stick.

    The one thing I think is possible within our lifetimes is getting rid of time zones. Instead of a business being open from 9:00 EDT to 17:00 EDT it could just be 13:00 UTC to 21:00 UTC. Then it’s much easier to schedule things with people in other parts of the world. China is already kind-of doing that, the entire country is on China Standard Time, even though it’s a huge country. That means that the sun is directly overhead at approx 3PM CST in the far west, and at the equinox the sun will rise at about 9am and set at about 9pm.

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    • ricecake@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I mean, you can do that today. Just post your hours and schedule your meetings in UTC.

      Tineszones exist because we have two uses for time: the linear progression of the universe, and “where is the sun and what am I doing in the day”.
      To communicate across wide stretches of the earth, you need a way to know where the sun is wherever the person you’re talking to is so you don’t call them in the middle of the night when they’re asleep.
      We’ll always have something that lets us lookup "is the man in Madrid likely asleep if I’m eating lunch?”.
      Tineszones work well for this because I can see that Madrid is gmt+1 and I’m gmt-5, so if I’m eating lunch they’re probably not in bed, because it’s 1800 there.

      As long as humans care about where the sun is in the sky for how we order our days we’ll need timezones, even if we reinvent them and give them a new name.

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      • merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Tineszones exist because we have two uses for time

        Not really. Time zones exist for 1 reason: it was too difficult for each town to have its own time, especially when it came to train schedules. So, they were organized into zones so that 6pm in Baltimore and 6pm in Philadelphia were the same. But, people were still used to having 12 pm being the time when the sun was at its peak, so NYC was put in a different zone from Los Angeles.

        To communicate across wide stretches of the earth, you need a way to know where the sun is wherever the person you’re talking to is

        You normally don’t need to know where the sun is, you need to know if it is normal business hours. Or, if it’s a friend, what their schedule is like and if this is a convenient time for them. You can search for the time in that other place and guess that maybe their business hours are 9 AM to 5 PM, but that isn’t always true across companies and especially across cultures. What you really need to know is something like “what are Dimitri’s business hours” which is easier if everyone uses UTC. If you ask “What are Dimitri’s business hours” and you get the answer 8h - 16h EET, now you need to figure out what “EET” means. But, if you get 6h - 14h UTC and you’re also using UTC, there’s no conversion needed.

        is the man in Madrid likely asleep if I’m eating lunch?

        If that’s what you need to know, what you really need are the current UTC offsets used to describe time zones. Just store those as “sun offsets” relative to cities and nuke the time zone aspect.

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