Comment on Handy temperature conversion scale.
merc@sh.itjust.works 8 months agoDuring 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.
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.
merc@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
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.
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.
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.
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
See, at the end? What you’re describing is timezones with a different name, and more fine grained so we have more of them. This makes it harder.
Business hours are correlated to where the sun is, which is why I used the sun as a stand in for “how people progress through their day as mediated by our biological day night cycles”.
People communicate with people in parts of the planet where everyone would say it’s a different time because the sun is in a different part of the sky.
Lumping places together by rough sun position is better than every town keeping their own time.
Jumping through hoops to avoid saying that our sense of time is linked to the location of the sun in the sky is just making things more complex than it needs to be.
Again, we already have UTC. People use it where it makes sense.
merc@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
No, timezones are intended for people who live in them to be in a time that’s roughly coordinated with other people living in the same area. I’m saying that’s unnecessary. There’s no reason that 12:00PM should be close to the time that the sun is at its peak. That already isn’t true for people in the west of China. For them it’s normal to think that 3PM is when the sun is at its peak. What I’m suggesting is that that be applied worldwide.
If, for some reason, you want to know where the sun is relative to someone else on the planet, there are plenty of ways of doing that. I suggested some. That doesn’t mean that you need time zones.
There’s a correlation, sure. But that isn’t enough information to know if a business is open, especially if it’s a business in another country which has different cultural ideas about when things should be open. Business hours are no reason to stick with clunky time zones.
No, they say that because it’s what they’re used to. If they were used to using UTC they’d say it’s the same time. They already do that for some things, because time is understood to be related to causality. As in, “Did that happen before or after the bridge collapsed?” People in different time zones will agree that in that sense, time is the same for everyone, even if they’re using a different time zone for historical reasons.
And don’t use it where it would also make sense for historic reasons. People also use US customary units not because “they make sense”, but because of historic reasons.