I dream of a world where everything is UTC, UTF-8, and metric.
There's also the problem that every software using UTC must be updated at least once every six months. That may be a lesser problem these days, but is still somewhat relevant especially in various industries.
I'd probably go with TAI and just convert the dates to the "human readable" format in the UI. Of course, that's not trivial either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time
International Atomic Time (TAI, from the French name Temps Atomique International[1]) is a high-precision atomic coordinate time standard based on the notional passage of proper time on Earth's geoid.[2] It is the basis for Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which is used for civil timekeeping all over the Earth's surface, and for Terrestrial Time, which is used for astronomical calculations. As of 30 June 2015 when the last leap second was added,[3] TAI is exactly 36 seconds ahead of UTC. The 36 seconds results from the initial difference of 10 seconds at the start of 1972, plus 26 leap seconds in UTC since 1972.
Time coordinates on the TAI scales are conventionally specified using traditional means of specifying days, carried over from non-uniform time standards based on the rotation of the Earth. Specifically, both Julian Dates and the Gregorian calendar are used. TAI in this form was synchronised with Universal Time at the beginning of 1958, and the two have drifted apart ever since, due to the changing motion of the Earth.
That way, only the display routine has to care about leap seconds and it won't break anything.
Maybe you were suggesting an improvement to UNIX time, though, in which case I think the grandparent and I would get behind your proposal.
OK, now everyone who cares how much time has passed in terms of the Earth's rotation needs to keep a time separate from everyone else. Astronomers come to mind, for example.
- don't rely on their laptop's system clock, - don't use UTC either because of minor rotational noise/drift and the discontinuity around the leap-second, and - find the whole 24-hour clock thing a little useless, not being seasonally adjusted etc.
I bet they'd prefer TAI to UTC (or even "Google time"), because they've probably got their own timekeeping systems that will probably interact more smoothly (heh) with it.
More to the point, there are approximately zero astronomers on Earth, and approximately seven billion non-astronomers. Even if astronomers do prefer UTC, it's better to make them have their own systems to add or subtract twenty-something seconds from TAI than forcing all of my timekeeping devices to have a database of historical leap-seconds and an internet connection to hear about new ones.
Not to mention the fact that I can't write down what the time will be in UTC in 86400 * 1000 seconds... Absolutely ridiculous.
> If we stayed on Standard Time throughout the year, sunrise here in the Chicago area would be between 4:15 and 4:30 am from the middle of May through the middle of July.
> If, by the way, you think the solution is to stay on DST throughout the year, I can only tell you that we tried that back in the 70s and it didn’t turn out well. Sunrise here in Chicago was after 8:00 am, which put school children out on the street at bus stops before dawn in the dead of winter.
Also dates in numeric order I.e. yyyy/mm/dd you know like all the other numbers we deal with not dd/mm/yyyy or the crazy mm/dd/yy.
Nobody ever says, "Do you have plans for the upcoming two days which, respectively, constitute the end of this week and the start of the next one?"
So, Americans and Brits are inconsistent. They have "the weekend" which is a block of two days when salaried people with regular working hours don't work; and they have Sunday as not the week end, but rather the beginning; or the "front end" of the next week. Which means that the two days cannot be the weekend; they are two different ends of two different weeks.
> that's changing (by convention)
It's changing because people have to confront the above reasoning and realize that a week beginning in the middle of something that they have been calling "the weekend" for decades is silly.
Since the working week (and the school week) here starts on Monday regardless of whether Sunday or Monday is regarded as the first day of the week, it seems to have always been a distinction without a difference to me.
A little disappointed, too, because every single time I have a great idea like this, I find out that somebody else had it before me. But still.
You'd think people would have learnt from Y2K but somehow we still see 2-digit years which make dates like 03/04/05 impossible to even guess at. It's slightly better since 2012 where a 2-digit year can't also be a month, but we'll have to wait till 2032 for 2-digit years to unambiguously mean year.
This is an area where I believe localization makes things worse, not better. If every website showed dates with the year first, people would easily understand, regardless of whatever silly local convention they have. As it is, whenever I see a ##/##/## date, I have to think about what the website might be trying to do (do they know what country I'm from? What country I'm in now? Are they using their own local convention?) and what possible dates it might mean. "I think that happened around August, so 08/10/14 is probably not the 8th of October." Localized dates just make no sense at all on the internet.
The 12:00 clock would be more respectable if it went from 0:00 (midnight/a.m.) to 11:59 a.m. then to 0:00 (noon/p.m.) and to 11:59 p.m. and never showed 12:00. (Let alone continuously flash such a thing as a demand that the time be set.)
It feels weird because you think people will think it's weird. You're probably right.
Personally I use a 24-hour representation and convert it to 12 when communicating with others.
11:59AM -> 12:00PM, 11:59PM -> 12:00AM caused me mental discomfort for a long time. A 24-hour clock made a lot more sense, but it doesn't seem like most other people have a problem with 12.
They'd rather you used "normal" time. If you want to fight that battle go for it. I believe you're right.
Next: Date format!
6:00pm
6:00PM
6:00 PM
6:00 P.M.
6PM
or just 6:00Maybe digital clocks/watches have influenced this preference, but I still think it is a good idea, because it is unambiguous.
I wonder if anyone collects a list of famous standards that have been superseded by compatible, better standards. Another example would be that many people know of ISO 639 language codes, but BCP 47 is a clearer, more relevant standard.
If you really want to know, ask Wikipedia. There are some lists there that make me think somebody has a major case of OCD. There is even a List of Lists on Wikipedia, so ... wait, there is even a List of lists of lists...
Hundred years of machines that use imperial, speedometers, odometers, books, tools, software, air conditioning, heating, manufacturing, construction, plumbing, including regulatory codes for each of those.
Not saying its impossible and it's definitely my knee jerk reaction, but at this point I cant imagine it being feasible.
All your major trade partners use the metric system: EU, China, India, Australia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgtsSM7vN0M
It starts a bit slow but stick with it. I'm currently rewatching it after several years so I'm not sure there is a calculation. I think there is. A lot of the production in the US already is metric so it shouldn't be that expensive.
Remember that everybody else also had to change their (many) measuring systems over to metric. It went remarkably well.
Road signs can be prepared in advance and covered. The covers can be removed quickly. Another option is to put stickers on the road signs on Metric Sunday.
You do realize there is more to switching to metric than just updating the road signs, right?
Think of all the military and space technology that uses inches.
Apart from some things like miles and gallons which would require a massive synchronised change that is.
I'd also like it if we drove on the RHS here as well so we can get decent import vehicles.
It's less the synchronisation and more the expense of replacing all road signs throughout the kingdom, making it a political non-priority.
So how much is that 1000 mile journey going to cost?
1000/44.94.4561.119= where's my calculator?
The separation is mostly distinct, at least to me. We mostly use imperial and in science class and such we use mostly metric.
The worst of both world I've seen was England.
They're mostly metric until you drive their car and then they decide to use mile per hour. That's pretty random...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_speed_limits_in_the_Unite...
While the article doesn't flat out say it but if you stare at the uk speed sign image and the comment below the image you will see they are in fact in MPH.
edit:
found an article about it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_King...
If you really want to, you can do it. And it's not as painful as presented especially since many countries have done it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_system). And the longer you wait the more painful it becomes.
SI units are already in wide use in the US, for instance for electricity (Amperes, Watts, Volts). For the most part, international trade has pushed US industries to adopt metric anyway: metric fasteners are used all over, in cars for instance. Also, countries that have switched still use inch-pattern stuff; in Canada we still use NPT threads and imperial size pipes with no ill effects; even in Europe they still use some imperial-threaded stuff.
And, in any case, most people have a mobile phone now which can quickly do unit conversions. I really think it actually is feasible, if you could get the public behind it (good luck).
> Would it be a huge deal to round that to 40mm by 90mm?
It actually would be a big deal to round things like that I think. Whole designs would need to be updated to take into account the new dimensions of things.
Imagine all of the parts in a car engine. Everything fits together perfectly. Engine mounts line up in the right places. It all has to be very precise.
Now imagine you take all those parts and round them off a bit. Nothing much, just a mm here and there. If you try to put the engine together with these parts, it's not going to work at all.
Also consider that you can't just simply convert the units. Take a 5/16" socket wrench for example. Nobody makes a 7.9375mm socket wrench.
Repair shops can maintain tools for both systems (they already have to). For converting, I mean the dimensions of a component, not tools and fasteners that need to work with tools. Those would likely take a "metric only going forward" approach.
A lot of them are already metric.
The dimensions in use are something that people are very used to working with and they know how to do the necessary mental arithmetic to work with them.
As for "a few generations", yes, certainly. We have only to look to the mishmash of unit use in the UK.
But what's wrong with taking a few generations to get there?
Turning it around, we got rid of a lot of specialized units - hogshead, chain, furlong, peck, etc. (If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, how many many more are needed to make a bushel?) So it's clearly possible.
Also, metric countries still use non-metric terms for some cases, eg, "inches in a screen", the market price of a "barrel" of oil, and food energy in "[food] calories". This tells me that the transition can occur piecemeal.
This is an example of American influence. Decade ago it was in centimetres.
For example, in this 2004 Siemens commercial for Russia CX65's screen size is 13 square centimetres:
What kind of argument is this? "It would really hurt to amputate my leg, so let's just wait and let the gangrene go further for now."
"it's definitely my knee jerk reaction"
Where metric units are important, e.g. science and engineering, they are already used.
2. it's got the advantage that you're using the same measurements as all your trade partners so people don't need two production lines anymore
3. it's got the advantage that people going into science and engineering don't need to build a whole new set of unit references because they've got the one which already works
4. the "huge expense" is pretty much made out of whole cloth for the purpose of saying you can't switch, the UK's metrication cost basically nothing except for road sign replacements which is why those are still imperial
We already do that.
> 2. it's got the advantage that you're using the same measurements as all your trade partners so people don't need two production lines anymore
Two production lines? For what?
> 3. it's got the advantage that people going into science and engineering don't need to build a whole new set of unit references because they've got the one which already works
Yup, failure to use the metric system in everyday life is why the US has the worst scientists and produces the least scientific output. Oh, wait.
> 4. the "huge expense" is pretty much made out of whole cloth for the purpose of saying you can't switch, the UK's metrication cost basically nothing except for road sign replacements which is why those are still imperial
I agree with this one. It probably wouldn't be terribly expensive to implement, though I would question the priorities of anyone who is really hung up about it (like the grandparent post who started this whole discussion).
Failure to use the metric system everywhere cost NASA a $125 million Mars orbiter just 16 years ago, and yet here you are, insisting that this is not a problem, and throwing in a non sequitur to justify the position.
No, bureaucratic failure to address the concerns of people who spotted the error well in advance of the launch cost NASA $125M. The investigation report makes that clear, especially when it goes on to make recommendations for avoiding future mishap; nobody recommended that the engineers needed to brush up on their units.
And yet here you are, insisting that the issue was that we didn't switch over to the metric system, and throwing in some unsupported claims to justify the position.
Do you really? Whenever I hear an American telling the temperature of the weather, I have no idea what they mean. I have to guess from the context if it's hot or cold, and even what units they're using because they rarely mention the "Fahrenheit" part.
Conversely, how many Americans would recognize that "35 degrees" is blisteringly hot while "15 degrees" means you'll need a jacket and "40 degrees" could kill you if you don't find shelter quickly?
Use SI and ISO standards for everything.
ISO A4 paper, ISO time (2015-08-14 23:52 UTC+2), Metric, etc
I would also vote for any candidate that would ban anything but powers of 2 in the definition of computer storage.
My proposal is basically the engineering estimate of foot. I would probably name it something different if I were Emperor / Very Powerful Politician. Its small enough to derive the mass and volume units directly.
So far, I have not been very successful, though. :(
Each definition gives you something pretty close to what we now define as a meter, but the precision to which they could be measured at the time differed. The length of a "meter" was more or less the same distance in everybody's mind then as now, but if a 10000 scientists would sit down and perform experiments to actually calculate the exact length in 1700 versus, the mean of the values they reported would be about the same as it is today, but the statistical uncertainty would be much much much higher.
The redefining of the meter has typically occurred when some new process was invented that was more precise than the the previous method, for instance today measuring a laser in a vacuum is something like 1/3 the uncertainty than the old method using an interferometer. So the uncertainty is smaller, but crucially the mean value is still basically the same or very close. That's the reason for the weird 1/299792458 seconds, it's because we can define seconds very very precisely (from atomic clocks) and that's the amount of time it takes light in a vacuum to travel the same distance as the previous most precise known value for the length of a meter.
If it wasn't done this way, every time we invented a more precise method to measure distance and want to improve the precision of the meter it'd be like defining a whole new unit. Defining a foot as the distance light travels in a nanosecond is fine now, but if we discover an even more precise way to measure distance than a laser in a vacuum we'd end up in the same position, where a "foot" would be some strange fraction of a reference value that makes it work out to agree with the old most precise known value.
This sort of stupidly accurate measurement doesn't matter anymore on the day-to-day life scale as the length of a meter is known to within ~(10^-9)%, which is about a ten picometers. However, that means then that if you're fabricating silicon at the nanometer scale, the actual exact length of a nanometer is only known to within about 1% of a nanometer (if I did my math right, might be off by a factor of 10). That's much more significant.
The original definition of the meter was one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole. Sure, we got more precise, but its still arbitrary.
The only interesting thing about metric is the relation of length, volume, mass. But, a liter is not a cubic meter, nope - its a cubic decimetre, another arbitrary decision.
Take a bottle of water, most commonly the sold sizes are 0.5 (about 16oz) and 1 liter bottles; a liter is also pretty close to a quart.
As another example, it is common to find soda pop sold in bottles of 1, 2, and 3 liters (depending on the brand).
A certain amount of arbitrariness is inevitable at human scale.
This is contrasted with something like Imperial units, where every division of e.g. distance is supposed to be roughly based on some physical object. That's why you end up with 12 in/ft, 5280 ft/mi etc. Or alternatively you end up with metric-imperial hybrid units like the kilopound.
Not to mention, what units are convenient vary depending on what you do. For instance one of the SI alternative units for energy is the electron volt (eV), the work done to move an electron through a 1 volt potential. This is a tiny amount of energy on human scale- a common analogy is that 1 MeV (10^6 eV) is enough energy to make a single grain of sand twitch a little bit. But, if you're a nuclear physicist (or maybe a chemist) then eV are typically much more convenient than say Joules.
You don't divide the uncertainty when you scale it because the error is in the actual definition of distance itself. The uncertainty in for example 1 meter is the same as the uncertainty in 1 nanometer (=10^-11 meters), which is a correspondingly much larger fraction. It's kind of weird and perhaps counter-intuitive, but that's how it works.
Phrased differently, the idea of a meter is exact and it's our ability to measure distance that is uncertain. The error isn't in saying "a meter is some specific fraction of the distance light travels in a second", it's in determining what physical distance in the world is represented by our definition of the meter.
So, the distances were talking about are actually at the level where quantum mechanics and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle matters.
Assuming QM's predictions are valid, we will never ever be able to to improve our measurement beyond the point where errors from the uncertainty principle dominate. Our current definition of the meter is pretty close to this limit, so personally I don't expect the meter is going to be redefined any time soon because we're already near the sort of scales where the idea of "distance" starts to get kind of fuzzy.
I have an SD card with 16.0 GB of space available, and I'm recording video at 9.00 Mbit/s. How many hours of footage? Well, (16.0e3 MB) * (8 bit/B) / (9.00 Mbit/s) = 1.42e4 s, or 3.95 hours.
Now do the computation with binary units.
I have an SD card with 14.9 GiB of space available, and I'm recording video at 9.00 Mbit/s. How many hours of footage? Well, (14.9 GiB) * (1e-6 * 1024^3 MB / GiB) * (8 bit/B) / (9.00 Mbit/s) = ...
Why make people do extra math? Shouldn't we choose units that make things easier to calculate, not harder?
Why make people do extra math? Shouldn't we choose units that make things easier to calculate, not harder?
Sector sizes are different between drives anyway. So using sector as a label is just bad practice.
And... how does it make the math worse? My hard drive partition has a size of 250140434432 bytes (actual value)... how much is that in GB? Easy, 250.1 GB. For some reason, I was able to do that calculation without the aid of a computer or a calculator.
Humans don't count sectors. We like to shift decimal points around. Computers are good at calculation, so we give them the task of multiplying by 512 for us, and displaying measurements in units suitable for human society.
Yeah, 512 bytes or, now, 4096 bytes - neither is a power of 10
The math is worse because the computer (address space) and hard drive are actually base 2 and vendors are selling in base 10.
This worship of base 10 in every aspect of our lives, even when it doesn't make sense and cheats us out of money, is sad. Computers are base 2, memory is base 2, and storage should be base 2 or else its just a batch of lies. I guess I should be glad the humanity didn't have 11 fingers.
The computer is showing you a number, calculating using base 2 will not be any stress on a human since it doesn't show every byte anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanke-Henry_Permanent_Calendar
My pick of the numerous proposals. Mostly because I can understand it.
You don’t get paid for January 31st, March 31st, May 31st, July 31st, August 31st, October 31st or December 31st either. (Actually, you get paid for 2 of them. Still leaves 5 days a year without pay, 6 days in leap years).
So, why should you get more? Just because you feel like you deserve it?
I have expenses during that week. I happen to earn enough to be able to save a bit during the rest of the year, so it won't be a problem for me, but not everyone has that luxury. There is no reason to make life harder for hard-working poor people. Also, entrepreneurs/employers are earning money that week, so it won't be a problem for them to pay.
If no, then you do not get paid for these days directly, and you won’t get paid for the leap week.
If yes, well, then you’d also get paid for that leap week.
You are not addressing my real argument, which maybe originally I did not articulate in a way that you understood. Which is that in the proposed calendar, unless special arrangements are made, at some point people will have to wait 37 days for their salary and will only get ~30 days' salary at that moment. That is the thing that's currently not much of a problem. Whether that gets resolved by reducing the salary over the normal months by a small percentage and introducing an extra payment for that week, or by spreading out the payments over a 30/31-day schedule that ignores the new official months (which I think would be confusing and complicated), or by some other method, I'm fine with that. I did not say I wanted extra money, but it needs to be spread out evenly over the year.
The failure to adopt the IFC is the proof that human beings will forever be shackled to their ancestral beliefs.
We can actually thank existing social patterns including religions for locking us in to a '7 day week' which is what many calendar systems try to promote.
With (roughly) every 4 years also containing an extra day of correction (the solar orbital period is not quite 365.25 days) the concept of 'leap days' is necessary anyway.
360: 2 2 2 3 3 5 << Oooh shiny
361: 19 19 << Annoying
362: 2 181 << Annoying
363: 3 11 11 << Less Annoying, but weeks are too long
364: 2 2 7 13 << Might be workable, there's a 7 in here.
365: 5 73
360 is 5 away from the closest integer orbital period of earth. Therefore 5 'extra days' (likely holidays) would need to be added. 5 is also a factor. It would either make sense to have an extra 5 day period as one long holiday set, or an extra holiday spread out through the year 5 times, though arguments for otherwise could be made.
7 and 360 get along poorly though. We'd probably also want to keep '12 months' for sanity/existing contractual structures (esp since we can't be in units of 10), and having 'months' close to current months seems to be an advantage.
Taking 2 * 2 * 3 out of the factor set, we're left with 2 * 3 * 5 for each month.
Stepping aside for a moment, let's examine a 'perfect' 28 day month in the IFC/current calendars. 2/7ths (0.285714) of the time is 'weekend' time.
I'd propose a 10 day 'week' in the new time, I also think 2 days in a row off of work is advantageous, and I think that this time should be time 'normal workers' can expect to share off. I think that this number might actually grow over time as we increasingly approach a more Utopian society based around automation and abundance.
The 10 day 'week' would begin with the following structure.
* 2 days of work
* 4 day period of 3/4th work (on each of these days about 1/4th of workers would have an 'erands' day)
* 2 days of work
* 2 days off work - weekend
The extra 5 holiday days could either be divided somehow over the year, or used up all at once as a burst half-week holiday. The necessary leap year correction would be added to one of those periods as a holiday as well.
Since this is another example of a 'standards proposal', someone must have thought of this before...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar
This link seems to do a decent job of discussing some of the other aspects of converting to a 10 day calendar (many of which also exist for the IFC) http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-it-time-to-over...