Time zone news
time.is
time.is
While we're, talking about changing time monitoring systems, can't we have 13 months with 28 days each? (and an extra day every 4 years added on to december?) :(
Simple things, but that would allow us to follow the lunar cycle.
As a parent: Neither do small children.
Having grown up in Indiana farm country, I'm of the opinion that "DST because farmers" has always been a myth. One gets up with the sun no matter the time. You quit work when it's dark.
Oh, wait, that's not true, either. With the advent of electric lighting on vehicles about, oh, 100 years ago, lack of sun no longer need keep one from the fields. I recall many a late night that the farmer that owned the field next to us was out either tilling or harvesting, lights ablazin' on the front of the tractor or combine.
So we've eliminated the farmer myth, why do we have DST? Few like it, do I...follow the money?
However, we've moved away from the need (mostly) for the potential energy savings, though perhaps for the wrong reasons (we work in offices and factories with little natural light). The remaining reason to keep it is to allow people access to daylight after their normal work hours. But this can be accomplished by shifting schedules. Move the standard start of work from 7 to 6:30, split the difference. And if that seems intractable, shift our time zones by 30 minutes and be done with it.
One likely possibility is the "but that is the way it has always been done" response (http://www.jeffbridges.com/because.html).
http://qntm.org/abolish ("So you want to abolish time zones")
http://qntm.org/calendar ("You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform")
qntm's got you comprehensively covered here.
The counter to that is -- well, let's always stick with daylight savings time then. That has problems of its own. For example, sunset is a little after 4:00 PM in Boston in late December. If we stuck with daylight savings time, it'd be a little after 3:00. That would pose risks for school children walking home, etc.
Yes, I realize that people in Fairbanks Alaska have it much worse and daylight savings doesn't fix the problem for them, but there are a lot of people who live in the northern parts of the lower 48 that benefit from the time shift.
This seems backwards. Sunset would be after 5 if they kept daylight savings.
I used to live in Boston, and I despised how early the sun would set. It made getting off of work demoralizing. I always liked the idea of just switching to Atlantic time. Whatever the case may be, I strongly value daylight later in the day rather than in the morning.
As it is sunrise is after 7 in the winter (it'd be after 8). In New York it would be even later since they're further west.
Daylight Savings Time can’t fix that in most places either.
Where I live, right now (today), sun rises around 8am, and sets around 4pm.
Kids will go to school around 7:20, and come back home around 15h.
In mid december, it’s even worse – most people never see the sun during that time.
It's really primarily useful when you have enough light for long summer evenings and winter days that are short but are still long enough that it makes sense to fine-tune sunrise and sunset relative to normal work and school times.
The solution to this would be for Atlanta to be on Central time (which it actually was, historically) but that won't happen - time zone boundaries generally shift west over time, and this one overshot the mark.
This is backwards. Sunset would be later, at about 5:15PM (the problem would be late sunrise in the morning). For instance, sunset on October 31 in Boston this year will be 5:40PM EDT, but on November 1 it will be 4:39 EST.
You did, however, demonstrate another fantastic reason to rid ourselves of changing our clocks: mass confusion twice a year :)
This is a mess that can only be solved by isolating 'meeting' and 'appointment' times from local time. For local time you might specify X on date Y, but the software should, at the time of input, convert that to an actual hard time (in UTC).
Daylight savings exist for saving power (and were introduced in the war to do just this), providing more daylight hours for school children, and longer days for agriculture (now historic). There is debate about whether any of those reasons are actually valid.
Ah yes, but they didn't always.
Unfortunately that would probably still be as a 'timezone', and if we're doing that it may as well just be UTC since every timezone library I've every used already has that and best of all is only off by a few seconds at most without updates. (Close enough for applications that care about timezones instead of leap seconds.)
From Wikipedia: George Washington (February 22, 1732 [O.S. February 11, 1731] – December 14, 1799)
Notice the year is different. In the British Empire before 1752, March 25th was the first day of the year. March 24, 1751 was the day before March 25, 1752. Then September 2, 1752 was the day before September 14, 1752 The last day of 1752 was December 31, and the calendar has continued how we consider normal ever since.
The British custom of starting the tax year on April 6th survives as a relic of the old calendar (March 25th plus the missing 12 days in 1752).
And the months still wouldn't sync up with the synodic month, because the synodic month doesn't evenly divide the solar year no matter what you do.
What we really need to do is use some rockets to slightly slow down the rotation of the earth so that a day is exactly 1/360th of a year. All kinds of numbers divide evenly into 360 so that should make building a good calendar easy.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
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If you think this problem can be solved by declaring today's version of tzdata immutable and final, then I'm afraid you're not being realistic. Timezones, DST rules, country borders will change and always have.
It doesn't have to be immutable and final, it can simply be versioned then :) cf what I said in my other reply, if you create a new timezone every time you change it, it seems you don't have that problem.
Are you sure the value of UTCunixtime("2050-10-30 17:00:00 Pyongyang") today will be correct in 2050? What if this record was created last year? (hint: the timezone was recently changed).
Remember, the meeting is supposed to happen at 17:00 local time on that day no matter what.
If we got rid of DST and didn't change the rules too often, time zones wouldn't really be that big of a deal.
They 'fixed' it by using a couple bits of the date to note if it was UTC or 'local'. But for a version or two, there was no way around corrupting data. The PM lamented the fact, saying "if only machines all had GPS, then we'd know the right offset to use", further demonstrating the lack of understanding.
Some folks just can't resist thinking in local time, instead of letting the dev handle time zones additionally.
Even the great tzinfo database is weird. Instead of using the names of time zones, it uses a random city. Which means if a time zone does split up in the future, you might end up with an incorrect timezone. (Like if I select Denver, but Denver switches to New Mountain Time, but my city doesn't.)
I think you can treat the name of the city as the name of the timezone. Seems like you'd have the same problem either way. If you used "Mountain Time" and then your city switches to "New Mountain Time" you still have the incorrect timezone.
Instead of cities it could use polygons on the surface of the earth, but that's starting to get complicated at that point.
"I was in favour of space exploration until I realised what it'd mean for date time libraries"
Actually we may remove time zones all together too. So the day time of 3pm will be different everywhere. For calendar months and seasons we already have it like that, in both hemispheres. The only issue is backward incompatibility with legacy movies, books who talk about breakfast at 8am. Similarly, a love song which talks about April/May being a sunny warm time sounds weird in southern hemipshere. Let's get rid of Roman legacy code in our civilization :)
There's a lot that could be improved with how we handle things like Daylight Savings Time today, but eliminating time zones is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
One second can be a big deal.
I'd vote for time being defined in terms of some universally observable phenomenon. Say the rate of cooling of the CMB. Anyone with a super spiffy radio telescope anywhere in the universe could then tell what time it is.
But hey, we muddle through the current chaos, I'm sure we can muddle through any other chaos.
So you want to abolish time zones? Relevant nice write up on the subject
I think that's a bridge too far. We can't even rid the world of QWERTY keyboards. :-)