I would be in favor of doing away with DST and also eschewing AM/PM in favor of a 24-hour clock. I'm surprised this article didn't mention that.
Or just name the zones based on the offset. So NY would be -5. We could for humans write time with the ecoding, similar to ISO-8601, but it would just be 15:30-5 for 3:30pm EST.
While we're at it. Can we make all the months standard lengths too? 30 day months, with 1 New Year's Day (for a fun party) and every four years a bonus New Year's Day! For an especially big party :)
Edit: as stated below I screwed up my (basic) math. 13 months 28 days is better. What should we call the 13th month?
28 day months make far more sense, would align nicely with your proposed single New Year's day, and have the added bonus of aligning with our 7-day week system quite nicely. This ends up with 13 months altogether, and hey, it turns out that 28 days is closer to a lunar cycle, so the full moon would end up happening at roughly the same time every month. Not perfectly of course, but with the chaos that is our solar system, I'll take what I can get. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
So when you give someone an inch, you're specifically giving 25.4mm ;)
[1] https://www.nist.gov/pml/weights-and-measures/si-units-lengt...
[2] https://www.nist.gov/sites/default/files/documents/pml/wmd/m...
And yeah. I mean 10 is only divisible by 2 and 5 where 12 is much more flexible in giving us 2, 3, 4, and 6. At least that was my grandfather's argument.
I annoying need to keep Metric and Standard wrenches and such for working on various things. Eventually it won't matter as the US will mostly source parts built over-seas where it will only make sense to adopt metric. And then the Standard system will only be left on road signs and temeratures, oh that's pretty much already happened.
Now that is some good ole American ingenuity :)
My "favorite" is "Well farenheit just makes more sense for humans".
I rely on unit tests for this stuff these days ;)
https://encrypted.google.com/#newwindow=1&q=ethiopia+13+mont...
I was shocked, being a visitor here, when sometime about a month ago, we celebrated new year (after the 13th month), while the rest of the world was in the middle of the Gregorian calendar!
But really, while we are on the topic of reform, is there any particular reason the week should be 7 days? Or that there should be a week at all?
Time keeping is also weird. Base 24 and 60 is so arbitrary. Make it base ten, and you can express date and time easily. Right now is 6.976. The 9 is the hour, the 76 is the minute, etc.
And then if we are talking about radical standards reform, let's do away with base 10 entirely and go to 12. It carries more precision in less space, is much more divisible, and has more patterns in the multiplication tables.
I love thinking about how more optimal the world could be if not for coordination problems and other issues.
Except the week starts with Monday. At least in the civilized world…
According to Wikipedia there are at least three "first day of the week" in use, sorted by (my assumption of) affected population:
Monday: EU and most of other European countries, most of Asia and Oceania
Sunday: Canada, USA, Korea, Japan, Israel, South Africa, most of Latin America
Saturday: Much of the Middle East
Hell, while we are at it we can just rename the days firstday, secondday, etc, and not have to deal with that issue.
We use 12, 60 (and 360deg) because our fingers are divided into 12 sections on the palm side.
You can use your thumb to point to each section on your right hand, counting to 12, while using the number of fingers on your left hand to keep track of how many 12s (up to 5) hence base 60.
You could also split time further into thirds, which would work even better with a base 12 system.
6 minutes is too much time though, if you tried to fill that with ads you'd lose your audience fast.
Dividing into thirds doesn't really work in a decimal system.
The 40-hour workweek isn't an arbitrary quantity, it's an empirically derived quantity. And the process of deriving it literally involved people killing each other. I don't see it changing very soon, except in edge cases.
Why not hexadecimal, to help accelerate the singularity?
I think you're proposing this, 13 months named for scientists, one day outside the year.
When the reality is much less exciting... replacing the old gods with a deified version of Science.
Alternatively, you would rely on the ordinals, dropping the -us ending and replacing it with -ilis as in Sextilis and Quintilis.
Unusber
Mostly cause it's lame though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'Pataphysics#Pataphysical_cale...
Months are hardly necessary, anyway. Wouldn't quarters be better?
Have 4 quarters of 13 * 7-day weeks each. Designate the vernal equinox as day 0 of the calendar, follow it with the 4 91-day quarters, and tack on leap days after the 4th quarter according to the Gregorian calendar rules.
So you end up with dates like the 41st of Spring, or the 82nd of Summer. New Year's Day would be the 0th (nilth) of Spring, and Leap Day the 92nd of Winter.
Months are, more or less, related to the moon periods, just like the year is to earth period. And most of the world has year quarters, called seasons. Seasons are there (in front of our eyes) to stay, regardless of how we'll choose to distribute the days of the year.
From the Simpsons
Undecimber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undecimber
And the other 4 days?
One solar year: 365.24219 x (86400s days).
This has a beneficial side effect of making date handling easier for 8 bit microcontrollers, so when the singularity happens, the superAI will take pity on us because we showed mercy to its ancestors.
I argue it'd avoid mistakes, such as the assumption it's dark at the other clock's 18h because it is here.
It's like that everywhere in Europe. Nobody says 'see you at fifteen'. 24 hour clock is merely for writing things down. I mean it would already be an improvement if the US would catch up with that, just saying that a 24 hour clock isn't said out loud as such. (not disagreeing or anything with you I guess, just adding some information).
Not really? In France it's perfectly normal to say "Rendez-vous à quinze heures" or "Le film commence à vingt-deux heures trente"
Google Translate sometimes seems to know how to do this too.
One of the main midday newscast is called "Le journal de treize heures".
I am not fond of it. It is heavy and in most use cases, doesn't bring more information than 1-12, because the context makes generally obvious to know if we're talking about AM or PM.
(sorry about that ;) )
And, as always, trying to generalize over a whole continent doesn't work out. It's perfectly fine in German or Polish to say "see you at fifteen".
This is why the less rural people over here use exact time.
Not sure why you feel the need to imply people using "half" are somehow impaired (as the attribute "rural" is often used to imply backwardness). The "half" notation is ubiquitous in the south.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uhrzeit#Sprechweise_im_Deutsch...
Sorry but that is not how it works in Portugal.
We usually say 15.00 unless it is clear from context that 3 is 15.00.
For example if I am scheduling to meet for a coffee at 3, it surely isn't 3 AM.
Now if I am talking about meeting for something else at 10, and it isn't clear from context, usually I will be asked if I mean 10 or 22.
Besides AM / PM is something that we have to deal with in English based devices, that is it.
Europe is not one country. In Sweden it's perfectly normal to say that.
Just thought I'd chime in here too.
Whatever you do, don't mention metric time in the US. The 10-hour days and 100-day months that we find so normal drives them insane.
That was just an added bonus for the democratically elected Parliament to accept it, but it wasn't the initial reason.
Decimal time had mostly been pushed by mathematicians (d'Alembert decades before the Revolution, Borda who was the real ), and much later Poincaré, while the most important proponents of the decimal calendar were Romme and Dupuis (very far from being an atheist! though not a fervent Catholic either indeed) and respected scientists such as Lagrange and Monge.
The first and foremost reason was doing away with old arbitrary customs associated with the monarchy and replacing them with standards grounded into more universal, less arbitrary references.
That's the only reason I support it, for my part, and I doubt anyone in France cares now about having weekdays named after Roman gods. Even at the time of the Revolution I believe these names would actually have been somewhat appealing, as classical culture was seen then as a model with which to replace the despised monarchy and religious oppression.
There are 24 hours in the day.
Why are we recycling numbers in our time system?
No really, why?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_analog_dial
I guess 12 hour clocks are an easy trick to make them easier to read and manufacture and so on.
(Former submariner so a somewhat special case ;)
Ever tried to read the clock on a sundial at night?
12/2=6, 12/3=4 work well, (with /4 and /6 being repeats of those)
24 hours doesn't add much on top of those divisions (you get /4 with a repeating /6 I guess)
In Quebec, the 24 hour clock is the norm.
Outside of Quebec, the 12 hour clock is the majority but a significant minority use the 24 hour clock. Everyone understands the 24 hour clock in my experience though.
1745 to me just means what 5:45pm means to you, but I never translate it in my head. In fact, if I'm texting someone older who I think might not naturally use 24-hour time, I have to translate to 12-hour time and it always feels odd to write the am/pm suffix.
And everyone "gets" that all numbers after 12 are late-day.
15 only is odd if someone else is expecting to hear 3p
I doubt many of the people on HN for instance, work those set hours in this day and age. Nowadays it is purely a convenience factor to keep the worker drones in the same hive so they can gather for the next interminable meeting.
With the rise of remote working, and other forms of communication tools, no one has to be constrained by those arbitrary work hours any more. I personally do my best work late at night and well into the early hours, and have indeed had remote meetings with overseas team members at 10 or 11 pm my time because it actually suits me better than 3pm my time, which is when I usually try and sleep off my post lunch lethargy. (Note: I see the irony in 'post lunch' - The concept of 3 set meals a day is also another byproduct of the agricultural/industrial age that is not really as relevant in modern society where families tend not to dine together at a set time any longer).
Japan adopted the 9-5. But Japan is on solar time, and thus the sun comes up at 4 AM during the summer in Tokyo. Japan also doesn't do DST. So 9-5 is actually 11-7 in "equivalent sunlight"
The idea of time zones is to keep people in sync, but most of the world is not even on a "12PM=Solar Midday" schedule! So when the sun comes up at 4, if feels weird, because it doesn't match what you see elsewhere on the same longitude.
If I understood correctly, Akashi is the "standard" (as in, fixed from Greenwich) reference in Japan, some 270 miles west of Tokyo, that means that the Sun is at the highest point just some minutes before 12 in Tokyo, which is not significantly different from what happens in London when the DST is not active? England sees the highest Sun at around 1 pm when the DST is active, but that's only one hour, give or take the minutes of seasonal variations from the real solar time, and that really only when DST is active, and Japan, as you say, doesn't do DST, and has the similar seasonal variations.
Therefore I don't understand your "11-7" equivalence.
http://blog.poormansmath.net/images/SolarTimeVsStandardTimeV... <-- this map shows the difference between clock time and solar time. Western Europe and much of the US is 2 hours behind solar time compared to Tokyo.
So Tokyo is set to a 9-5, but if they want to follow the same strategy of getting to work first thing in the morning, then they should be doing 7-3, or even a bit earlier due to DST non-observance.
Main point is that 9 AM means vastly different things, even counting for longitude. Standard time has become standard, in setting when people wake up, but it's far from the locally ideal situations.
http://blog.poormansmath.net/the-time-it-takes-to-change-the...
As the picture shows, Spain and the parts of France are the extremes in the Europe, in the rest of Europe the Sun is closer to being at 12:00 (not counting DST) not too different to Tokyo.
Yes, the map you link shows is that some parts of the world have wider time zones than it would allow all the people living there to have the Sun very close to 12:00. But your "Tokyo sunrise" argument is still not a good one. All the areas (and cities) in the map that are "relatively white" have Sun at the highest point around 12:00 noon. Tokyo is "relatively white." New York and LA are also "relatively white." So I still don't know what is your perspective for Tokyo being strange. Can you please explain? The dramatic example would in fact be Spain or even Argentina.
http://geography.about.com/od/physicalgeography/a/longestday...
"Reykjavik, Iceland Earliest Sunrise: 2:55 a.m. from June 18th through June 21st." (Reykjavik is 64° N)
"London, United Kingdom Earliest Sunrise: 4:43 a.m. from June 11th through June 22nd." (London is 51° N)
"Tokyo, Japan Earliest Sunrise: 4:25 a.m. from June 6th through June 20th." (Tokyo is 36° N)
Everyone gets wrenched by the start and end of BST, but generally if someone says "5pm" or "17:00" you get a seasonal sense of how much daylight that implies. I can't imagine the US - or anywhere else - being different, except possibly close to the poles.
Absolute sun position matters a lot less than the felt relationship between clock time and sun position. That sense changes slowly but reliably over the year.
The obvious benefit of time zones is that virtually everyone you interact with daily has the same subjective time sense. Everyone knows that midday is going to be bright, midnight is going to be dark, and the rest is going to vary with the season.
A single universal time would lose that.
But then we also have far longer periods of sunlight during the summer.
What's annoying me even now in London is that sunset still comes too early during the summer (during the winter, on the other hand, I definitively appreciate the longer days here vs. Norway)
On the contrary, the 9-5 concept has never applied to the vast majority of working humans on the planet (agriculture, health, factories, sales, even most offices don't keep those hours). With growing communication across time zones, their difficulties have only recently become more obvious, previously this sort of communication was rare, now it is becoming commonplace.
The solution to not being sure if someone is working at a given hour is to schedule a call, preferably using a sane shared timekeeping standard which doesn't change hours at the whim of politicians.
Also, reproductive work (nursing children, taking care of the sick and elderly, cleaning the house).
We all need to get off our high horse and be more specific, at the risk of smaller readership. For global teams that are making software, GMT / 24 hour clocks are great. But lets not project our reality onto the rest of the world. I love that comment!
Farmers, truck drivers, pilots, bakers, hospitality workers, nurses, street sweepers, security guards and a thousand other jobs are NOT bound to a 9-5 working time. Indeed, outside of government or large corporations, I struggle to find many professions that ARE bound (or have to BE bound) to these hours.
For instance my place has a requirement on being there around 9:30 in the morning even though we should be part of the "Ivory Tower" club you mention since we actually work day in day out with people on different time zones.
Same with public services opening at 9h an ending at 18h, forcing everyone else to open holes in their schedule to get there.
What kind of hour staggering were you thinking about to try and solve the scheduling problem?
I miss out on time with my family if I leave later than 5, and I prioritize that over looking busy in the office. After 5 my mental capacity and productivity is dwindling anyways.
Would love to stay on DST and never go back. Kids don't sleep in an extra hour. It makes for a rough week.
Some jobs have the luxury of ignoring that, but that's just a perk, not a wide tendency. Just as if remote working in software allows one to work in one's pajamas, it doesn't mean all other clothes besides pajamas are now an outdated concept.
I know lots of lawyers and accountants who do that stuff at all hours - exactly the same hours as I do my programming work.
20 years ago, I used to do the whole 'business lunch' thing with a lot of them too. Nowadays, it is usually a quick 'coffee catchup' at all sorts of hours - sometimes 9pm, which works better for us than the 12pm or 1pm lunch sessions used to.
Technology, plus the burdens of modern working life, means that 9-5 is really just a placeholder for "Oh, well those are the official times that denote when I will be available to do work stuff", but heck, that is really my "interruption time band" and my REAL work times are usually outside of that...
However that's not how that will work out for the majority. You abolish 9-5 expectation, all fine until you get a boss that is a night owl and he wants you available from 6PM to 3AM AM. Enjoy both not having family time anymore and not being compensated to work what would be a night shift in current society.
You take the example of the lawyer here above. Right now he need to be in the office because his assistants/PA will be in the office at that time and there is no reasonable expectation he can force them to be available at other times.
> just a placeholder for "Oh, well those are the official times that denote when I will be available to do work stuff"
It's not "just", it's very important coordination point. If lawyers kept random hours and you needed a lawyer, it's be much harder for you to find one because you'd also look for one that has suitable hours. Not impossible, but harder. To lower transactional costs, the hours are roughly synchronized.
It's always been a struggle to force myself to conform to society's idea of "normal hours," especially in high school when I had to wake up at 6 AM.
I realize most people struggle relating to this; try imagining starting your day at 10 PM, if you're a "normal" morning lark.
In fact, most people in my coworking space also work 9 to 5.
Same goes for set meals (except that I don't have breakfast). Usually when I'm hungry enough that I want to eat, it's conveniently lunch time. And the second time I get hungry is usually around 7 pm.
Personally, my wife and I like to be home when the kids come back from school at around 2:30pm, so we tend to break our work days to spend the afternoons with them to help with homework and chat to them etc., then resume working once they are in bed.
That works for use because we work from home too. Obviously wouldn't work for many others. But why not make things work for us, especially now we have the capability to do so via tech and modern corporate culture?
No, that's completely untrue for the vast majority of workers.
I appreciate that factory assembly line workers, shopkeepers and many others have to have set hours, but even so, does that have to conform to the 9-5 standard?
An example using Banks, an ancient entity that exemplified the 9-5 ethos: Here in Australia, most banks don't open their doors until 9am, then close promptly at 4pm. Their reasoning - they have to prepare floats and cash drawers in the morning and cash up at the end of the day, thus the restrictive times.
Problem is - everyone else in town has to work between their designated 8am and 5pm, thus are otherwise occupied during the bank's opening times too, which makes visiting the branch office an impracticality.
Except during lunch hour. And when do the banks send most of their staff on lunch? That's right, between 12pm and 1pm, which is when everyone else can actually get there and experience short staffing at its absolute worst.
Why on earth don't they do a 'double shift', whereby one smaller team comes in at, say 6am to start the preparation and open the doors at, say 7am and work until 1pm. Another team can come in at 11am and work through to 7pm, doing the cashing up and closing the doors at 6pm. That way the bank will be open before and after other people's work times for convenience, and the dreaded lunch hour rush will actually be double staffed for better service.
That 1920's inefficient mindset really has to give way these days.
The reason they don't do this is that that would require workers to stay at work later, which would take away from time spent with kids, eating dinner with family, etc. You're only thinking of this from the perspective of the customers' convenience, but the banks' employees are people too, and they don't want to have to be at work long after everyone else finishes up with work. If you were a cashier at the bank you'd feel differently about this.
I've run my own businesses for over 30 years now, and in almost all cases, we give our employees a choice over their preferred working hours. Guess what? Some of them are 'early birds' and love coming in really early when they feel productive and like the fact that they can leave early and still catch up with friends for coffee or a late lunch at 2 or 3pm.
Some preferred spending their early mornings getting kids ready for school or going to extended yoga classes, running errands etc. and coming in closer to lunch time and working later, leaving the office after 6 or 7pm to avoid the rush hour traffic.
The solution could work to suit the employees as well as the customers. Time to be creative about this, rather than refusing to budge from an outdated mandate.
I daresay that if your childcare centre only offered a 11am to 7pm slot then your work schedule would shift accordingly. And why wouldn't a child care institution offer split shifts like this? It would cater for people who have long commutes or actual shift work. I know employment contracts, overtime rates and EBAs/Government legislation comes into play - but all these are things that have to be reconsidered in light of modern workforce practices.
While it would be nice if there was slightly later childcare and work to shift peak hour, I don't really think it will work.
I've posted elsewhere here that my business tries to cater for this, by allowing earlier start time and/or reduced hours for parents who want to be home for their kids, or collect them and take them home themselves.
Must admit I find it strange that social implications like this aren't more of a focus in modern society. Surely we can make the whole working/school cycle more effective?
When I worked remotely in the UK for a company based in California (normal time difference 8 hours), I'd work into the evening for exactly the same reason. It's far more efficient; it makes IM possible, and changes email threads from multi-hour conversations to multi-day conversations.
Even if we keep AM/PM, we should make it make sense. It should switch when the numbers roll over. Having 11am be followed by 12pm is nonsensical. The fix for this, as any programmer will tell you, is to recognize that 12 is really 0...we've got an off-by-one bug. Midnight should be 0am and noon should be 0pm.
twelveHour = twentyFourHour mod 12
But instead with the status quo, we need to add this extra line of logic:
if twelveHour == 0 then twelveHour = 12
> if twelveHour == 0 then twelveHour = 12
That's because humans naturally begin counting from 1, not 0. Mainly because we are counting objects, not adding an array index to a pointer.
One inch is a displacement of "1" from the beginning. One hour is a displacement of "1" from the beginning. It's pretty stupid to arbitrarily call the beginning "12".
I think this will be a more and more common thing as more of our lives ends up online. It won't matter when the sun shines so much as what is normal to the individual.
> We need to deep-six not just daylight saving time, but [time zones]
I fail to see what you mean. Do you mean your biological clock needs to see it's 12pm to believe that it's the middle of the day? Why can't your biological clock just settle on any arbitrary number?
And the 24 hours clock is just a matter of notation. In large parts of the world it's the default one for specifying time.
I've worked in several companies with global offices and time translation was never an issue. Of course you'd need to accept the fact that people in other parts of the world would be in the office at different times of the day. But there is no "tech fix" for that.