The Day of Two Noons
npr.org
npr.org
- everyone switches to Dvorak keyboards
- British motorists start driving on the right*
- United States adopts the metric system
- Daily Telegraph admits a hard Brexit may have negative consequences for the population as a whole
* yes, I know, Dagen H, but 2019 UK is very different from 1967 Sweden
Abolishing time zones is just an incredibly dumb idea, and the drawbacks heavily outweigh the benefits if you actually think about it. So I'm actually glad that human inertia makes it impossible to do.
It's not that I disagree about the utility of modern technology, but I just think that some things are inherently difficult for humans even if there is a handy oracle to compute them.
Yes, converting is technically trivial, but you still have to reach for a calculator to do it.
Don't forget the medium and large units!
I guess miles on their own work fine, but it'd be nice if someone could say "2000 feet" and I didn't have to think about how many miles that means.
And our two speed measures of feet per second and miles per hour are close to equivalent (1 fps is about 0.7 mph) but nobody knows that to convert it in their heads. It just happens that 3600 seconds is the same order of magnitude as 5280 feet.
Not that metric is totally better in that regard since they're stuck with minutes and seconds too. There's 86,400 seconds in a day, maybe when we're making this big calendar change we can switch it over to 100,000 seconds at the same time.
Or we could change miles to be 3600 feet so that feet per seconds and miles per hour are equivalent. Added bonus, that's not too far off a kilometer.
1 beat = 1 minute and 26.4 seconds (86.4 seconds) in standard time.
They're useful for having people understand speeds at different scales, but only because the different scales of units line up stupidly.
Of course the effort to change it isn't worth it, it just makes you wish we'd got it right the first time around.
About the only place I see decimetre markings is depth gauges on rivers/canals/bridges, and rulers used by geologists when photographing a rock formation.
2 feet is about 600mm or 60 cm or 6 decimeters or 0.6m or 0.06 dekameters. Just pick whatever prefix that gives you the number of significant digits you want.
Metric doesn't "lack units", because there's only a single unit for every measure. Instead there's prefixes for every power of ten around human-scale measurements, and for every power of thousand for much smaller and much larger measurements.
IMHO this is just the tip of the iceberg. I can’t even begin to fathom the inordinate amount of conversion mistakes there might be but we never hear about or even detect because this is not NASA yet have possibly damaging consequences.
Nobody uses anything but meters and seconds with metric in science. But even if - using 2 different metric units would give answers differing by a factor of 1000 - a little easier to notice than Pound vs Newton (1 to ~4.45).
Is that m/s, km/h or kmps?
Sure, now. It took the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter to end the Imperial madness at NASA.
A lander is engineering and science, and I can guarantee you that there is a non-zero probability of one part of a system working in m/s and another in km/h — which would lead to the exact same error.
Any sort of machinery that deals with measurements, has some sort of "standard" embedded in it.
I'm a woodworker, so I'm going to pick on the world of woodworking.
A thickness planer (thicknesser if you're from the UK) dimensions wood to a consistent thickness. The adjustment is typically done by raising or lowering the bed relative to the cutterhead. There is generally a crank or handwheel that turns some kind of gear or screw mechanism that in turn moves the bed.
In the US, woodworkers generally use inches, and work in thicknesses that are some even number of 16ths of an inch.
It would be possible, in theory, to set any planer for any dimension in the continuous range of dimensions it supports. In practice, the adjustment mechanism is set so that a whole turn of the crank corresponds to some whole number of 16ths. Moreover, this is usually set up so that a whole number of 16ths lands at an easily repeated position: crank handle at 12 o'clock or 6 o'clock. This makes it blindingly easy to repeatably hit the same mark (within woodworking tolerances) every time you use the machine.
So far, so good.
The shop I belong to where I have access to a planer has a modern Powermatic planer. Powermatic no longer manufactures in the US, and the planer was a bit of a source of mystery to me until I dug up the docs and read them. One full turn of the crank is 1.5mm. I'll spare you converting: That's 1/16th of an inch, less 3.5 thousandths of an inch (thou, rhymes with cow).
That doesn't sound like much, but it adds up. Over 16 turns of the crank, you're now 56 thou off where you expected to be, or, almost exactly 1/17th of an inch[0]. Moreover, hitting 3/4" exactly (within woodworking tolerances) requires a bit of guesstimating about how much extra you need to turn the wheel past 12 o'clock or 6 o'clock.
Non-solutions to this problem:
1. Put a measuring device on the machine. They either aren't accurate enough, don't stay accurate, or cost a fortune (i.e. anything digital that is both accurate and stays accurate)
2. Work in metric. I would, happily, except for the fact that literally everything else in the shop is inches. Chisels in the US are an even number of 16ths of an inch wide. A dado stack for a table saw cuts dadoes an even number of 8ths, 16ths, or 32nds of an inch wide. The simple act of finding a measuring tape that's metric is a pain in the ass. I can go to Home Depot, Lowes, or any hardware store and find a dozen options in inches. If I'm lucky, there's ONE with metric, and it has inches on one side of the tape.
But wait, it gets worse if you're a metalworker. Metal lathes have a leadscrew that rotates a fixed number of rotations per rotation of the workpiece (non-continuously variable by gearbox). Those are threaded either in either metric or inches. To do metric work on a lathe that's natively inches (or vice versa), you need gears in the ratio of 254:100, reduced to 127:50. If that sounds like a lot of teeth on one gear, that's because it is; making that set of gears requires either an impractically large gear (won't fit on the lathe), or impractically small teeth (incapable of transmitting the required torque)[1].
Once you start making actual physical things, you find that your system of measurement is embedded in nearly everything around you in ways that are difficult to work around while maintaining sufficient accuracy and precision.
[0] Yes, this means that 1.5mm is almost, but not quite, exactly 1/17th of an inch.
[1] There exists a very close approximate solution that can be used subject to limitations you'd need to find a machinist to expand on.
People who are serious about cooking know about the volumetric units used in cooking and the relationships between them. (teaspoons/3 = tablespoons)/16 = cups.
But your American friends who don't know how many ounces are in a pound? I hope you're kidding. That's basic stuff, taught in elementary (primary) school.
It is because we count with base 10 numbers that metric is easy and imperial is difficult.
You can see the prices per unit on their websites:
https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/search?query=bottled%2...
Not sure if this is required by regulations or it’s just the supermarkets being customer-friendly though.
In the EU, the same thing exists, but it is always per 100g or per 100ml. No exceptions. So comparing two food items is always super easy. I don't know why the US allows this idiotic loophole of per serving.
it really doesn't help that you being non-american, could conceivably be talking about any one of about 20 different 'pounds'. America itself only uses the avoirdupois pound, but if you thrown internationalism into the mix, it could be a troy pound, an ISP or a non-US avoirdupois pound, maybe we're even talking about a russian pound... and that's all before we get to pound-mass vs pound-weight/pound-force
here, let wikipedia muddy the waters even more for us:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0a/Co...
There are lots of little things like this, multiplied by millions of people.
Situation: mother and 6 year old boy in hospital in the UK. In the UK, everything is metric except casual discussion of body weight and height, and road distances and speeds. And beer in pubs.
Doctor: I'm prescribing this drug, the nurse will give it to your son.
Nurse to boy: can you stand on the scale please? OK, 45… that makes the dose 5mL.
Did you notice the error? A 6 year old won't weigh 45kg, the digital scale is somehow set to pounds. The boy actually weighs 20kg — he's about to receive a double-dose.
Neither the nurse nor the mother (or the boy for that matter) noticed the incorrect weight, and the boy was seriously injured (perhaps killed, I forget) through an overdose of the drug. The NHS then replaced any scale that could give a reading in pounds, to prevent a repeat of the error.
In the rest of Europe, nurse or mother would have known 45kg wasn't a reasonable weight for a 6 year old boy, and investigated the problem.
I'm sure you can think of other technical or semi-technical situations where unfamiliarity with the metric unit can lead to mistakes.
[1] http://metricviews.org.uk/2009/12/nhs-risking-patients-lives...
The nurse is expecting a "big" value, but has no concept of either measure.
Buying a car from anywhere in the EU or wherever would be a lot easier, as it is a lot of 'grey' imports in the UK tend to be from Japan, I think, as they're RHD and have interesting vehicles in good condition.
I can think of negatives though. For one, people for the most part are right eye and right hand dominant. That means that they can drive better on the left side of the road - if you look at racing cars where the driver can drive in any orientation, they generally historically had the gear stick on the left because you want your right hand on the steering wheel. Having your dominant right eye have a better field of view of the road and oncoming lane helps too.
Despite being one of the more densely populated countries in Europe, UK accident rates are well below almost everywhere else in Europe let alone the world. I don't think this is because UK road infrastructure is superior to eg. German road infrastructure - I think it is because we drive in a more "natural" position.
Driving on the left would mean chaos in the short term and then make our accident rates slightly worse for all eternity afterwards. Not really worth it?
I'd also be interested to see how those rates compare historically, I only drive occasionally and it's very noticeable that the UK is now plastered in speed cameras compared to even 10 years ago.
Around 89% of people are right handed, and 11% are left handed.
With the steering wheel on the right, as it is in most left side driving countries, most drivers have their most nimble hand on the door side, and their least nimble hand on the interior side.
But the door side only has a few things that you need to interact with--the handle to open the door, the lock button, maybe some power windows buttons. These are all things that do not require any finesse to operate.
The interior side has whatever is on the center console, and possibly a gear shift, and is also the side on which any interaction with the passengers take place. It's where the stupid touch screen is on cars so equipped. It's the side where you want your dominant hand.
(Well, one case: when driving a heavy vehicle at low speeds with no power steering. But in that case, my right hand is also unable to steer it on its own! Getting the truck out of the parking lot is a two-handed job.)
My intuition is that I would generally prefer to keep my left hand (less dextrous) on the steering wheel (only one moving part, controlled by big sweeping movements), and use my right hand (better at fine motor control) for tasks involving moving/pressing/twisting smaller controls.
If the whole world drives on the same side, international travel involving driving becomes safer and some unknowable number of lives will be saved.
But long before that could ever happen self driving cars will become the norm, and human driven vehicles will be considered a savage ancient custom you can't believe we used to do.
https://www.nist.gov/sites/default/files/documents/pml/wmd/m...
Being able to trivially convert volume to mass and vice-versa for anything that's mostly water is a killer feature for metric, at least when it comes to cooking, which is the main place most people actually use volume and mass measurements in their lives. Switching there seems like a no-brainer.
Really, most people are using these measurements for household work, checking the weather and setting indoor temps, cooking, and travel distances (miles are fine there since they rarely/never need to be converted to anything else for that purpose). That's about it. The only place Imperial's a clear loser there, seems to me, is the kitchen. Most people aren't doing science—and it's telling that the kitchen, where they come the closest to it, is where metric might have a real advantage.
Re: water, a pint's a pound the whole world 'round.
(Just my 1.58 pence)
Le sigh.
I work in a team distributed throughout the globe. It's very difficult to talk about "time" because everyone's timezone is so different.
What would be nice is if our computers always showed two times. The local time in a larger font, and then UTC time in a smaller font.
This way, when we need to talk about time in a global context, we can use UTC. But, because most of us live our lives in local time, we don't need to say something silly like, "I'm getting lunch at 22:00".
It's pretty easy to set up on Windows and I can't imagine it's hard on other OSes either.
I did that when I worked remotely so I wouldn't constantly have to translate time zones.
If it not already exists as a script, it would be very easy to create.
Unfortunately, can't do different font sizes. : T
When you are scheduling a meeting with people in a different timezone, you need to figure out what a specific time is and what a specific time means for both parties.
Because times have meaning, we know that 8:00 is breakfast, 12:00 is lunch, 18:00 is dinner and 23:00 is night and people are sleeping.
Timezones force you to do a lookup to figure out what the time is in the other location, and given that knowledge, you know because of universal global conventions what that time means, so you can avoid scheduling a meeting when they are probably sleeping.
If you remove timezones, you no longer have to do a lookup to figure out what the time is in the other location, because it's the same everywhere - yaaaayyyy!!! - but you still have to do a lookup to figure out what a specific time means. Is the sun up? Are they sleeping? Are they at work? You know that you wake up at 17:00, eat breakfast at 18:00 and have to be at work at 19:00, but you have no idea at what time people typically do that at the other location.
You have perfect knowledge of what the time is everywhere, but you have no knowledge of what times mean anymore. Great. And that's just one of the multiple issues with removing timezones.
Except for the literal billions of computers which will need replacing and trillions of lines of code you're going to need to rewrite, sure.
And redeploy the entire GPS system. And the code running on the mainframe in the back room of the basement which no one has touched in literal decades.
Seems.... Risky
One of the biggest problems is that weekdays completely cease to make sense. With timezones, the day of the week changes at midnight, when most people are asleep. You wake up in the morning, it's a new weekday, and it's the same weekday for as long as the sun is in the sky.
If we abolish timezones and choose UTC as the one time, the day of the week will change at 5pm in San Francisco. Say that you have an establishment that is normally closed on Sundays. It's 4pm on a Saturday, do you close in an hour because it is then Sunday? Or do you change your "schedule" so that your establishment is closed on SundayMondays instead? Or perhaps you keep it closed on SaturdaySundays? Because the concept of "Sunday" doesn't make sense anymore, "Sunday" is no longer a contiguous period of normal waking hours.
In San Francisco. In London it's business as usual. But in Sydney the day of the week changes at 10am. When is "Sunday morning"? 9am Sunday morning is the day after 10am Sunday morning. Every week has two Sunday mornings now. (And two Monday mornings!) Which one of them did you mean?
Adjusting computer systems is much, much simpler than getting humans to accept this idiotic system.
Agreed -- I think of timezones much like coordinate systems: They're all representing the same point in (space|time), just in a slightly different format, each with different benefits/setbacks for biological things vs electronical things. Like latitudes and longitudes vs UTM coordinates vs local grid coordinates. "Number of milliseconds since January 1st 1970" can still describe the same global time-point as "First of July, 2019, noon". Timezones are there for people. Everything else can normalize on UTC.
That being said, I think the "universal" in coordinated universal time is a bit of a misnomer -- at some point in our interstellar future, are we going to have to start thinking more about factoring in time dilation? :-) we already have "coordinated Mars time".. Are we going to have an intergalactic day of many noons..
If anything, it's the computers that would have the easiest time of things. Time is already so random and janky that on the whole the computing world has dealt with it reasonably well. It would "just" mean one more entry for every timezone in the Olson timezone DB, and that's a lot of the work right there.
However, by the same token, if you want to get a sense of just how impossible this is going to be to get anyone to agree to from the political side, a read through the comments in the timezone DB can be constructive, such as: https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/master/europe
It'll really show you what anyone who thinks they can convince the whole world to change is up against.
A surprising amount of finance is time stamped in New York time. Just for fun, Auckland time gets used a bit, too.
As I wait for my remote team member half-a-world away to get online so we can have our meeting and I can go to lunch while she has her breakfast, this rings so true.
The invention of standard time was more complex, more international, than america's NPR would have us believe.
On july 1st, let us also remember that basketball was invented by a canadian. (Go raptors).
Wait, what did it do in between?
This was in the USA and the captain had an australian accent. At the end of his announcement he said "And to the passenger that expressed concern, please be assured that I have received extensive training as to the direction of "up" in the northern hemisphere.
So I propose the following very simple definition:
Up - The direction defined by the position vector of Polaris with reference to the center of the Earth (not to be confused with North).
Down - The direction opposite of Up (See also: South).
How is the direction represented?
Since GMT is the time in England, and the meter is (more or less) 3 Parisian feet, we should at least standardize "up" as the direction the Empire State Building goes.