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Comment by endgame | Hacker News Reader

Everyone carries a GPS in their pocket; why not use it for good? We can have people's clocks continually update so that 12:00 is solar noon at their current location each day, and avoid the jarring transitions into and out of DST.

Don't ask what people living in the high altitudes will do - I'm still working on that.

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That's what people did before time zones were a thing. Is caused a major hassle for railway schedules when those started to be all the rage.

Here in Bristol, UK, we've got an old Corn Exchange that has a clock with two minute hands to show London time (GMT) and Bristol time which was about 10 minutes different.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exchange,_Bristol

'Oxford Time' is still used for a few things in Oxford, the clock at Christ Church reads five minutes slow with respect to GMT for example.

Continuously updating clocks is an interesting idea, but it isn't solar noon that you want to to anchor it to. That doesn't really accomplish anything biologically useful.

It is sunrise you want to anchor it to, because it is sunrise that our circadian rhythms sync to.

What definition of sunrise? I live near a mountain range, so sunrise changes depending on what part of the mountain the sun aligns with that day.

Do you not appreciate how incredibly annoying it would be if the clocks in the next town over were 5 minutes ahead of yours?

Forget different towns being 5 minutes ahead, from the other linked qntm post [0]:

> At the equator, the position directly underneath the mean Sun travels west at about 463 metres per second. That means a standard rack unit is about one millisecond wide. At latitudes closer to the poles, the effect is amplified, although but not by more than an order of magnitude in the realistically habitable parts of the world.

Even a row of servers would all have different times.

[0] https://qntm.org/continuous

Not viscerally, but this was meant to be an obviously unserious proposal.

please don't ditch timezones.

https://qntm.org/continuous

”Lets meet at the coffeeshop in town X at 5pm” becomes a real difficult thing to orchestrate.

It's only actually an issue at the poles. Even 10 meters away from the pole, there's technically going to be a solar noon.

> Don't ask what people living in the high altitudes will do - I'm still working on that.

You meant latitudes?

Maybe he means astronauts on the International Space Station, who will now have a 90 minute long day.

Why will they have a 90 minute long day? It's probably obvious I'm just not clocking(tee hee) it.

Orbital period in LEO

I did, thank you.

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