How much is time wrong around the world? | Hacker News Reader

How much is time wrong around the world?

poisson.phc.unipi.it

158 pointsot74 comments

It is interesting to see that much more of the world errs to the side of having sun later in the day. As someone who lives just on the other side of a timezone line in a green area, I can definitely see the appeal. It gets dark at 4-4:30 in the winter here, and it sucks. There is actually a bill in our state now to stay on daylight savings all year. I really hope we pass it and don't have to "fall back" next year.

I so agree. Whenever I hear people say "changing the time twice a year sucks, we should stop doing that," I wonder whether they mean "let's ruin everything" (stay on 'standard' time all year) or "let's have daylight in winter too". This is rather a huge difference, and I wish they would always make it clear so I could tell whether to completely oppose or joyfully support them. :)

I think they mostly mean making daylight saving permanent, but have a recurring dread that maybe they don't.

I really don't like false times. I can put up with time zones because they are at least constant. Every time I adjust my clock because the government said so is a "the sky is green and 2 + 2 = 5" moment, especially since they moved the times in 2007 so that we only get a few months of "real" time.

This is one thing I miss about Saskatchewan, the big red mark in the middle of Canada. They are always on DST, which means you can watch the sunrise every clear winter morning and don't go home in pitch black world. It works just fine and no one misses the time change. It would save a lot of confusion and work much better IMHO.

Hey, you just solved my dread problem. If Canada gets rid of the time switch they won't do it in a way that forces Saskatchewan to change. (I'm in Alberta.)

Thanks!

Unless you've got an employer that's enforcing very specific hours, what's the difference? It you'd rather get up earlier, work earlier, and leave when it's still light, what's stopping you?

The number that we assign to a time of day doesn't have any intrinsic meaning, it's just a symbol.

I think you're underestimating the number of people who have what you consider "very specific work hours".

Of my friends, I think I'm one of the only ones who gets to dictate what time I go into and leave from work. I think it's fairly unique to the tech industry, this ability.

It is indeed just a symbol, time, but the symbol is given meaning by most people's employers, and as such ends up carrying significant meaning in a person's own life as well.

There are lots of things that get run on a time of day basis that can't be controlled. I work for myself from home, so I can do whatever I want, but my wife is a teacher. They have a very set schedule as it happens.

Most employers that I know, while being somewhat flexible, still require being in the office for certain hours of the day, 10-3 seems to be popular in my area. If you want to work the rest of the hours early or late you can. Any way you look at it when it gets dark at 4 that doesn't leave much time for most people.

Always going to be less daylight in the winter, but I think the argument for moving the daylight later in the day is an easy one.

Among other things, children. Sure, I might be able to get up earlier, work earlier and leave when it's still light, but I still wouldn't have much time to spend with my kid during daytime.

Another example: bus frequency. You know, small stuff that adds up ;)

If shifting the timezone by an hour is a solution, then so is just shifting work hours by an hour. How do children change anything?

There may be other, poor, reasons, that it sucks for you (like other people insisting on going by a certain clock time) but I don't understand the children part.

School start times, for one.

the point is that business and school hours can be (and are) different in different countries. You can either change the timetables or the clock. To change the former requires more coordination throughout the society, hence we move the clock.

> what's the difference?

School hours, public transit hours, business open hours (banks, law-mandated bar closing times, etc.), friends who work at enforced hours (most people, in my experience).

Mainly because it's easier to get one government to shift their hours and thus the hours of everyone, businesses, government services, etc. at the same time, rather than relying on everyone to make a local distinction.

Though sometimes (like in Western China, where time is really off), businesses run on a 'de facto' local time zone (10-7 Beijing) rather than say 8-5 Beijing time

Similarly, the overall preference seems to be to shift things to a later time rather than earlier

This! I live in Poland, where sun usually raises 2-3 hours before i get up and leave house. It was such a joy to visit st petersburg, where days were shorter in theory, but mid-winder sun set around 7pm, so i actually had more time to enjoy the day.

I prefer sun later in the day too. I moved to Japan three years ago and sunset in the winter is as early as 4:30 but sunset in the summer is never past 8 while the sun rises just after 4am.

I lived in the Canadian north when I was younger and used to love the summer nights when it would stay light until 10pm.

The sun rising at 4am sucks. It's a waste of daylight for 99% of the population.

I grew up in NW Indiana. We are were in the same Chicago's timezone which makes sense, but 20 miles to the south or east of us was on what we affectionately called "Farmer Fuck Up Time". they didn't change for DST. it sucked. hard. I remember calling ahead to ask what time it was when traveling to away games in high school.

Actually Indiana can be used as a test case of how to mess around w/ DST or not. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Indiana

This is functionally equivalent to permanently moving into the next time zone eastwards and not observing daylight savings at all. That seems to be the more common interpretation than daylight savings year round.

I'd be interested to see how that does. I was researching starting a similar petition this year, but it seams that time zones are controlled by the federal government. The only option that states have is whether or not to be included in Daylight Savings Time.

So, California could permanently be on shitty Pacific Standard Time, but more optimal Pacific Daylight Time/Mountain Standard Time isn't an option without federal changes.

Since the rest of the site seems to be down, here is a direct link to the relevant image:

http://i0.wp.com/poisson.phc.unipi.it/~maggiolo/wp-content/u...

He brags about using SVG in the post, but shares as PNG. =\

I'm going to argue that the colors should be flipped. Having sunlight last longer seems like a feature not a bug. Taking Boston in to consideration, it is dark here by 4:15 for weeks at a time in early winter. Every day of the year, SF stays light later.

Boston would be dramatically more livable if it were to just change to the next time zone. The red areas seem far more desirable to me.

By "having the sunlight last longer", you mean to say "having the sunlight later in the day. It's not that there's a longer period of sunlight, it's a matter of personal preference as to when during the day the sunlight is.

(And I prefer it earlier and loathe DST.)

Right, I thought that was pretty obvious...

I think it's obvious as well.

However, I run into all sorts of people who are convinced that DST actually gives them more hours of sunlight in a day (i.e. a 24 hour period). If I ask these people how that's possible about half proclaim "well you lose it from the winter when it's colder out" (!) while the other half just admit they have no idea.

Just like you wouldn't say "this laptop battery lasts longer than the other" if you started them at different times, I wouldn't say the "sunlight lasts longer" either.

Where do you live? In Boston, the sun rises around 5 AM throughout the month of June -- that's with DST. Without, it, the sun would be up at 4 AM. Anything before 7:00 is wasted for most -- anything before 6:00 is wasted for the vast majority.

Slightly west of you in NY where it rises at 5:30a EDT/ 4:30a EST.

I find it much easier to wake up at 5:00a if sunrise was half an hour ago and the sun is well up in the sky. I can get up, go for a bike ride on the boardwalk, shower, enjoy breakfast by a window.

And with sunset at 8:30p EDT/7:30p EST ... well, if I'm outside in the evening, I'm usually hungry and want dinner by 7:30p, so the sunsetting then wouldn't bother me in the least.

The winter is most miserable when the sun rises after 7:00a, waking up in complete darkness is miserable for me.

If the vast majority doesn't like getting up to do things when the sun is up already because they'd rather sleep in bed so they'd rather have everyone change their clocks at great expense shrug I guess that's their prerogative.

I suspect you are greatly in the minority there (based on both my personal conversations with others on the topic, and the linked picture showing far more red than green.

Perhaps you should move to an area that is on the eastern edge of a timezone?

I agree with you. What is more, nn current society majority of people starts work around 9 and stays awake until 22:00 (probably even longer). We should actually move the time by at least an hour everywhere and/or permanently enable daylight saving time.

I'm in Guatemala, and frequently see late dinners (later than 8PM+), but Guatemala is about "perfect" in time. (And fortunately, doesn't participate in timezone shifting nonsense, except on years when the local government arbitrarily decides to implement a timeshift for a few months.) So it's probably more a cultural thing, than a slightly shifted timezone.

While this article is interesting, I don't get the obsession people collectively have with specific times and needing timezones. Don't like getting up when it's dark? Get up later. Yes, that requires participation if you depend on others' schedules. Schools are particularly notorious, starting at ridiculously early hours. (My kids would have had to get up at 5.30 or so, but I created a private school for them, and it starts at 9. Works fantastic for them, they can stay up a bit later and play. There's no traffic rush for the teacher, which is good. A much better solution than starting at 7.30.)

I imagine if there were no timezones, people would cope with this better, since they'd be forced to. Instead of saying "kids shouldn't be up past 8!" they'd actually stop and think about it.

People's obsession with "specific times" is kind of nice when you want to get on a plane, execute a contract before the offer expires, allocate scarce resources like tables at a restaurant or telescope time, calculate hours of ec2 usage, ensure adequate physician coverage in an ER, etc.

I think "specific times" are one of the hallmarks of modern society.

How do relative times help in your scenarios? How on earth would timezones fit into EC2 billing?

Relative times? Timezones? Neither of these concepts appear in my comment. My comment is concerned with "people's collective obsession with specific times" and this gem:

"Don't like getting up when it's dark? Get up later. Yes, that requires participation if you depend on others' schedules."

Modern civil society requires depending on other people; this is one of the big problems with division of labor. Imagine bringing your child to the hospital and having the nurse explain:

"Sorry Doctor Bob decided he wanted to get up a little later today. So your child will not receive the routine emergency care that he needs. Oh and you should probably rush home. this is can be a rough area. Sometimes the cops that work the night shift decide they want to be in bed before it gets too bright and the day shift cops are not real big on getting up when it is dark."

Collective obsession with coordination and organization is a hallmark of modern society. How am I going to schedule a trip if I am not sure when the plane will take off? How should I mitigate the risk that the pilot of my connecting flight decides to take off early so he can put his kids in bed when it gets dark?

I have no idea how timezones fit into EC2 billing. But I do know how specific times relate to billing: "Billing commences when Amazon EC2 initiates the boot sequence."[^1] That is a specific time, not a "We think it started sometime after 0200 and before 0330."

[^1]: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#Billing

I suppose if you misconstrue my first comment as "people should just do things, like, whenever, man", then you're right.

That is only part of my response. We seem to have fundamentally different understandings of living in a modern society:

"Don't like getting up when it's dark? Get up later. Yes, that requires participation if you depend on others' schedules."

I do not understand how you could even type "if you depend on others schedules." Other than Christopher "Alexander Supertramp" McCandless I do not know anyone who does not depend on other people's schedules. The disconnect is not limited to this sub-thread, in another comment on this story you wrote that you did not understand how children could reduce scheduling flexibility...

Original article: http://poisson.phc.unipi.it/~maggiolo/index.php/2014/01/how-...

Sadly it can't seem to handle the traffic as much as Slate

Interesting fact just for fun: Afghanistan shares a 76 km long border with China; this is where the biggest time zone jump occurs, an impressive 3.5 hours.

brilliant concept ...

... but this could probably be the poster child of where not to use the Mercator projection.

yeah, Greenland overlaps five time zones. but they're tiny at that latitude! this makes it seem like places as far apart as New York & Los Angeles are in the same time zone.

edit: Miller not Mercator - but the point stands that it's distorting the size of countries at high latitude, significantly exaggerating the issue.

It's not Mercator and I feel personally offended (it's Miller). I decided to use a equirectangular just because otherwise drawing the gradients would have been a hell.

ok, it's not Mercator, but it has the same high-latitude distortions

any projection where Greenland is the same size as South America is IMO the wrong choice :)

Relevant http://i.imgur.com/10sfTYY.png

http://mapfight.appspot.com/in-vs-gl/india-greenland-size-co...

^ companion knowledge

Unless the data you are conveying has nothing to do with relative area of different regions, like this map.

> I decided to use a equirectangular just because otherwise drawing the gradients would have been a hell.

If you've got a function that maps between map-position and globe-position, couldn't you just compute the gradient color for each pixel one by one? That doesn't sound particularly difficult... :]

I edited an existing SVG with emacs.

Miller projection is in the class of ideal projections for this data.

We're comparing time zones here. Instead of miles, this is a map of latitude against longitude. Using Miller, the longitudes are vertical, and that's the data being visualized.

(edit) I would have enjoyed seeing the Antarctic time zones as well. I suspect they're weird.

not sure I agree - a non-continuous projection such the Dymaxion / Fuller projection could indicate the same timezone errors without size distortion.

the Miller used here gives the impression that an utterly huge physical area - as with Greenland, appearing to be several thousands of miles from edge to edge - has just one timezone. this detracts from the point it's trying to make.

Antarctica would have been cool to see, yeah. I love the concept :)

How does this make it seem like places as far apart as New York and Los Angeles are in the same time zone? It's pretty clear that they're in different time zones.

the distance between the western and eastern tip of Greenland (which is one time zone) appears to be the same width as the continental US, but it's far, far smaller.

I don't think that's confusing anyone. Greenland appears to span 5 (hour-wide) timezones, because it does, and NY and LA are almost as far apart and span four (almost 5). This is exactly what you'd want to see in a map about the widths of timezones.

But Greenland is 1000km wide at its widest (east-west), which is 1/4 the distance from NY to LA.

We're talking about timezones. The whole article is about timezones. The map has no purpose except to show timezones. I cannot emphasize enough the point that timezones are the relevant unit of measurement in this article.

I think the point is that although it's only 1000km, the difference when expressed as a proportion of one day is the same. So noon in LA corresponds to late afternoon in NY, noon on Greenland's west coast corresponds to late afternoon on Greenland's east coast.

Greenland's span of longitude in degrees is greater than that of the continental US. That is what this map projection is displaying. Even though Greenland's distance is smaller, it's more longitude and time zones because the meridians are very closely packed near the pole.

How come? It seems clear they are in different timezones. The colors represent the difference between local solar time and local standard time.

Down for me:

http://web.archive.org/web/20140107014545/http://poisson.phc...

Earlier this year I was curious as to what would happen if we used a clock that was actively calibrated to the solar high noon. I made this little web page here: http://mseiler.com/highnoon/ that uses your geolocation data and a few date-time and astronomy libraries to do just that. It tells me that in NYC the time is shifted by about 11 minutes and that number varies a lot throughout the year.

It would be a very different world if we were to set up meetings using the actual solar time calibrated to the date and location of our meeting points!

I suspect that your clock (or one with the same result) is the future...

Right now we have 2 clocks; Universal Time and time zone time. Even today, there is no real practical reason to have such small time zones. It would make sense to expand the size of the time zones to that point that there is only one (Universal) and just use solar time for the cases where daylight is important.

I wonder if Spaniards used to stay up late before Franco changed their time zone in the 1940s. Does anybody know?

Yes, but the 1940's, and before, were different:[0]

""So you used to work in the morning at one job. Then it was necessary to stop to rest. And then there was another job in the late afternoon and evening — in order to earn enough money to survive," she says. "It's said to be the origin of our way of life now.""

[0] http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2013/11/30/244995264/spai...

…also it appears there has been a 10 year campaign by an economist to change the clock in Spain;[0] an organisation [1], and progress (dependant on one's perspective) [2]

[0] http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/03/wil...

[1] http://www.horariosenespana.es/

[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24294157

That explanation isn't very convincing. People in other relatively poor countries didn't develop that distinctive pattern.

I don't think it matters if it's convincing or not.

I was answering the question, and the linked resource affirms it was.

they are still up late, because many people also have long working hours, as they are forced through the siesta lunch break

If you don't like having your time wrong, you could use my decimalised time system that rotates the numbers based on your geolocation so that solar noon where you are is always at the top of the clockface.

http://kybernetikos.github.io/UIT/

(You will of course have to allow it access to your location)

Here's Google's cache.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

The anniversary of your birth may not always fall on the same day.

A year is actually 365 and 1/4 days long.

If you were born before 6 AM, this doesn't affect you. But for everybody else 25 - 75% of the time, the anniversary of their birth actually falls on the day after, depending on what time of day you were born and whether it was leap year and whether you born before the end of February (where we get that extra day every four years).

And then throw in daylight savings time.

Of course, the reality is that sticking with the same day is good enough, just as having some arbitrary number describe noon. 12 is, after all, an arbitrary number too.

The important thing is that people agree on what these conventions mean and that they help mark time.

Sorry, this should read "the anniversary of their birth actually falls on the day after or day before"

If you're born the year before leap year early enough in the day, leap year makes the anniversary of your birth move to the previous day.

Needless to say, time can make your brain hurt.

The Olson tzdb used to have support for a solar-noon time zone for Saudi Arabia. I forget the specifics but there was a need for solar noon and a religious observance. It was just recently removed due to constraints regarding the size of unsigned chars.[^1] It would be neat to remake the map with the tz shapefiles and animate it a la xearth.[^2]

[^1]: http://efele.net/maps/tz/world/

[^2]: https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/a9ac0f6938c416f724a52115...

Interesting to see how big US Central Time is. Most states in Central Time (e.g. the Dakotas) should be on Mountain Time if we are strictly adherent to the time zones. (Similarly, much of Eastern Time should be in Central, and Hawaii is off by a timezone, presumably to keep them on the same date as the mainland US.)

In the US (and other countries that have internal time zone borders), a lot of the variation is to keep the TZ boundary falling through relatively unpopulated areas OR to keep more of a state/region on the same time as its capital or major city.

I noticed this when travelling from Eastern Slovakia to Western Germany. It was really noticeable.

I personally prefer the red zones where the sun sets really late in the summer, so it's nice to see the map of those. :-)

its perfect apparently.

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