Comments on: Abolish Time Zones

By: some1

some1 — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 00:51:49 +0000

I agree!

By: noddy

noddy — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 17:15:33 +0000

yeah right, and while your at it why not shorten a second to ~0.864 of its current length and make a minute 100 seconds, an hour 100 minutes, and just have 10 hours in a day.

I dont know what you’d do about the watershed though…

By: lenoxus

lenoxus — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 17:54:11 +0000

Regarding GlobalMetricTime: The only problem with that is that ten isn’t such a hot base, and ultimately ought to be discarded altogether. Twelve is where it’s at!

“New” seconds would be either roughly four old ones, or roughly one third of an old one (dpending on how many division you want to make), so it doesn’t jive as well compared to the decimal concept. But, people are used to base-twelve thinking when it comes to hours. Hmm, tough stuff.

By: lenoxus

lenoxus — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 17:42:39 +0000

One thing I like about this concept is how precisely one could sync events with local daylight. With time zones, you have time "jumping" by margins of an hour (or sometimes half-hour) as you travel. But under this system, you could fine-tune things to match both the actual sunrise/sunset and our circadian rhythms. (It would come to be seen as reasonable for one office to open at 8:23, and another, some miles away, at 8:37.) The biggest problem would indeed be the lack of cross-cultural understanding about what a given time "means". So perhaps for every region that was once a zone, governments would establish "official morning time", corresponding to what was once 7AM (or whatever). Meanwhile, the whole calendar could use some fixing too… Months ought to be renamed to each start with a unique letter (in the current system, it takes three letters to "abbreviate" them! — or two digits, still wasteful). They should occur in alphabetical order (for easy sorting and memorization). Perhaps the same with weekdays, (although there would be some debate over what should be considered the "first" day of the week). The number of days in each month should follow a consistent pattern — either all of them containing the same number of days (28, 29, 30) with one "small month" at the end of the year, or an alternating pattern of 30 and 31 days. "Thirty days hath September…"? Humans shouldn't need mnemonics for things we made up in the first place! Most important and sanest of all: years should always start with the same weekday, and the leap day should happen at the end of the year. That way, scheduling holidays for a given institution is way, way easier — you don't have to worry about whether Fun Day falls on a Wednesday or a Saturday this year (I speak as someone who works for a school). And you would reduce those confusions that arise when someone says "Meet me on Wednesday the 16th" and the 16th isn't a Wednesday (which one takes priority?). If every Gemini 16th is a Thursday, you'll be more likely to ask for clarification. Heck, perhaps dates should come in base 7 instead of 10 (it would still take only two digits to describe the month). That way, knowing the date will mean that you know the day! Ah, the things that will never happen (at least not until Octember of the year 21-J).

By: GlobalMetricTime

GlobalMetricTime — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 02:55:40 +0000

I like getting rid of timezones. I like getting rid of AM/PM. I even like redefining what an hour means: how about metric time where 1 day has 10 “hours” and an “hour” has 100 “minutes” and a “minute” has 100 “seconds” then redefine what a “second” is to make all that fit back into into one diurnal day (the average annual time it takes for the sun to hit [0.0 LAT, 0.0 LON] in one rotation). The new “second” will be 0.864 * the time of a current second – very close. Total metric time over the entire planet. It’ll have to happen before an alien civilization visits us anyway. Why not NOW?

By: Jim

Jim — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:59:16 +0000

Very good points. (Krista, see the footnote.) Perhaps what would be required is a sort of hybrid system. The actual o’clock hours would be standard, but you would have a way of saying “three hours after noon.” Not as easy as 3 p.m., but it would solve the problem.

Steve, I would disagree with your last bit. We’ll eat at 11:30 would make perfect sense in any given place, because people would know that 11:30 is around the time for breakfast, for instance. Just like we now know that 11:30 is around the time for lunch. It’s hard to think about it that way now, but I think the context of the hours would shift. You would only have a problem when out of the given context (like your news example.)

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 06:09:51 +0000

To elaborate on your “what would we lose”, using universal UTC would have the side effect of removing all context-sensitive information from times. This could be very unhelpful in the context of, say, journalism or literature (especially past literature) — anything read across time zones. For instance, a book that mentions that the protagonist “got up at 5 AM every day and was in bed by 9 each night” has a connotation of self-discipline now which would be completely lost. Compare, for example, “got up at 11 AM every day and went to bed at 3 AM”. Nearly the same phrasing; totally different connotation due to the time shift. Or a news article that mentions that a fire broke out at 2 PM would instead have to specify the time and a context (eg. “2 PM, that is early afternoon here in ____”), since there wouldn’t be any inherent local context for the time. (You could say the news could just say “early afternoon”, but in the interest of specificity that wouldn’t be ideal.) This could even impact business communication, as you would have to specify which shift (evening, morning, etc) when giving hours/meal times/etc if the time was important for giving context. (EG, “we’ll eat at 11:30″ would have to be “we’ll eat lunch at 11:30″ since 11:30 is arbitrary.) Etc.

By: Krista

Krista — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 23:20:49 +0000

“if, for example, the sun was always directly overhead at five o’clock p.m …”

If we’re going to ditch time zones, than for goodness’ sake, let’s get rid of the 12 hour clock while we’re at it! 17 hours, no 5 pm :)