http://smbc-comics.com/comic/daylight
Alt text
There, now Nate Silver can stop arguing with everyone on twitter.
Bonus panel
Team UTC. F* DST and TZs. I’ll go to work after the sun comes up at 16:30 if it means my watch remains unchanged and there’s no adding or subtracting when I make plans with someone on a different latitude.
You’ll still have to add/subtract for plans with distant people to figure out when they’re awake and at work. You just won’t have the convenience of a familiar workday timeframe (9-5) to help you with the calculation.
True. For some reason, it feels less like adding and subtracting than knowing it occurs later or earlier. I kind of like that.
“The sun sets at 6PM, but they’re 4 hours ahead so it’s setting here at their 10PM and there at my 2PM,” feels more complicated than “the sun sets at 16:00 there and 20:00 here,” It seems clearer where they are on earth relative to the solar cycle. Also, if I visit them, it’s straightforward when I’ll be eating and sleeping, so maybe a day before traveling I eat dinner at 18:00 to ease into it.
The best argument against that I’ve heard is that the date will change mid day for half the world
Could make some transactions and programming a bit more complex. It’s not insurmountable, but not trivial
Fair point. Though it might help that the date would change, globally, at the same time. Our current setup is not flawless regarding dates.
Currently, plotting daily events that happen before and after midnight, like sleep, is not straightforward.
Also, anyone who stays up past midnight or works the night shift experiences this already.
When scheduling with folks in drastically different time zones (one’s night is the other’s next-day morning) you need to account for the hour and the day. If an event is scheduled for the 2nd monday of the month it’ll be their 2nd tuesday, sometimes, or their 3rd, depending on what day the month starts on.
It seems to reveal an issue that we use “day” to mean multiple things: the objective increment between month (or week) and hour, and the personal increment after a sleep cycle. Timezones muddle the two by adapting the former to resemble the later.