The creator of DST gets the first slap. Then the timezones asshole.
I’m planning to do a presentation at work on how to deal with dates/times/timezones/conversion/etc in the next few weeks some time. I figure it would be a good topic to cover. I’m going to start my talk by saying “first, imagine there is no such thing as timezones or DST.” And then build on that.
Imagine, if we were just all on the same time. It’d just make things, a little easier.
All in the same time? But… Then the sun might go down at noon. That doesn’t make sense…
Wait… Noon? Noooon…
The word noon comes from a Latin root, nona hora, or “ninth hour.” In medieval times, noon fell at three PM, nine hours after a monk’s traditional rising hour of six o’clock in the morning. Over time, as noon came to be synonymous in English with midday, its timing changed to twelve PM.
Oh now that’s worse
We must establish a new order of monks, who all get up at 6am UTC. We can call them in sync
You might want to show them this video https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY
Sandford Fleming (the guy who invented time zones) actually made it easier.
Before timezones, every town had their own clock that defined the time for their town and was loosely set such that “noon is when the sun is at its highest point in the sky.” Which couldn’t be measured all that accurately.
If it wasn’t for Fleming, we’d be dealing with every city or town having a separate time zone.
Save a slap for the dude who invented sundials, and another slap for the dude who invented civilization.
Some asshole had the idea to water a seed and now I have to pay taxes. Fuck that guy.
Oh yeah, please do imagine there is no such thing as a time zone.
On an ellipsoid!
No, see, how it would work without timezones is:
- Everyone would use UTC and a 24-hour clock rather than AM/PM.
- If that means you eat breakfast at 1400 hours and go to bed around 400 hours and that the sun is directly overhead at 1700 hours (or something more random like 1737), fine. (Better than fine, actually!)
- Every area keeps track of what time of day daily events (like meals, when school starts or lets out, etc) happen. Though I think generally rounding to the nearest whole hour or, maybe in some cases, half hour makes the most sense. (And it’s not even like everyone in the same area keeps the same schedule as it is now.)
- You still call the period before when the sun is directly overhead “morning” and the period after “afternoon” and similarly with “evening”, “night”, “dawn”, “noon”, “midnight” etc.
- One caveat is that with this approach, the day-of-the-month change (when we switch from the 29th of the month to the 30th, for instance) happens at different times of the day (like, in the above example it would be close to 1900 hours) for different people. Oh well. People will get used to it. But I think it still makes the most sense to decide that the days of the week (“Monday”, “Tuesday”, etc) last from whatever time “midnight” is locally to the following midnight, again probably rounding to the nearest whole hour. (Now, you might be thinking "yeah, but that’s just timezones again. But consider those timezones. The way you’d figure out what day of the week it was would involve taking the longitude and rounding. Much simpler than having to keep a whole-ass database of all the data about all the different timezones. And it would only come into play when having to decide when the day of the week changes over.)
- Though, one more caveat. If you do that, then there has to be a longitudinal line where it’s always a different day of the week on one side than it is just on the other side. But that’s already the case today, so not really a drawback relative to what we have today.
regarding day change, you could also just have it change at UTC midnight and the entire planet bongs at that time if they’re awake.
You still call the period before when the sun is directly overhead “morning” and the period after “afternoon” and similarly with “evening”, “night”, “dawn”, “noon”, “midnight” etc.
Note that the Sun position is not consistent throught the year and varies widely based on your latitude.
In Iceland (and also Alaska) you can have the Sun for a full 24 hours in the sky (they call it “midnight sun”) during Summer solstice (with extremelly short nights the whole summer) and the opposite happens in Winter, with long periods of night time.
I think it still makes the most sense to decide that the days of the week (“Monday”, “Tuesday”, etc) last from whatever time “midnight” is locally to the following midnight, again probably rounding to the nearest whole hour.
Just the days of the week? you mean that 2024-06-30 23:59 and 2024-07-01 00:01 can both be the same weekday and at the same time be different days? Would the definition of “day” be different based on whether you are talking about “day of the week” vs “universal day”?
I used to think this way, then it was pointed out to me that, without timezones, we’d be in a situation where Saturday starts mid-workday in some places.
Yeah, timezones are absolutely helpful from a logistics and coordination standpoint. Daylight savings time, though… That nonsense needs to be eliminated. So what if it will be dark well into morning wake hours in the winter, I’d take it over dealing with the time change twice a year.
Anti-DST… The almost accidental political bridge. Kinda funny actually: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-approves-bill-that-would-make-daylight-savings-time-permanent-2023-2022-03-15/
Look at the names of the quotes. Both sides are commenting on how dumb it is.
Then the House got involved.
that-would-make-daylight-savings-time-permanent
fwiw this is by some metrics even worse than switching back and forth
timezones are absolutely helpful from a logistics and coordination standpoint
They’re a downside from a coordination standpoint. If everyone was on UTC, you could say “the meeting is at 04:00” and everyone, anywhere in the world, will know when the meeting is. In the real world, you have to say “the meeting is at 2pm AEST” and then someone in AEDT will have to think “oh, that’s 3pm for me”, and someone in American EST will have to convert to UTC and then convert to their time. It’s a huge pain.
So what if it will be dark well into morning wake hours in the winter
That’s not something that DST does. It would be something that switching to year-round DST would do, but permanent standard time doesn’t change winter hours at all. It can mean you might have dark mornings (especially early and late summer—after the switch to DST and before the switch back to standard time), depending on how far west you are in your time zone and how far away from the equator you are. That’s the main thing DST does: swap bright mornings for bright afternoons in summer. Which is kinda silly considering it’s done at the time of year when afternoons are already bright for the longest. It’s also very harmful to public health.
Eliminating time zones doesn’t make scheduling meetings easier it just changes the language. Instead of figuring out what time it is elsewhere you have to remember what normal working hours are, Europe, US, and Japan aren’t all going to be available 9-5 UTC. It’s just as easy to suggest a meeting at functionally midnight without time zones.
But… We have UTC already, so calculating the difference is a non-issue. If you got rid of timezones, you’d still end up creating it in all but name since the vast majority of business will be occurring during daytime hours around the world. For example, an office in Tokyo sending emails to their NYC office at 0800 UTC (currently 0400 EDT in NYC) wouldn’t end up getting answered for at least 3-4 hours when those employees started logging in. In other words, people would still be doing calculations in their heads to know when business hours are in that region, essentially recreating timezones.
As for your second paragraph, I agree, and I did have it backwards, thanks for the correction. In the summertime where I live, the sun has risen by roughly 0530 and sets around 2100. In the wintertime, the sun is rising around 0700-0730 and setting around 1630-1700 at its shortest daylight hours. Like you said, staying at standard would mean in the summertime we’d have brighter mornings, but curtains and shutters exist for a reason. Personally, I think having it still be bright out at 2030 is kind of annoying.
I have never really understood why people care so much about the change.
You will just wake up one hour later or earlier twice a year, so what? I do that multiple times a week, twice per year isn’t too bad.
I’d say the people in that 24% have a quite valid reason to care.
You obviously don’t suffer from a sensitive circadian rhythm. To that I’d say, lucky you. But there are plenty of people who do suffer. And by the time they finally get used to the time change, it’s time to change again. It’s vicious and disruptive; to more than just scheduling. It has a direct (negative) impact on physical and mental health.
Conversion for metric system is a pita also
Which conversions? Most metric conversions are drastically simpler than their imperial counterparts.
You know the system before timezones was way worse, right? Every town had their own time.