Why must we change?Follow

So what? It's an arbitrary point in time, which approximates sunrise in any given geographical area. It's not like we're talking about light sensors or anything. It's geography and time offsets done by computer. Which is more than "close enough" for the purposes needed. It allows us to effectively always have maximized daylight savings benefits for retail and leisure industries, set in a way that is useful to farming industries, while eliminating large sudden time changes which cause disruption. Constant small adjustments will not even be noticed. I mean, you don't notice them now, do you?

The revolution of the earth in respect to sunrise isn't a constant (cuz our axis is angled in respect to the sun). So everyone's sunrise time doesn't progress evenly.

Then of course without time zones your time is dependent on whatever location you might be at. If you like to sleep in, make sure you live east of your work place.

Wouldn't it be easier just to eliminate DST?

More importantly, if the sun never sets in Alaska all summer, does Thursday ever end?

Why can't summer ever start on a Saturday? It always gets hard to work around 274 o'clock.

Comes with a free IV Drip Kit.

It would be pretty much going back to the old "town clock tower" model, except way stupider because as mentioned, unlike noon, sunrise can vary quite a bit because of obstructions even in a local area where otherwise there would be little difference in time. It's way easier to mark the zenith than the rise.

It used to be each town pretty much set their own time by the local "noon" as in Sun at zenith.

When railways were brought in, that became impractical in terms of scheduling. That's when modern time zones were brought in. Anyway that's what an essay by Isaac Asimov that I read in a science fiction magazine taught me... so take with as many grains of salt as you'd prefer.

I should scan it in and post it for funsies.



Edited, Mar 14th 2014 12:29pm by Olorinus

Nah, @#%^ em.

Edited, Mar 14th 2014 4:26pm by Xsarus

I mostly hide in my office and sip coffee until other people waddle in.

You're all luddites I say! Yup. There you go. Afraid of new ideas.



Yup. Just like that. Except that there's not one clock tower, but each person has their own clock, which automatically syncs up with all the others based on standards for what the time is based on where you are geographically. As I already pointed out, it doesn't matter what exactly we say is "sunrise" as long as all clocks agree on a specific method of calculating sunrise in each location on the earth relative to epoc time. It's not like you're going to have people standing out on their decks waiting for the sun to rise and then setting their watches based on that.



No. That's more or less correct. The need for standard time arose out of a need to coordinate arrivals and departures for trains. For the first time, man traveled at a fast enough speed where local time mattered. And the need to schedule trains traveling on the same lengths of track kinda necessitated being able to make sure that people in town B knew when a train traveling from town A to town C would be passing by.

Time zones arose out of the need to have standard "local" time be reasonably consistent to the day/night cycle. We could just all use Zulu time or something, and never have any issues. But then the time when businesses open and close would change based on where you are. It's purely about human convention with regard to timezones. There's no reason not to just say "stores in NY open at Midnight UMT and close at 8AM" except for the human need to align our clocks to daylight.


The point is that from a scheduling point of view, as long as there's a common time that all the systems involved in scheduling use (which for computers is epoc time, no matter how they express that to the humans reading them), then you have solved the original train problem (as well as planes, emails, meetings, etc). We don't need timezones anymore except for humans needing time to match "local time", so why not go back to a true local time system, and let computers handle the scheduling in the background for us?

It's not the 18th century anymore. I'm just saying that maybe we should look for a better way to do this.

But what if I want my own personal mini timezone?

Notional rate up.

Thanks!