Timezones suck too.
I don’t get it. Why do we need timezones anyhow?
Why doesn’t the whole world just run off a 24hr clock, and people just get used to going to work by say, 03:00 and getting home at 12:00, then going to bed around 17:00? Seriously.
If we didn’t have timezones, scheduling would be tons easier. No one would be confused about what time it is. The perception of time would be constant, and more independent of night / day. In a world where all types of businesses are increasingly becoming round-the-clock operations, is centering a clock on the cycle of night / day really that important? No.
Think about how it is now. You get a meeting invite for a location in California but you live in New York. You either need to fly there, or teleconference in. The meeting is scheduled for 3:30PM. Is that 3:30 PM California or New York time?! It depends on who scheduled it and where they sit. What a load of malarkey.
Now if you got a meeting invite that said it’s at 07:30, you’d know exactly what time it is, regardless of where you are in the world.
I understand that we have UTC and GMT just for this purpose. But people don’t rely on that. They don’t know it. I don’t get it.
The only thing that really demands timezones from a business case is push-style television, where the schedule is mandated based upon the availability of the viewership. If the timezones didn’t exist, they would still time-shift shows. But instead of everyone knowing around the world that Law and Order comes on at 16:00: in New York it may, but in L.A. it might be on at 19:00. We already do these conversions, everyday. Why not make it easier and get rid of this AM / PM junk and this crappy notion of timezones while we’re at it?
Don’t get me started on “daylight savings time”. That’s bull. The solution isn’t to shift the clock. The solution is to shift your business’s start time. DUH! It shouldn’t be up to the government to mandate that I change my schedule so that I can be more energy efficient. I think it’s totally unfair, stupid, and ridiculous that they’ll use that excuse to impose time shifting on citizens, but they won’t outlaw SUV’s, monster trucks, etc. in the name of being more energy efficient.
Where does it end? Huh? Why did they stop with timezones? Why not extend this to the next level and impose that all travellers on the road between 6:30 and 7:45 AM must be carpooling.
I guess the question you really need to ask on this is:
Do you really care that the sun will rise between 6 and 8 AM? as opposed to 2 o’clock to 4 o’clock?
I really doubt that you do. Your _perception_ however, your learned experience, well it does.
I’m sick of pandering to nonsensical perceptions of measurements devised by mankind. This is stupid. If I can’t get rid of clocks and calendars all together (which I would consider a great thing to do), then the least we can do is get rid of people’s stupid perceptions about night / day and the association they have with a clock (which is purely nostalgic, symbolic, and impractical) and purge humanity of this “timezone” heap of dung.
August 21st, 2006 at 3:44 pm
Wow someone didn’t get up on the wrong side of the bed today . . . albeit in both of today’s posts you make great points – you might wnat to “tone it down a bit.”
August 21st, 2006 at 6:49 pm
Ah, what’s the logic of timezones? I agree, to some extent that what you’re suggesting we do (all go to a single timezone, or GMT) makes sense in terms of coordinating everyone’s schedule around the world, based on the fact that people all over the world are doing things in business.
But that timezones don’t need to exist (at all) for a business sense is not true, and actually timezones were created for a very logical reason back in the 1800′s that related very much to business: trains. Before the advent of timezones, every place you were had their local noon based on the sun being highest in the sky. Well, that means a town n miles away is.. a minute or two off… this made it worse than a nightmare for contention about “The train is late/early/on time!” in that it caused a problem because of the single-threadedness of railroad tracks (well, close to it) in that a single piece of track can’t allow two trains to go in opposite directions at the same time, or any thing that causes a problem where you have a collision. I’m not absolutely certain if it was the first use of semaphores, but they have been used by hand using special flags for railroad switching operations: in effect, humans (in the past) were threading primitives to keep trains from having collisions. Although that’s likely all driven by mechanical means these days for trains, nothing has really changed that much.
And yes, I feel the pain of “What time is it in MA?” when I deal with my current employment situation, or in Japan, or Colorado….
Oh, and another argument against daylight savings time: if you’re a farmer, imagine trying to reason with animals, such as cows that are milked at the same time every morning: “Hey, we changed the schedule, so don’t bother me to milk you until this time!” with the problem that no animals I’m aware of know how to interpret clocks humans use to track time. I do know from experience with cats, however, that they don’t need a clock, because they’ll wake you up exactly when experience tells them to (usually feeding time) anyway!
August 21st, 2006 at 10:39 pm
>Why do we need timezones anyhow?
Well, back in the day, noon (when the sun is the highest in the sky) would be slightly different in each town and the trains didn’t run on time, or were on the track at the same time.
Well this wouldn’t do, if we had time zones that were more or less (okay less) in sync with actual noon it would solve that problem.
>The meeting is scheduled for 3:30PM. Is that 3:30 PM >California or New York time?!
Adding a EST or PST would almost be something you would do automatically if you were a globe spanning company.
If not, they should fire the person didn’t include it
Day and night (and time!) are linked to circadian rhythms.
I think it would be a hard thing to have everyone get up while it’s still dark and go to work or school.
It might require light therepy, which is pretty much sitting under a bright light.
I myself have wondered why day didn’t start at sunrise.
Shouldn’t the “day” start at sunrise?
Why don’t we have metric time in multiples of 10? Why 24 hours, why not divide the 24 into 10 equal pieces and that into 10 equal pieces et cetera?
I googled it, and the Egyptians used base 12 for a number of reasons. You can use your thumb to count your 4 fingers and 8 lines/joints.
We also might want to get rid of 12 months. Should we also have metric months or lunar months of 28 days? I guess we could also have metric weeks.
Your idea is a good idea, but it would probably go over as well as the metric system in the USA.
China does well enough.
August 22nd, 2006 at 6:45 am
Bryan you should be glad about differences and non-compatibility, because when everything would be set to 1 standard, you wouldn’t necessairily have a job in the IT business : )
August 22nd, 2006 at 9:12 am
If all my ideas were adopted and I was out of a job, we’d be in a utopian society, and I’d have myself a nice solid rock house carved into a hillside where I could hunt mountain lions with my spear, chuck rocks at squirrels, and pick the meat off their bones over an open fire for dinner.
Of course, my little cave would have solatubes, running water, DC power distribution, and would have multiple power sources running a PC with a low wattage processor. :-p
Yeah. It’ll never happen.
August 22nd, 2006 at 9:07 pm
I don’t think it took me 3 hours to make my post, but I swear JT’s post wasn’t there when I posted. Maybe I went away and never hit refresh.
I’m guessing I meant to say you could use your thumb to count all 12 joints on 4 fingers.
I’ve never met anyone with 2 joints per finger.
Daylight saving time saves energy in the evening, but in a world where you get up whenever I don’t think it matters much.
So how much do the people that make solatubes pay you to say how much solatubes rock? I want a piece of that action Solatubes rock !
-Michael “solatubes rock” Summers