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Whoa, imagine being on the line between day and night!
Is this gonna be on the test?
Round earth propaganda 🙄
We all know earth is a mobius strip.
Netherlands was pretty cool in the summer. We were chilling in Amsterdam night one and realized it was 1130PM and basically dusk.
That’s also because the Netherlands are wildly in the wrong timezone. Especially during daylight savings.
Bah it’s only natural they’d be in the timezone meant for Berlin. Next you’ll say Seville shouldn’t be in Belgrade’s timezone…
holy shit Dublin doesn’t even have nighttime from May 15 to July 30. it’s astronomical twilight all night
Wait wtf‽
Many people forget how far north Europe is because of the mild climate we have. Like countries like Ireland and Netherlands are as far north as Newfoundland. And these two countries rarely get heavy snowfall like Newfoundland. And Saint Tropez is on the same latitude as Vermont.
So the English went pretty far south to wind up in a frozen hellscape with what are basically hurricanes but with snow
It’s pretty scary when you think about it: Europe’s mild climate seems to be extremely fragile, dependent on the aligning of a few major forces.
Those few major forces are slowly weakening. We’ll have Canadian winters in Europe. Which, hey, I missed snow but also the gas prices in England will have me “wake” up frozen dead one morning
Chaps in Glasgow at 1am trying to sleep
LIMMEH
I only see 1 chap in Glasgow at 1 am trying to sleep. Where are the others?
Are they in the dark part of the picture?
Part of me wishes we didn’t have timezones at all. Like normalizing the idea that some places have mornings at 22:00 and others have it at 07:00. Would definitely make my life easier not dealing with timezones anymore.
EDIT: I want to be clear, this is me pining for a world where any date or time is aligned without the need for conversion. It’s impractical, skips the caveats that timezones help fix, and it’s not really how we, as humans, think of or experience time in a day. Some of y’all really jumped on this, but it’s not a serious suggestion. I do really appreciate the thought experiment and interesting discussion of it though!
Proposal: have a shorter way to write “global time” (or you could have, say, 4 quarter-global times), the same way we have C, F and K for temperature, then make that a more common way of communicating time.
Yeah UTC kinda does that but nobody uses it like that. Shorten it to U and it’s much punchier. Also abolish daylight savings, too confusing.
If you don’t wanna bias to europeans too much, use the international date line.
Without timezones, not only would the whole world live on the same time, but also on the same date. So, the sun comes up at 22:00, and then two hours later it’s the next day. So, which part of the world will volunteer to have their date change in the middle of the day? I don’t think the world would ever agree on anything like that.
Not just one place but almost everywhere in the world will click over to the next day during regular sun-up or just after sun-down hours. Only a few places will be lucky enough to have the date change during regular sleeping hours.
I mean, that’s already kind of an issue in the sense of determining what day something happened when using a timezone.
I think timezones help give a sense of shared “day” in the sense of when the sun is roughly meant to rise and set. I also think we’re super used to them and I don’t expect my opinion to change our relationship with time.
That said, timezones are wildly inconsistent and often difficult to track. This goes doubly for places that practice daylight savings of some kind. I like the simplicity of ideas like UTC and stuff.
I’m a software engineer, and we have a product that depends a lot on recording the time that something happened. In the past, one engineer coded the on-device agent using local time, and later on, a different engineer coded the ETL server code using UTC. It’s a huge headache, made even worse by the fact that the infrastructure for that server is in local time for a different time zone.
With a more normalized UTC, I think my life would definitely be a lot easier.
I thought that too. The problem is that somewhere will have their day go through into tomorrow… Which will cause so much confusion
This makes things way more complicated.
When are timezones relevant? When dealing with people far away, or when traveling for longer distances.
In the first case it is far more easier to remember that John is +3 ours from you and Julia is -2 hours, than to have to remember when John gets up and when Julia gets up, and when they go to sleep and so on. Remembering “about my shedule but +/-x” is far easier.
In terms of flights it might seem easier at first, however once you land and realize that 13:40 means the middle of the night and everything being closed, you will quickly wish differently. Imagine for every further away place you visit you have to learn how the UTC translates to local opening hours, instead of just rolling with local time.
I mean it it makes travelling a teeny bit more complex to remember but for communication and coordination across time zones… It’s way better that way.
Maybe we could refer to places by when solar noon is for them in UTC.
Maybe we could refer to places by when solar noon is for them in UTC.
So that instead of knowing a simple +/- hours you have to first calculated it off of 12?
I think it doesn’t make communication across timezones easier. Instead of everyone rolling with a comparable schedule and just adjusting for the time difference, you will have to remember many more local schedules as you lack an intuitive understanding.
Also solar noon is even worse of a metric, because it would completely fracture timezones. Timezones already are a compromise, so that people in a more connected zone can work with each other more easier, effectively demanding the people on the east of that time zone to stay at work later and in the west of that time zone to rise up earlier relative to the sun.
I didn’t mean solar noon like, exactly. But close-ish. Like timezones are now.
I think it would be equally easy to coordinate across timezones. Nobody is likely to ask about “solar noon,” they’re just going to ask about the time of the things they’re trying to coordinate.
“Let’s meet for lunch when you get in town!”
“Great! When do you guys have lunch?”
“Around 16:00.”
“Oh, ok. That’s around dinner time for me.”
Easy-peasy. The biggest reason it seems weird to us is that we are used to the current way. There’s no reason our brains couldn’t get used to (for instance) waking up at 01:00 and going to bed at 17:00 if that was the normal we had all grown up with.
Though, that said, there was someone on Lemmy a few months ago who absolutely lost their mind at the idea and verbally abused me about the very concept a few weeks ago, so you know… your mileage may vary.
I have an opposite yet equally radical proposal. Time zones are subdivided into infinitesimally small segments of longitude, effectively making them continuous. They are assigned to individual persons based in their current location on the globe and are updated regularly through geolocalization services like GPS. When you move, your time zone changes as well. Have a meeting at 10am? No, you don’t. Living in UTC-8:00? It’s UTC-7:58:33.0371 in your living room now. Going to work on your bike? Prepare for time travel. No GPS connection? The exhilarating sensation of timelessness.
That’s actually what it used to be like before time zones. Every town would have its own time. Wouldn’t be much of a problem when you had to travel to the next town by foot, horse or cart.
But I think when trains started to become more common they had to synchronise times.
Great, that means I can sell this idea to conservatives (trains = bad).
You’re basically advocating everyone switches to to UTC which is kind of already used when organizing online events
Except for US people, of course.
To a degree, yeah, but timezone-aware times are the overwhelming norm for most people. I’ve had to work through timezones a lot when planning with online friends and stuff outside of a planner or something to do the conversion for me. I’d be cool with everyone using UTC though.
You mean one timezone, not no timezones. Without timezones everyone uses their local time, just like in the 19th century when getting off a train meant setting your watch to the stations clock first thing
This only makes sense for robots without circadian rhythm and for that we set the system time on servers to UTC and just read the timezone in your browser for display you needy meatpuppet
Huh?
Your circadian rythm would be unaffected. Your clock might just say “07:00” at solar noon. You’d adjust. It changes numbers on a clock not like, your day to day schedule.
Timezones were necessary once trains became prevalent. Having a geographical region all in yhe same time allowed for actual schedules that could be kept.
This comment also seems to discount the seasonal short days due to axial tilt.
Timezones are only necessary if people demand that 12:00 be noon. This doesn’t have to be. Neither does the wall-clock time have anything to do with day length. Did you even read the comment you responded to?
Timezones were created so that you didn’t travel west for 4 hours and arrive before you left.
Edit: do you think every town having their own time was helpful?
Arriving before you left was way too cool to be allowed.
Either you’re illiterate or you’re a troll. Either way I’m done arguing with you.
Nah dude, what replaces the timezones? We live in an interconnected world. Timezones or a mechanism similar is nesscary. Have you actually left the area you grew up in or do you not understand time?
The general suggestion is to just use UTC everywhere. Ask if you don’t know what UTC is.
Yeah, and it’s a dumb idea. Did everyone here forget about sundails? You get rid of timezones and that’s what Imma use.
Not having everyone set their clocks to show 12:00 at their local solar noon became necessary. Time zones as such weren’t and aren’t really necessary, except to keep alive the convention that 12:00 is noon (in the winter half of the year for the countries with daylight savings).
Especially in programming
So, how do you schedule with multiple parties in multiple regions when everyone has their own time? Do we go back to the horse and buggy where if you called the town over at 5pm and they are 6pm but the are 20km away?
Whats the work around here?
Right now, everyone does have their own time. In the current system, if someone in Boston, at 3pm, were to call up someone in Seattle and ask what time it is, the person in Seattle would say noon.
OP is proposing a single time zone for the whole world. So when it’s 15:00 in Boston, it’s also 15:00 in Seattle and even 15:00 in Tokyo. It would make sense logically, but from a daily life perspective, it’d be pretty terrible - noon would no longer mean the sun is directly overhead, except for one small part of the world.
It would definitely remove the concept of noon being around when the sun is at its zenith in the sky. I think we kind of have a shared idea of what a waking day is, so from that perspective this change is a terrible idea.
I actually think it would be kinda cool in a way to have people have different relationships with what “time” or “day” it is. I’m looking at it very optimistically when I say that though.
Why would it be terrible if noon is not when the sun is directly overhead? It’s not like there’s some natural law telling us that it must be 12 o’clock. So what convenience does it provide?
0 might as well be when you wake up and start your day, so you actually sleep during the end of your day, instead of a bit at the end and a bit at the start.
So OP is trying to start a fight. Who gets noon overhead? Because your gonna get shooting wars over that, or you’re go na spend the rest of your life in the dark because corporate is on the otherside.of the planet and 0800 is start time.
you’re go na spend the rest of your life in the dark because corporate is on the otherside.of the planet and 0800 is start time.
Huh???
Just because everyone would be using the same clock doesn’t mean we’d all be awake at the same time or suddenly forget that the day is different at different places on the globe.
Let’s say there’s a chain store that’s normally open 8am to 8pm. That’s 4 hours before noon to 8 hours after. Now in our new system the whole world uses the same clock/time. Solar noon in your area now happens at 05:00. So the store’s new hours are 01:00 to 13:00. And the one on the other side of the country might be 03:00 to 15:00.
This may make travelling a bit more complex but it would make coordination and communication across time zones in our interconnected world easier.
I’m not saying that switching to this is a great idea, we’re already used to our current system. I just think it wouldn’t be as big of a deal as you think.
This kinda already happens in China. The whole country uses one time zone, despite being as wide as 5 time zones. And it’s based on Beijing wayyyy in the east. Solar noon is like 3-4pm on the western side.
I’m sorry I’m trying to start a fight? How did you interpret my comment that way?
I’m not actually advocating for this. I just hate dealing with timezones. 🤷♀️
Well it sounds like younare trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist using a technique that is non viable.
There are problems that exist with the current setup. I’ve probably spent around a 1000 hours at my current job dealing with timezone issues in data.
You sure took it that way, champ.
Do you mean for example planning an online meeting? That would be way easier than now, right? Now everyone’s time is called differently. In the proposed system, you’d just say “let’s meet at 9”. Everyone would connect at what is called 9 in their part of the world - easy. It would be different parts of the day for each of them, just like it is always at such meetings.
Hey, let’s change everything about society because one person doesn’t like timezones…
No one is saying we need to change society. We’re having a fun discussion here. Calm down.
I am being calm. Don’t be that person.
Changing how the timekeeping system *works for the entire planet WILL change all of society and thinking otherwise is shortsighted.
Oh no, the adult entered the room, no more fun allowed. Yes, I like thinking about world-changing stuff. It’s fun if you don’t immedately reject it for not being realistically implementable. Try it, it’s enjoyable.
Ah yes, can’t have a differing opinion and voice it or I’ll ruin your fun…
FFS.
I’ve been in Ireland during this time of the year and boy you couldn’t tell by the cloud cover.
Pretty sure the cloud cover is just to save processing power on the twilight rendering, much easier to just apply a static flat light source to everything
they did the same thing during the victorian era with the smoke stacks, to save on horizon rendering. Things were so much faster and elegant back then
holy fuck that is actually so fucking cool
I nearly dropped this in c/mildlyinteresting, but I also thought it was too cool.
Wait until you hear about the Arctic circle…
tomorrow is going to be the first sunset in kiruna since may.
here’s an old photo taken sometime after midnight the 6th of june 2016:
Beautiful!
not mine, i stole it from flickr :P also i’m now not sure that it’s actually midnight, because there’s a photosphere of that exact place on google maps and the compass is confusing me. i think the wall is to the southwest, which would make the sun to the north-northwest but the compass shows the wall as being east-west. annoyingly the shed isn’t visible on the satellite image.
…and now i’ve spent way too long looking at pictures of a place i haven’t been to for almost 20 years.
In short: it’s not even a circle.
Proof there is no god
Almost as if the sun sets earlier in winter or something 🤔
But Africa is in the dark AF
Proof that the earth is flat
Ah yes, the 'Mericas
