
How much is time wrong around the world? (2014) - tempodox
https://blog.poormansmath.net/how-much-is-time-wrong-around-the-world/
======
Aardwolf
As an evening person, personally I find it more optimal if it stays light
until later in the evening, and less light is wasted on morning times like 7am

But now that I think about it, maybe moving time like that also moves around
when other people will be awake/asleep. So what actually defines an evening
person?

-a relationship between when it's light and when it's dark?

-a relationship between when other people are awake and asleep and schedules like typical working hours (a desire to be awake after others went to bed, as opposed to a desire to be awake before others get up in the morning)

-a relationship to the 24 numbers assigned to certain times of the day?

I'm an evening person but especially in winter would like more light in the
evening. So I guess what I really prioritize is being awake after other went
asleep, instead of when it's light/dark, even if it makes me miss out on some
light that I would like to see. Or maybe my biological clock thinks
differently than what my mind wants...

~~~
colechristensen
From what I have experienced, some people have a strong cognitive bias towards
the numbers on a clock, for example, needing to look at a clock in bed to
decide if they are still tired. (or worse getting up happy and awake to be
devastated to learn it is early morning after a few minutes)

People tend to identify themselves as a certain way, and those ideas have a
strong impact on behaviors and desires. Of course it's silly to link how tired
you feel to a clock, but it happens!

If you'd like more light towards the end of your day wake up earlier! (and
sleep earlier) Try to realize that when you feel you want to be awake and
asleep might have a lot more to do with an image of yourself you have attached
to instead of any biological cause.

~~~
staplers

      needing to look at a clock in bed to decide if they are still tired
    

You make a great point here and it almost reminds me of addict behavior. I
would be curious to see which pathways are illuminated in the brain with
regards to 'checking the time' during resting hours.

~~~
kzrdude
To work well, should be “addicted” to our routine, shouldn't we? As in, follow
it almost every day.

~~~
colechristensen
There is probably a lot of philosophy/linguistics/neuroscience to do, but
there is a difference between habit and addiction. Addiction seems like a
toxic shortcut to get what you want out of life, even if the "addiction" is to
a benign behavior like sleep schedule.

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tzs
What is going on with Argentina? It straddles what would be UTC-4 and UTC-5,
so one would expect it to be in one of those time zones, or to be a two time
zone country using both of those, but it is actually in UTC-3 (which is why it
is all deep red in the map).

According to Wikipedia [1]:

> The first official standardization took place on 25 September 1894. The
> official time switched between UTC−4 and UTC−3 from 1920 to 1969, and then
> between UTC−3 and UTC−2 from 1974 to 1993. [...] On 7 March 1993, it was
> fixed at UTC−3, called Argentina Time.

I can sort of see UTC-3 if they felt it was important to be in the same time
zone as Brazil...but I can't even come up with a guess as to how UTC-2 was
ever an option.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Argentina](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Argentina)

~~~
jersully72
I suspect it's their preference for daylight in the winter. Which currently in
Buenos Aires is about 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM.

Worth noting that the provinces have the option of following DST but choose
not to.

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jameshart
It’s interesting that while, as the author notes, the map seems to skew red
overall, with more places opting for a late time zone, the few deep green
areas there are are among the most heavily populated regions in the world -
the northeast US, Japan, central Indonesia, coastal Brazil, Southern
California. This is a typical issue with geographic visualizations. I’d be
interested to see a population histogram for how many people are on late solar
time vs early.

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chipschap
I'm mildly surprised this discussion hasn't brought up the artificiality of
daylight savings time, summer time, and whatever other names it might be
called by around the world. Certainly the concept is prevalent enough.

Leaving aside the arguments about saving energy (I am not knowledgeable enough
to speak to that in any event), daylight savings time seems to be an enormous
confusion factor, especially since (as one example) Europe and North America
have different start and end dates.

On one level it seems that DST is a way of patching a system that is
fundamentally flawed, hence some of the very interesting suggestions in these
discussions about alternative methods of timekeeping. But changing such an
entrenched and widespread standard might be next to impossible.

~~~
dahart
> I'm mildly surprised this discussion hasn't brought up the artificiality of
> daylight savings time

I'm reminded of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "Time is an illusion.
Lunchtime doubly so."

Time zones are artificial too, but the benefits of coordination outweigh the
advantages of sticking to a perfect solar noon.

The thing DST does pretty well is keep sunrise to within an hour of 7:00am
(plus or minus, depending on location) year round. Without DST, sunrise varies
by 3 hours in the US.

> daylight savings time seems to be an enormous confusion factor

It certainly requires people to adjust, two days a year. There is certainly
some small amount of effort related to publishing calendars and having a few
people forget, I suppose. At least, that used to be common before smartphones
and the internet. It seems to be fading over time.

But what is the enormous confusion are you referring to?

It seems like these days, since nearly all clocks and phones are digital and
net-connected, we _could_ , if we wanted, have a continuously adjusting
schedule. That wouldn't reduce confusion, but it's no longer crazy either.

~~~
prerok
I think that the referred confusion is the difference in applying the DST
between Europe and US:

 _Start and end dates vary with location and year. Since 1996, European Summer
Time has been observed from the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in
October; previously the rules were not uniform across the European Union.
Starting in 2007, most of the United States and Canada observe DST from the
second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November, almost two-thirds of
the year._

The problem is that if you're European (like me) and have recurring weekly
meetings with US based coworkers the meetings will be shifted by an hour until
the other party shifts the clock.

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jihadjihad
This sort of thing is always interesting to me. I love how by using the
analemma and the equation of time you can figure out the times of
sunrise/sunset anywhere on the planet for any time of the year [1].

Another interesting thing to read about is the problem of longitude, it's
amazing how clever we've had to be to solve such problems in practice. In
Florence there is a Galileo museum which showcases some of his ideas on how to
compute longitude, namely by using the orbits of Jupiter's moons as a sort of
universal clock to make the calculation possible.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analemma#Times_of_sunrise_and_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analemma#Times_of_sunrise_and_sunset)

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athenot
Is it really desireable to have the apogee of the sun be 12:00? Maybe yes
maybe no: I don't know.

Most businesses work ~3 hours in the morning and ~5 in the afternoon.

From a thermal perspective, there's an inertia and an accumulation effect so
the hottest part of the day is around 5PM, not noon. There may be times when
we want to maximise whatever heat available, or conversely avoid as much heat
as possible.

But in the end, I think it evens out as the culture will simply adjust to what
works best for most people, and not really care about lining up to neat
numbers.

~~~
zhte415
Interesting... the hottest part of the day in what I've experienced, in terms
of thermal accumulation, is around 1-3pm. But I've usually lived on the coast
or within 100km of it; the sea works as a huge normaliser for intraday
temperature.

When several thousand kilometers inland for the first time, the hot days and
cold nights were stark, despite the average temperature being about the same.

Do you live significantly away from a very large body of water?

~~~
Retric
It's also latitude dependent. The amount of sunlight you get at 4:30pm also
depends on time of year and time zone, etc.

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MajorSauce
That was a great read, thanks!

Made me wonder what other thing our civilization could consider starting back
from scratch to adjust to our modern ways of living.

For example, do we really need time to be set as this 365.25d/24h/60m/60s
system? We could have something more convenient/modern/metric?

Same for days of the week and daylight saving time.

I know it would be absolutely impractical and costly, but I like to entertain
the idea of adopting a better system.

~~~
martin-adams
Well, it's hard to change the number of solar days it takes to go around the
sun one full revolution. Anything different and we'd see the seasons shift.

As for number of hours in a day. 24 is very divisible which is better than say
10. You can divide it into 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 24 without fractions.

As for 60 minutes and 60 seconds, these again are very divisible: 1, 2, 3, 4,
5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, and 60.

The more interesting question, should we have chosen base 12 instead of base
10. It would of course be harder to count using your fingers.

~~~
JFFalcon
> It would of course be harder to count using your fingers.

No necessarily. 4 fingers * 3 knuckles per finger make 12, so you can count in
base-12 using only 1 hand. I think the Sumerians (?) used that * 5 fingers on
the other hand to count in base-60, resulting in our base-60 time system.

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chmike
This shows how much staying with UTC time or adopt the International Atomic
Time (TAI) is a false problem. As time references changed because of the
telegraph and railways, computers will make us change from UTC to TAI. The
question is when.

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drngdds
Very tangential, but it's pretty annoying how so many articles on the internet
unnecessarily make things bold.

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nicolas_t
Having lived in Japan and China (shanghai) which are both wrong in the
opposite way of Spain and lived in France and Spain, I find that living in the
red zones is really much more comfortable and a lovely way to live.

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coding123
There will be 45 suggestions to change how we track time in this thread.

~~~
colechristensen
My suggestion is people try to put much more distance between themselves and
time.

~~~
s3m4j
> _" We can solve any problem by introducing an extra level of indirection."_

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_softwar...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_software_engineering)

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Bromskloss
> 2014

So add four years to all values, I presume.

