
The Day of Two Noons - danso
https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=730727038
======
FearNotDaniel
File under the same category as:

\- everyone switches to Dvorak keyboards

\- British motorists start driving on the right*

\- United States adopts the metric system

\- Daily Telegraph admits a hard Brexit may have negative consequences for the
population as a whole

* yes, I know, Dagen H, but 2019 UK is very different from 1967 Sweden

~~~
henrikschroder
Well, switching to metric and switching to right-hand driving would be good
things, painful in the short perspective, but extremely beneficial in the long
perspective.

Abolishing time zones is just an incredibly dumb idea, and the drawbacks
heavily outweigh the benefits if you actually think about it. So I'm actually
glad that human inertia makes it impossible to do.

~~~
bostonpete
I wonder how beneficial switching to the metric system would really be. It's
trivial to convert between systems if need be and pretty much all serious
engineering/science work (where confusion can be costly) is done using the
metric system these days anyways.

~~~
henrikschroder
The imperial system has shortcomings for small units, which means that regular
people will encounter grams/millimeters/milliliters in their daily lives, so
they are effectively using a hybrid system already, which is just the worst of
both worlds.

Yes, converting is technically trivial, but you still have to reach for a
calculator to do it.

~~~
wlesieutre
_> The imperial system has shortcomings for small units_

Don't forget the medium and large units!

I guess miles on their own work fine, but it'd be nice if someone could say
"2000 feet" and I didn't have to think about how many miles that means.

And our two speed measures of feet per second and miles per hour are close to
equivalent (1 fps is about 0.7 mph) but nobody knows that to convert it in
their heads. It just happens that 3600 seconds is the same order of magnitude
as 5280 feet.

Not that metric is totally better in that regard since they're stuck with
minutes and seconds too. There's 86,400 seconds in a day, maybe when we're
making this big calendar change we can switch it over to 100,000 seconds at
the same time.

Or we could change miles to be 3600 feet so that feet per seconds and miles
per hour are equivalent. Added bonus, that's not too far off a kilometer.

~~~
asavadatti
0.7 and 1 are not close to equivalent even when speaking informally. The
difference is the same as driving normal highway speed vs license suspension
(or jail) speed

~~~
wlesieutre
I don't mean they're close enough to be interchangeable, just that they're
close enough that it's dumb to have separate scales.

They're useful for having people understand speeds at different scales, but
only because the different scales of units line up stupidly.

Of course the effort to change it isn't worth it, it just makes you wish we'd
got it right the first time around.

------
gwbas1c
I wish most of the comments weren't so snarky.

I work in a team distributed throughout the globe. It's very difficult to talk
about "time" because everyone's timezone is so different.

What would be nice is if our computers always showed two times. The local time
in a larger font, and then UTC time in a smaller font.

This way, when we need to talk about time in a global context, we can use UTC.
But, because most of us live our lives in local time, we don't need to say
something silly like, "I'm getting lunch at 22:00".

~~~
asdfman123
>What would be nice is if our computers always showed two times

It's pretty easy to set up on Windows and I can't imagine it's hard on other
OSes either.

I did that when I worked remotely so I wouldn't constantly have to translate
time zones.

------
huffmsa
> _Oh, my goodness, there 'd be a couple of years of bumps and grinds as
> people readjusted their schedules._

Except for the literal billions of computers which will need replacing and
trillions of lines of code you're going to need to rewrite, sure.

And redeploy the entire GPS system. And the code running on the mainframe in
the back room of the basement which no one has touched in literal decades.

Seems.... Risky

~~~
henrikschroder
"readjusted their schedules" is such a ridiculous hand-waving away of serious
problems with the idea.

One of the biggest problems is that weekdays completely cease to make sense.
With timezones, the day of the week changes at midnight, when most people are
asleep. You wake up in the morning, it's a new weekday, and it's the same
weekday for as long as the sun is in the sky.

If we abolish timezones and choose UTC as the one time, the day of the week
will change at 5pm in San Francisco. Say that you have an establishment that
is normally closed on Sundays. It's 4pm on a Saturday, do you close in an hour
because it is then Sunday? Or do you change your "schedule" so that your
establishment is closed on SundayMondays instead? Or perhaps you keep it
closed on SaturdaySundays? Because the concept of "Sunday" doesn't make sense
anymore, "Sunday" is no longer a contiguous period of normal waking hours.

In San Francisco. In London it's business as usual. But in Sydney the day of
the week changes at 10am. When is "Sunday morning"? 9am Sunday morning is the
day after 10am Sunday morning. Every week has two Sunday mornings now. (And
two Monday mornings!) Which one of them did you mean?

Adjusting computer systems is much, much simpler than getting humans to accept
this idiotic system.

~~~
z2
And even if those adjustments are somehow accepted, travelling anywhere
longitudinally will be a world of pain to the traveler, to re-learn what
should be common sense on the 'local' time to wake up, time for lunch, days of
the weekend...

~~~
henrikschroder
If only there was a system, some kind of longitudinal "zones" maybe, that
would help your smartphone auto-adjust so it could show you when things like
working hours, lunch, afternoon, etc occurs in the place you're in...

------
tengbretson
I did a lot of scientific research and I've come to the conclusion that if we
all just agreed to stop coming up with ideas that start with the phrase "if we
all just agree to X." we'd stop wasting so much of each other's time.

------
fjfaase
In Urumqi they are using Beijing time, but doing everything two hours later.
The official working hours are from 10:00 to 14:00 and 16:00 to 20:00. Even
after being there for two weeks, it kept confusing me. Every time I looked at
a clock (and you do this many times a day), it took me some mental effort to
'translate' the time on the clock to my own time of when I am used to do
certain things. And this was only a two hour shift. Imagine if it would be 7
hours.

------
lalaithion
[https://qntm.org/abolish](https://qntm.org/abolish)

------
amluto
> STEVE HANKE: You can trade 24 hours a day, almost around the clock in gold,
> currencies, stocks and everything else under the sun. And those are all
> time-stamped using Universal Time.

A surprising amount of finance is time stamped in New York time. Just for fun,
Auckland time gets used a bit, too.

------
telesilla
"William F. Allen realized that time is not just some objective measurement of
where the sun is in the sky. It is also about the needs of society"

As I wait for my remote team member half-a-world away to get online so we can
have our meeting and I can go to lunch while she has her breakfast, this rings
so true.

------
jtlienwis
I thought about this. My watch needs to tell me (no matter were I am, by using
GPS) what time are the most common for meals and what time is my meeting with
the locals. What numbers it assigns to these are not material, but UGMT would
make the most sense. I once made a trip south of Chicago. Got to my
destination in Indiana. I could not make sense of the miles per hour I
realized for the trip. Then later on I realized that Indiana has two time
zones and I had gained an extra hour between Gary and Indianapolis.

------
sandworm101
[https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/invention-...](https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/invention-
of-standard-time-feature)

The invention of standard time was more complex, more international, than
america's NPR would have us believe.

On july 1st, let us also remember that basketball was invented by a canadian.
(Go raptors).

------
henrikschroder
Obligatory: [https://qntm.org/abolish](https://qntm.org/abolish)

~~~
emiliobumachar
Definitely a great resource. It explains steady-state drawbacks of universal
time, that is, drawbacks that would keep existing even after everyone has
adapted.

------
oeuviz
_Sometimes the time changed every few minutes._

Wait, what did it do in between?

------
QuercusMax
Anyone else catch that Helm seems to think that meteorology has to do with
shooting stars?

~~~
tantalor
"40% chance of meteor showers this evening."

------
madengr
GMT is used in ham radio too. Gives me an excuse for s 24 hour watch.

------
qserasera
I think we should have two numerical time zones. One should be sun time and
the other should be world time. Sun time could eventually become obsolete if
not helpful for workdays and sleeping habits.

------
nmeofthestate
This is a great idea. While we're at it, we should standardise "up" so
everyone is on the same page regardless of their location. "Up" should be the
vector pointing at Alpha Centauri. This would make it so much easier for
people around the world to talk about directions.

~~~
chicob
A "vector pointing at Alpha Centauri" is an incomplete definition, since a
vector has a magnitude and direction. Also, Alpha Centauri has a declination
of –60° 50′ 02.3737″, which makes it necessary to adjust for the time of the
day. That would make people dizzy, which is unfortunate.

So I propose the following very simple definition:

Up - The direction defined by the position vector of Polaris with reference to
the center of the Earth (not to be confused with North).

Down - The direction opposite of Up (See also: South).

~~~
munificent
_> since a vector has a magnitude and direction._

How is the direction represented?

~~~
archgoon
A normalized vector; i.e. a vector with magnitude 1.

