How do the numbers on your clock determine when it’s “okay” to call someone? The only bit that matters is their schedule vs yours. Your ridiculous argument as to why waking up at 2300 to a sunrise would be difficult for people to grasp is extremely ignorant. But who knows, maybe you’re right, maybe the world isn’t ready for something as simple as a universal time. Hell, many people struggle with figuring out how to simply count to 24 in a single day!
Maybe it would be a good time to fix that too and move to decimal time while we’re at it.
I’ve always felt the idea of decimal time was backwards, and that base 60 as a base is far superior. 60 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30. Of course it doesn’t make much difference to a computer, but to people it makes it more likely that we can deal in a simple ratio (third of an hour = 20 minutes). Of course, it would be a far bigger lift to switch number systems.
Yeah 60 indeed has nice numeric properties. So does 24h but IMO it’s far less useful in practice. Apparently the roots are in Egypt. wikipedia.org/wiki/Decan
Each day is composed of 10 hours, each of those of 10 minutes, each of those 100 seconds. There are 100 days in a year.
The difficult part will be modifying Earth’s orbit.
What’s decimal time? 100 hour day, 100 seconds in a minute, etc?
There are different proposals, 10 “hour” day is the traditional one. See wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time
Jesus. It doesn’t even list Vinge’s version… we just count everything in seconds. The ksec (kilosecond) is the unit used to indicate things that will happen in the near future (see you in 3 ksecs). The msec (megasecond) is used much like we use for weeks, and the gsec is used much like we now use decades. Only geologists really use tsecs.
And there’s no need to reinvent the wheel, we can just use UNIX time!
Pretty much. Though in Deepness in the Sky, code archeologists believe that zero seconds dates to the landing on the moon, rather than 1970.
HA…what’s the startdate today again?
Meh, I am unconvinced.
It is 04:25 (“four twenty-five”) there, same as it is here. Does that mean I can call him? I don’t know.
Of course. But instead of asking “what time is it in $location” you just ask “what time do people wake up in $location”. Really quite simple. In fact it is way more simple because when you get 04:25 you don’t need to then say “Ok, I’ll call in 5h, what is that here. That is $time here”. Ok, I’ll let him know I’ll call at 09:25 local time and I’ll put it in my calendar at $time. Instead you just say “Ok, I’ll call at 9:25, I’ll let him know 9:25 and I’ll put 9:25 in my calendar”. And you automatically know that you will still be awake at 9:25 because you know what time you go to bed, you don’t need to convert it back to your time zone (or do the math again adding 5h to your current time) to check.
To address the summary:
causes the question “What time is it there?” to be useless/unanswerable
That is a feature. We can agree on what time it is! This is a huge benefit. No more time-zone conversion errors and people showing up to a meeting 1h apart because someone made a mistake.
necessitates significant changes to the way in which normal people talk about time convolutes timetables, where present means “days” are no longer the same as “days”
I agree. I think this is something that we will need to get used to and the biggest concern about not syncing “day” to the sleep cycle. But you know what?
- This is already a solved problem for 24h shift workers, they seem to figure it out quickly.
- This is already a problem when calling across timezones. You can’t have a “tuesday call” or talk again tomorrow.
It is hard to tell how a whole society will adjust, but I think it will be solved within a couple of years of minor confusion.
complicates both secular and religious law
This seems silly. I’m sure we will figure out how to add a “no trading on sunday” law if we want to.
is a staggering inconvenience for a minimum of five billion people
This is only true if we agree with your other points.
makes it near-impossible to reason about time in other parts of the world
What? how so?
does not mean everybody gets up at the same time, goes to work at the same time, or goes to bed at the same time
Of course it doesn’t, the sun is important and this would be silly.
is not simpler.
That is your opinion.
I feel like most of their objections are pretty easily solved by using solar day terms, which aren’t timezone specific anyway. Morning, late morning, noon, afternoon, evening, night, midnight. If you’re worried about whether to call someone, you’d just look up what 1400 is for their city, and something would tell you: afternoon.
That solves most of his criticism, but some ingrained terminology does become more confusing, particularly the “today” issue.
Perhaps a good middleground would be keeping your local time, but using an “absolute worldwide time” only for scheduling across timezones
Haha this is pretty cool
