Microblog Memes

Unix time or bust!

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.

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.

You're basically advocating everyone switches to to UTC which is kind of already used when organizing online events

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.

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

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.

Especially in programming

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.

LIMMEH

We all know earth is a mobius strip.

I nearly dropped this in c/mildlyinteresting, but I also thought it was too cool.

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.

Okay the city I live in has pretty much the same graph, and speaking from experience it's not as bad as you'd think at first glance. It's still dark at night, just for fewer hours.

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

That's also because the Netherlands are wildly in the wrong timezone. Especially during daylight savings.

Where I live we call that "sunset". Pretty exotic

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: