Radical idea - why doesn’t everyone use the same 24hr clock everywhere. Locally you can set business hrs to the middle of daylight for you location. Yes you will have to get used to your morning being at 01:00 and someone on the other side of the world getting up at 13:00, but that is so much easier than calculating timezones.
You would never have to change your clocks to keep up with daylight or change your watch travelling, or figure out what time everyone is taking about when co ordinating with people internationally.
China is a fine example of how this fails in practise. Officially, the whole country is on Beijing time. In practise, this doesn’t work so good at a 4 hour real offset.
Pfft. Southerner!
(I’m about an hour north of 45th)
I mean, we have that. You can always express times in GMT or UT if you want, like astronomers do. For everyone else though it just means you have to do the same calculation to tell if someone is awake or not – or at lunch, or enjoying their evening at home – which is kind of important for coordinating.
With time zones, things get confused even more easily when setting up meetings. I think a universal 24 hr clock would make a great deal of sense. One would have to check daylight difference vs the person you want to meet with, but not time zone and whether that time zone moves seasonally with yours or is offset seasonally. I just had three different people mess up a meeting this week because of confusion between Mountain Time, Pacific, and Arizona’s weirdness in-between. Whereas if we’d all agreed to meet at 21:00, it would have been just fine.
Sure, but then you do have to remember a different start, lunch, and end time for each office. Likewise you wouldn’t have to change your watch when you travel to Singapore…but then do you have any idea how to set your alarm so as to be up when the shops are open? And when the banks might close, and when the restaurants might close? Instead of having just one measurement that tells you what the time of day feels like there.
To be honest though, I’ve both worked and chatted with people in both Europe and North America, and so long as they remember to specify the time zone they’re talking about I’ve never actually had much trouble. So that seems like an easier answer to me.
I have you beat with slightly over 60°, but I suspect @vermes82 has us both beat handily.
Okay, so the first step to fix this would be to make sure the Earth rotates at a constant, fixed speed. Obviously.
Could this be done by changing the Moon’s orbit and/or mass, or maybe getting an additional Moon (with a mass that matters; I seem to recall that Earth already has a teensy-weensy second Moon)?
ETA:
Maybe I should talk to the International Earth Rotation Service (IERS) first; this should be right up their alley.
Helsinki is in the deep south ~60.16°.
Finnmark and Troms have entered the chat…
Where fucking everything is “Europe’s northernmost [enter trivial thing]”.
It’s funny 'cause it’s true, though.
Hello neighbor!
It sounds like you might be interested in .beats Internet Time
https://www.swatch.com/en-us/internet-time.html
strangely it didn’t catch on
Mom and I bought a beautiful multi-lingual Hungarian horsey calendar from an ebay seller. Hungarians’ weeks start on Monday, which makes much more sense but occasionally fucked with our heads when referring to that calendar.
It’s really fucked up when the US goes on DST before the UK does, or returns to standard before they do. US Eastern Time is normally 5 hours behind UK time, but when our DST precedes theirs, it’s a 4 hour difference until they go on Summer Time.
The denizens of a UK site & chatroom I hung out on found it terribly amusing whenever I’d say, “We’re/I’m 5 hours behind you.”
FTFY.
Maybe another entry for The List. I’m waiting for the inevitable discussion.There could be a dedicated topic for that. I suggest the title “Calenders: a Dvorak keyboard type discussion”.
You’d have that problem with almost everything that is based on Greg’s calendar and wasn’t printed in (or for) North America.
[pan over to ANSI INCITS 30-1997 (R2008) and NIST FIPS PUB 4-2, huddled together in a corner, whimpering]
Well, it was an honest mistake, since the calendar was Hungarian - the primary language it used was Hungarian, it was printed in Hungary, and it was set up that way.