Personally, it would be brilliant if we'd just go to permanent daylight savings time nationwide. The transition is hard on the kids and living in the northern part of the country, the extra daylight is appreciated.
As a parent of young children, we dread changing the clocks & curse the evil people who came up with this terrible idea.
If Dante's Inferno were to be written today, their would be a 10th Circle for those who came up with daylight savings time. It would involve the sound of screaming children, important appointments & clocks that change at random.
The people who came up with it were people living in more agrarian times, when your kids wouldn't be screaming, they'd be up watering the chickens and helping you out around the farm before day-break no matter what the hour of the day.
I switched my own "native" time format to 24 hours years ago, in my head and on all my personal devices. Now I'm able to convert between the two formats effortlessly, and doing mental math on times is easier when I don't have to mix in a bunch of modulo-12 operations.
Interestingly, in the rest of the world people have been using both systems interchangeably for many years without giving any thought to it (after kindergarten anyway).
In Europe we use the 24-hour system to write time, but a 12-hour system to speak about it. So you're invited to dinner on Saturday at 6 (nobody in their right mind would show up at 0600). Everybody learns at an early age that 4 o'clock in the afternoon is 16, 5 is 17, etc. It's easy when there are analog clocks in all public, walkable spaces, as well as in the kitchen and/or living room.
In French, we say "viens à 21 heures," or "come at 21 hours," quite literally. Yes, "hours" is a duration as one poster commented; and yes, also in French. But the context gives the meaning away.
How long did it take you to switch? I've had my phone in 24-hour mode since May. I can convert without thought now, but I still think in 12-hour time internally.
Good luck. I've been using a 24 hour clock on every single device in my control for likely 30 years now and I still think in 12 hour time. Hell, I even spent ages trying to find a 24 hour bedroom clock before I finally found one on a ham radio site. But I still have to stop myself doing 12-hour time math, do the math in 24 hour, and STILL manage to screw it up.
I don't know why, but the 12 hour clock is just so ingrained that I can't stop thinking that way. The good news is, the conversion is trivial for me, but its just strange how it never 'took' in my head.
I'd just pick the timezone that gives 12:00 closest to the local solar noon and leave it at that, year round. Calling that time of the day 12:00 is completely arbitrary, but any other number would be equally arbitrary, and 12:00 is a long-standing convention.
For some purposes yes, for others no. The state has jurisdiction in matters not involving the tribe that take place there and the residents can vote / participate in civil government as Arizonians. However, the nation does have sovereignty in tribal affairs on the reservation and a few outside it.
I agree that middle/high school is arguably starting too early (especially since research has shown, I believe, that teens really should be sleeping later).
In the case of elementary school, though, you are dealing with kids young enough that they probably cannot reliably be counted on the get ready and leave for school on their own, and so you need to fit school times in with their parent's work schedule.
As long as we're trying to fix all the world's problems, I'd submit that the ideal domestic partnership has one parent able to focus full-time on childcare and home life. It doesn't have to be the same parent all the time, but I find the expectation of dual incomes to be one of the great rip-offs of modern life.
Somewhere along the way to 10s, we lost the work flexibility. "I took care of my kids for 5 years" gets your CV discarded in an instant. So both parents, not always because they need the money, but very frequently because they're afraid to lose their career, choose to keep working.
Middle/high does start too early, but if you started later, there wouldn't been enough time after school for those precious athletic team practices and games.
I went to school in the 90s-aughts in a school district where the median household income was ~15% below the national average. The rationale I always heard for the 7:45am high school start time was that some teenagers needed to work after school jobs to help support their families, and if school ended too late they would just drop out.
I know live in a wealthy school district (with very good athletic programs) and high school starts at 9am.
In both places at least some of the athletic/band programs started before school.
Just an anecdote though, I never heard that rationale from an official source.
> Although isn't the idea of "permanent DST" an oxymoron?
It's slightly different from no-DST in that "the sun is directly above" is no longer approximately noon, ever; the TZ is effectively 1 hour off of what is should be and DST is abolished. (The sun would be overhead at ~1pm year-round.)
(It would also mean that during winter, in some locales, the sun would not rise until after 9am. I personally like seeing the sun in the morning.)
Everyone agrees that the schools start too early, but there are so many idiots who throw up reasons why they are afraid to change. It's like a mark twain novel of a small town in Misssissippi in the 1800s. In my town, the latest reason why we couldn't start later was "we'll mismatch for athletic events for schools from nearby towns". Then the other nearby school districts switched, and our asshole district said, its still too scary, and waited one more year, and now we are 40 minutes later. We should go another half hour later.
On the 47th parallel there's only 8.5 hours of daylight around the winter solstice so you pretty much have to choose one or the other. My high shcool's first bell was at 07:40 PM and final bell was sometime around 2:40 PM, but around 60% of the class did extracurriculars during the week that would get you out at 4-6 PM.
As other have pointed out, starting school later (around 8:30-9 AM) would have students coming in after sunrise, but then school would go until ~3:30 PM and you run the risk of all students getting home after dark during December and January.
I'm not sure what you mean, here in Michigan a large chunk of the school year (maybe 50% ?) the highschool/middleschoolers go to school in the dark. It usually dark for another hour or more.
It's the same here. The middle/high school kids here are in the dark for about 5 months. Going to permanent DST would not change anything for them. Dropping DST completely would reduce that to about 3 months. See the third column in my table for the details. The rows are when they go in the dark (1) if we got rid of DST completely, (2) if we keep it as it is, and (3) if we went to permanent DST.
It's elementary school kids that it would make a big difference with. Under the current system here they are always going to school after sunrise. If we went to permanent DST, they would be going in the dark for about 2.5 months.
And Massachusetts, especially Boston, is insanely east in the same time zone. Hence the discussion. Not as Far East as the upper coast of Maine but relatively few people live there.
NO! Agree that the transition is hard, but Standard time is much better.
Wakening before the sun is not only biologically counterproductive, but the late morning dark would further hinder ability to exercise in the morning for months out of the year.
Just Kill DST, stay on standard time and be done with it
As a former schoolchild, please no, PLEASE NO. Waking up early is already hard, having to wake up an hour earlier than I would otherwise have to for the entire year would be hell. Just use normal non-DST time. Please.
Good God, no. The time isn’t just an arbitrary number to help coordinate meetings, it communicates what time of the day/night cycle you’re experiencing, to a reasonable approximation. Having separate time zones may be annoying, but it forces you to think about others’ experience. If I say I was up last night til 4 in the morning, that tells you something.
I think the sunrise is a better fixture socially, and maybe the sunset is a better fixture biologically. Noon is just an easy to measure compromise for the above two.
Social life and timing mostly revolves around how early you get up. "Its late" kind of means "I am behind schedule to get enough sleep before waking up".
Biologically, we are programmed around sunlight. Whilst our mornings aren't really controlled by the biological clock (that is what the alarm is for), the evening really are. Besides, the for many people, the evening is what separates 'civil life' from 'private life'.
> Agree. Noon should be the moment when the sun is at its highest altitude in the sky, or a close approximataion thereof.
I too want the same time worldwide but I guess the best we can do is UTC. I mean we could do it but I fear we'd just be sweeping the ugliness under the rug. I don't want this kind mess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China
> Currently, timezone usage within Xinjiang is roughly split along the ethnic divide, with most ethnic Han following Beijing time and most ethnic Uyghurs following Ürümqi Time.
We already have UTC when you want the same time worldwide. Using UTC in everyday life would be somewhat confusing when travelling. I guess it would take quite a while to get used to things happening at a different time on the clock.
I like it that no matter where I live I can wake up at 6, stores open by 9, and lunch is at 12. Imagine every time traveling having to ask the locals what time things happen. Also, I don't think any politician will allow their state to be the state that doesn't have the same time as other countries in the same longitude
Yeah, I can wake up at 6, except in winter, when it's 5 and my biological clock has absolutely refused to adjust for the last 30 years, so I wake up at 7, and the stores open at 9 except when it's 10 and some open at 8, and lunch is, of course at 12, except in winter, when it's at 13, or maybe it's at 11, because I skipped breakfast, no wait there's an early meeting and corporate provided snacks, lunch is at 14 today.
I'm happy that you can set your life to the digit displayed on the clock no matter what that digit actually means in real time, but please spare a thought for those of us whose biological clocks can't readjust and help us abolish DST.
Most places I've visited vary from business to business. With all due respect, I don't know of anywhere that fits your 9 & 12 mold. When I travel I always need to look up the hours of businesses. Many also pick a day or two during the week to close or prepare. Many also operate dramatically different depending on the day you go.
Ok but they do operate at a reasonable approximation. Sure a shop may open at 0800 in one town and not until 1000 in another but are there really places on earth where the shops tend to open at 0100 and close by 0900? Certainly there can't be many.
> If it's any consolation, all of this is extremely unlikely to happen, since it relies on an international agreement between every single nation in the world. Or on China attacking and conquering the entire world and installing China Standard Time as part of a totalitarian regime, which is slightly less unlikely but still very unlikely.
That's greatly exaggerating the difficulty of deciding if it is OK to call your Uncle who is about 165° east of you in a single time zone system compared to the current multiple time zone system.
In fact, the procedure is the same in both systems:
1. Look at your clock.
2. Add 11 hours to clock time.
3. Ask yourself if it would be daytime at your location when your clock says that time.
4. If yes, call your Uncle.
• Under the current multiple time zone system that works because clock time is close to local time. Step #2 computes the clock time at your Uncle's location, which gets you close to the local time at his location.
Daylight hours are approximately the same in his local time as in your local time, aside from the seasonal variation which you can ignore if you allow yourself a reasonable margin of error (e.g., aim for calling him a couple hours or so after sunrise rather than shooting for the crack of dawn), so you can use your local time as a proxy for his [1].
• Under a single worldwide time zone system it works because your local time is about 11 hours behind his local time. The time you get in step #3 is what the time will be on your clock (and on his clock, and on everyone else's clock) when your local time is the same as his local time is right now. So if that clock time will be a good time for you to receive a call, now is a good time to try your Uncle.
Of course, you probably wouldn't actually have to do any of that. Just as in his first example with the current time zone system where he Googles "time in melbourne" rather than looking at his clock and adding 11 hours, in the single worldwide time zone you would Google "local time in melbourne". In such a world, where local time can be quite a ways off from clock time, Google would surely recognize such queries and do the right thing.
Heck, it might even assume you mean local time if you just did "time in melbourne" because in the single time zone there would be no need to Google for the clock time for a particular area. I'd expect "time in melbourne" to probably give something like "The local time in Melbourne is X at world time Y". That covers everything.
[1] If you really are aiming for crack of dawn calling, then you will have to take into account the seasonable variation in sunrise relative to local noon, but you have to do that in both the multiple time zone system and the single worldwide time zone system.
If I'm thinking about calling someone I'll check their IM status, not look at the clock.
If I'm going to a store I don't visit often I'll have to look up their opening hours on a map anyway. Whether that says it's 08-20 or 16-04 couldn't matter less.
And that's before getting into the even more ridiculous stuff:
> First of all, we need to straighten out some terminology. The terms "a.m." and "p.m." (ante meridiem and post meridiem) are strongly deprecated now, because they refer to the position of the Sun, not of the clock.
So use 24-hour time? Somehow the rest of the world manages just fine.
> So, you have to say "solar noon" to refer to the instant when the Sun is at its zenith, and "twelve hundred hours" to refer to the instant when the clock reads 12:00. Similarly "solar midnight" and "zero hundred hours". And you have to use the twenty-four hour clock, it's the only way to be unambiguous.
12:00 is just an arbitrary time anyway, and even now it might not have much to do with noon anyway, depending on where you live. Hell, look have a look at the arctic circle, where noon (or day/night) doesn't have much of a meaning anyway.
> Even in the best case scenario, it is impossible to retroactively scrap time zones. The past will always exist, and the people who lived there will never adopt your new standard. Nor can all of past history be renumbered. The history of timekeeping will remain exactly as complicated as it always has been, and the zoneinfo database can never be abandoned.
Do you also refuse to use epoch timestamps, because they can't represent dates before 1970? Sure, you'd need to handle zones for historical data, but that'd get progressively less relevant the further away from cutoff you get.
You would still need to create a system to keep track of local time of day. Hey, guess what, we already have such a system, people already use it and are familiar with it, let's keep using it.
No, you don't need that. Many people think you need it, but only because they have never experienced the alternative. Once you try it you won't want to go back.
This is similar to China, which has 5 timezones wide and they have one standard national timezone.
The US is far wider when you consider Alaska, Hawaii and the island territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific. It spans from UTC+10 (Guam) to UTC-10 (Hawaii / Aleutians).
Why permanent daylight savings time? Why not just permanent real time? Clock noon should be roughly the same as solar noon, all year round. 'Daylight savings' is an impossibility.
I have absolutely nothing to gain from the sun being close to its highest point at 12 o' clock. I have a lot to gain from an extra hour of light in my evenings
> I have a lot to gain from an extra hour of light in my evenings.
May I suggest leaving for home earlier?
And a child comment of yours wants an extra hour of light in the mornings. You can't have it both ways! There's a finite amount of light in the day: not everyone can have everything he wants. So why not just settle for making noon be noon, rather than taking an hour from Spooky23 and giving it to you, or taking it from you and giving it to Spooky23?
I don't know what kind of flexibility HN'ers have, but the overwhelming majority of people can't just decide to leave whenever they please.
And it's utterly missing the point, keeping track of time is an inherently social issue. If I didn't care about other people (and again, had no time-related obligations to work or study), I'd most likely just use UTC everywhere and wake up whenever I wanted. I want more light in the evenings exactly because that's when I'm outside, and if I went to bed at 8pm, my social life would suffer.
Making solar noon 12 o' clock would be giving the all light to Spooky23 (and wasting most of it), as practically everyone wakes up at most 6 hours before noon, but are awake for 10 hours after. Noon isn't the middle of normal waking day. Making solar noon 2 hours late is exactly the compromise!
Maybe we should have some sort of compromise system: in the summer where there's plenty of sunlight hours we can get that extra hour in the evening (without sacrificing morning light hours), and in the winter we could have a sightly shifted time to make sure the stm doesn't get up too late.
Book a standing meeting on your calend/ar to leave at 4 (or whenever). For exceptional meetings, make an exception and stay late. Probably come in early, or some how signal that you're not a slacker, just running a different schedule. This obviously doesn't work in all environments, but it can in many.
Because we'd want the standard waking hours to be roughly aligned with daylight, but due to historical reasons (during the transition from an agricultural society to industrial one?) our standard waking hours, determined by our standard working hours, are significantly shifted to the afternoon.
As a rule, people don't go to sleep in 20:00 to wake up at 04:00 (anymore - in the agricultural era that was quite common), and midnight is not even close to the middle of our nighttime; in the same manner, noon is not in the middle of our days, we're spending much more of our time after noon. Changing all of that is hard and difficult compared to changing a time zone - so we'd want a timezone where the astronomical midnight is at 1:00 or 2:00 local time, it would better align the daylight with our activities.
I think you'll find that it's like euphemism creep: in a few more decades, you'll be arguing to slide the time over another hour, and in another few decades, you'll do the same thing all over again.
Better to just stick with real time and be done with it. We're adults, are we not? Have we not the tools at our disposal to take responsibility for our lives?
in a few more decades, you'll be arguing to slide the time over another hour, and in another few decades, you'll do the same thing all over again. ... We're adults, are we not?
And you'll be doing the same thing, but in the opposite (and wrong ;) direction. Non-DST isn't some heavenly ordained moral high ground.
Right now it's the first and last times with our spring-forward, fall-back switches. I'm thinking EDT year round would be most beneficial in the AM in winter, as it is realllly hard to get out of bed in the dark. I already go to work in the dark in winter, so it being dark an hour earlier wouldn't make any difference there.
Maybe just a half-hour difference in the switch would be a good compromise?
> Why permanent daylight savings time? Why not just permanent real time? Clock noon should be roughly the same as solar noon, all year round. 'Daylight savings' is an impossibility.
Because if my commute involves driving fifty miles east in the morning and fifty miles west in the evening, I don't want to have to adjust my clock by about 5 minutes twice a day.
(At the equator, this would be 3 minutes - the further you go from the equator, the greater the difference that fifty miles would represent).
> Because if my commute involves driving fifty miles east in the morning and fifty miles west in the evening, I don't want to have to adjust my clock by about 5 minutes twice a day.
You seem to think that I'm arguing against time zones. I'm not (here, anyway): I'm arguing that the time within a time zone be that of noon at its midpoint, so that no point within the timezone is more than 30 minutes from true noon (yes, some timezone are larger than an hour …), as opposed to those who want permanent DST, or even double DST, where clock noon might be hours from true noon.
And life gets interesting if your time zone crosses through anywhere populated. (That's why northwest Indiana is on central time: it basically exists as a bedroom community for Chicago, so it's most sensical to be on Chicago time.)
The valid argument is usually about safety. Many people, especially children are travelling to go to work or school and sunrise at 7:20, feels a little unsafe for many people. That extra hour in the morning helps.
But daylight saving time is exactly the opposite! It adds an hour to the evening. If you want sunrise to be earlier, you have to use non-DST. Or even anti-DST and move the clock an hour back from regular time.
I'm with you, but we're fighting the losing fight.
As an aside, what a brilliant marketing name. Daylight is in peril and we all adjust our clocks to save it from the treacherous grasp of morning. We're heroes!
I think we should shift time zones a little every day, so that (in some designated location, say New York or DC) the sun rises at exactly 6am every morning. This eliminates the sudden transition to daylight savings which is the source of most complaints, and it would be trivial to implement with modern electronics.
I firmly believe we'd see a lot of problems. Pick nearly any datetime library and see how easy it would be to calculate things like durations between two arbitrary timestamps. Even with those that do handle daylight saving or time zones properly, many applications that do use these libraries don't use these features. Or how often projects update their timezone databases. Handled in an incremental way would be a world of pain, precisely because of our reliance on modern electronics and software, or more precisely, because we rely on time so heavily to coordinate events, and rely on syncing these operations with human activities. I think I may have just literally shuddered.
By the way, what you describe is how things worked prior to standardization of time which was driven in part by the expansion of the railroad. There's a brief history on Wikipedia:
Regardless of the (extreme) technical challenges to implement something like this...a 6am sunrise in NYC would make for sunset at 3:15pm in December. A little early for my taste!
What is the point of making it permanent? If you want to increase the daylight after the workday, then just make working times one hour earlier, instead of changing the clock.
One of the main purported benefits of DST is that it in effect moves some of the extra sunlight from the longer days of summer from the morning to the evening, where most of us are in a better position to use it.
That's because without DST as the day lengthens the extra daylight is split evenly between morning and evening.
But WHY does it split evenly? It's because we historically use noon as our reference. We think of noon on day N+1 as being exactly one day after noon on day N. Noon is a sensible reference, fairly easy to determine with ancient technology.
Suppose that instead we had historically used sunrise as our reference. By definition, then, sunrise would be 8 AM every day. As the days lengthened in the summer, all of the extra daylight would then have shown up in the evening automatically.
It's interesting to ponder whether or not such a reference could have worked. I think that in the days before clocks, when the sundial was the most sophisticated timepiece, this could have worked quite well. It would also fit in well with work schedules, meaning people who needed to wait for light to work would be going to work at about the same time every day. It would also fit in with animal sleep schedules.
With clocks, though, a noon reference is easier. A sunrise reference requires a much more sophisticated clock, or it requires frequent manual adjustment.
Nowadays, though, clocks easily have the sophistication to handle that. We probably could actually reasonably handle using sunrise as our reference, and have our clocks adjust daily to keep that so.
It would mean that a given clock time on day N+1 is no longer exactly 24 hours later than that same clock time on day N, but I don't think that would matter for ordinary life. I'd be willing to put up with that if it means I get the benefits of DST (more evening light in summer) without the two big discontinuities a year.
Edit: to be clear, I am assuming that if we did a sunrise-based system instead of a noon-based system we would still do time zones. 8 AM would be simultaneous everywhere in the zone.
[1] In this comment "day" refers to sunrise to sunset.
There is one flaw with your theory here: Historically, noon was defined locally by the sun being directly overhead. All time was local time.
Then we invented trains and railroads and you couldn't schedule anything with such a system. Thus was born standardized time zones where it is the same time across large swaths of land. Noon is no longer strictly correlated to the sun being directly overhead.
I think there are all kinds of things we could do, including promoting the gig economy. If I work when, where and as much as I choose, it makes little difference what time it is (as long as I meet deadlines).
The world population is both high enough and mobile enough that you can now find 24 hour establishments in a lot of places, even relatively small towns. The small town I am in has enough 24 hour places that I have quite a lot of latitude on when I shop, when I get lunch, etc. I don't care all that much when the sun rises or sets. I care much more about things like if it is raining, and that is because I live without a car, so I walk everywhere.
That hasn't been my experience. I do what I can to try to promote the idea of gig work done well such that it is a net positive for the worker in metrics like quality of life and control over their schedule.
Granted, some things are inherently more flexible than others. An Uber driver can choose what hours to work, but is at the beck and call of people who need rides. If you want to make good money, you realistically need to work during busy times. But a lot of knowledge work can realistically be done whenever works best for the employee, so long as they get it done in time for the due date. You do need to arrange for such expectations though.
the gig economy may have many upsides and can help supplement the traditional economy however it will not replace it (at least for the next several decades)... while you can have much more flexibility in that econ, there are many things in the traditional econ that still require standardized time and traditional work hours
You say you would still have timezones, and timezones are approximately the area (all points) of the globe where it is approximately the same time, say all points where it is closer to 8am than to 7am or 9am when the centerline is 8am. With the current system, that makes the edges of time zones perfect north-south meridiens of longitude (which are then tweaked, of course for local reasons.)
Sun rises at approx 6am and sets at 6pm every day on the equator. Go straight north to another point, and in the northern summer, it's sun rises before it does at the equator, and in northern winter it rises after the equator. So, with your system calling sunrise 8am, the edges of a timezone would drift with the seasons and would only be north-south meridiens twice a year at the equinoxes.
If you decided to define the timezones with fixed (non-drifting) boundaries, your system might require a 2-dimensional grid of small timezones with boundaries not just on the east and west but on the north and south, with behaviors relative to their neighbors that would make timing a phone call to another time zone pretty much require computer assistance.
Your theory is inconsistent with the history of timekeeping:
> I think that in the days before clocks, when the sundial was the most sophisticated timepiece, this could have worked quite well.
Actually it's quite hard to figure out when "sunrise" occurs: it's not an instantaneous event, plus it's hard to calculate as an abstract (when would the sun peek over the horizon on an ideal billiard-ball planet); in the real world there are atmospherics, mountains etc. Plus for all these reasons it's hard to measure when you're close.
On the other hand noon is easy with a sundial as that's when the shadow "disappears" (really: "is shortest" on most of the planet) except of course on rainy days. You can see the shadow shorten, see noon, and see it expand again. It's literally a 0 in the curve.
The use of a nighttime sextant (or astrolabe that was on HN recently) is a way of transforming that calculation (known fixed angle) to other stars or times.
So it was the clock that made the time of sunrise work: if you could synchronise your clock to noon on D0 you could then use the clock to index into your ephemeris to figure out times of other celestial events post D0-noon.
Also, pre-clock, hours were not fixed duration, they were 12 divisions of the day. Minutes and seconds were post-clock inventions.
Live in Fairbanks, Alaska. There is no way this system would be feasible at northern latitudes. The days get longer/shorter at a rate of ~7 min. a day. Instead of an hour time change twice a year, it would be equivalent to an hour time change once a week. (and in december, it would get dark at 11:30am)
Oh, and November 19th in Barrow would be ~1,560 hours long, and you would you just skip those 65 days? Or you could have November 20th in Barrow while it is different dates in other parts of the world?
Calibrating a sundial to noon is a one time effort. Calibrating a sun dial to dawn requires an update every single day. Further, dawn depends on local geographic conditions making it an ambiguous term.
I'd expect that a sunrise-based system would use the calculated time that sunrise would occur for an observer at the middle of the time zone on perfectly spherical planet. Well, if we did one today, anyway. If it had done it in ancient times it would probably be based on sunrise in the capital city as observed each day by some designated religious office such as a high priest at the main temple of the dominant religion.
What you have written here is what I came to logically myself as well. However, it would then be more difficult for someone in Sacramento to ask someone in San Francisco what time the train leaves. Plus, all sorts of similar issues.
Mental math of "train arrives at 3pm, takes me 30 minutes to walk there, fifteen minutes to pack. Gotta be sure to be out of my meeting by 2:15" but if you live 30 sunrise minutes west, you and your coworker would have different 2:15 times.
You are 45 sun minutes west, but you go out to a job site with coworkers which is another 15 sun minutes west. You think you're able to leave on time to get home for your daughter's birthday, but forgot your clock that is calibrated to your current gps location, is going to make you 15 minutes late when you get home.
The timezones would have to be much, much more complex than now.
The noon-based timezones change on the east-to-west axis; and the difference between two locations is static; i.e., if my noon is one hour later than your noon, then it's always one hour later than your noon.
However, sunrise based timezones would depend also on the north-south axis, and shift during the year! If my sunrise is one hour later than your sunrise, then at a different month my sunrise might be at the same time as your sunrise, or two hours later than your sunrise (depending on our locations) - and cities moving between timezones every few months is a bit inconvenient.
Would you elaborate on how this would work? I feel like I'm missing something obvious. The sun is roughly in the same position in the sky at noon each day—at least it's going to be midday for any human approximation of it. Sunrise (and sunset) vary throughout the year, and increasingly so with latitude along the same longitude. If the idea is to be sunrise-based, sunrise isn't going to be at roughly the same time along longitude lines, while midday sun is at roughly noon.
Sure. We have that now. But it also wouldn't be the same along the same longitude. Yes, 6AM would be the same, but now sunrise, midday, and sunset would all vary. At least with noon-based time zones, midday occurs at the same time along longitudes. People have an expectation that noon occurs midday, which is why the system is set up the way it is. This is how it was before we had time zones. It's a human-interface thing, more than anything else.
Am I missing something? Sure, we could have all sorts of different schemes. Most of them are not going to match human intuitions.
My guess is that what is intuitive for time keeping has changed over time (no pun intended). Consider back when most people were living directly or nearly directly off the land in single families or small groups, working very hard to grow enough food or catch enough fish or game to keep alive.
I think that they would use three references for time: sunrise, noon, and sunset. Sunrise would be the main one, because that marks the time when the dangers of the night go away, and your domestic animals wake up, and you have light to start working your fields or hunting your game. I think noon would mostly simply be used for pacing--it marks when you have used up half of your daylight, and so is a good time to judge if you are working at a good pace or need to pick it up for the rest of the day.
For such a person, if they had a use for a clock at all, a sunrise synced clock would be intuitive because it would put the things they do at relatively fixed clock times each day. For example, if it takes you about four hours working the fields each morning to get hungry enough to need a lunch break, then on a sunrise clock that has you starting in the fields at 8 AM everyday, you are coming back to the house for lunch at 12 PM every day.
On a noon-based clock, you would be starting in the fields at a different time each day, and so if you came in after four hours you would be arriving back at the house expecting lunch at a different time each day.
For people at that "barely making it off the land" stage, pretty much everything they might need timekeeping for is tied to sunrise or sunset in a similar way so those are the intuitive references for time.
It's not until you get a large enough and diverse enough society that you have people doing significant things that are not directly tied to just staying alive off of the land, and doing things that involve synchronizing with people who are traveling a long way, that noon-based starts to make a lot of sense.
As settlements become bigger and bigger and more specialized, the dark becomes less dangerous, more work is done indoors by candle light or lantern light, and syncing to the sun becomes less and less important. More and more of our time is dictated by the clock and noon-based makes even more sense because it is clock friendly.
But now we've reached a point where we have enough leisure time that we actually do want some sun synchronization. We want to go to work earlier in the summer, when the sun rises earlier, so that we'll more time for play in the sunlight after work.
The most obvious way to do that would be to change work hours. Normal offices hours would change to 8 to 4 for the summer from the normal 9 to 5, and we would not fiddle with the clocks.
I suppose this was not done because it require too many people to act. Instead we diddle the clocks, so the clock says you are starting work at 9 in the summer, but it is astronomically an hour earlier than the time you started work the rest of the year.
What I'm suggesting in my earlier comment is that now that clocks are actually computers that can do quite sophisticated calculation, we could use a psuedo-sunrise based time has both the daylight maximizing property of daylight savings time and has the reproducibility and consistency of noon-based.
You can think of it as a kind of continuous or near-continuous daylight savings time, where instead of adjusting the clock with a big jump twice a year, it is adjusted either continuously or in a small step every day.
I appreciate the time and thought you put into this. I've written elsewhere about this (some in comments on this submission), but rather than again poorly transcribe my thoughts, I'll link to the best summary I've found (also linked elsewhere in this thread):
I certainly appreciate the desire to utilize sunlight. I've spent the plurality of my life north of 45°N, and boy is it getting dark now!
Edit to add: Just discovered that the same site has a piece on continuous time zones, which is pretty much what you're proposing: https://qntm.org/continuous
Interesting, but holy shit, how it would break everything.
Having a day defined as a period of constant length of 24 hours is, I feel, a feature, not a bug. It allows for scheduling, for easily mapping between hours and days in your head. The system being anchored at the point more-less in the middle between sunrise and sunset is elegant, IMO, because - as you say - "the extra daylight is split evenly between morning and evening". This synchronizes the day period with our circadian rhythm (based on day/night cycle), which allows for easier dealing with other people.
Variable-length day sounds like an ongoing chaos full of manual corrections and constant recomputations. I feel it would be a step back for our civilization.
It does mean that we'd have a lot more time zones because time zones would change both along longitude and latitude. It'd also mean that the time delta between two time zones north and south of each other would have a delta that changes every day, and wouldn't be a multiple of a single hour.
To illustrate, think of two time zones, one on the equator, and another straight north enough that the day length changes by an hour between the solstices. On the equinox their clocks are identical and on each solstice they are 30 minutes apart in either direction. Halfway between an equinox and a solstice, they'd be 15 minutes apart. And so on.
If you try and adjust the rules so that each zone is always an integral multiple of an hour apart from any other zone, then you end up with clocks jumping forward & back an hour which is basically what we were trying to avoid in the first place!
So you'd always need a computer when trying to arrange a meeting across time zones. I imagine we'd get used to it, though.
Another question is: what time would you pick for sunrise on really northern latitudes below the Arctic circle? For example Anchorage AK has a shortest day and shortest night of 5.5 hours. 9AM might be a good choice for the winter solstice, but it'd really suck waking up in the dark on the summer solstice when there's 18.5 hours of daylight! So maybe they'd set their time zone to smoothly change from a sunrise of 6AM to a sunrise of 9AM and back with the rest of the variance in the sunset times.
North of the Arctic circle they're screwed no matter what they do, so I imagine they'd just join the time zone of their neighbors to the immediate south just for commercial convenience. :)
It gets complicated, but time zones are complicated no matter what you do, and one hour clock shifts really suck. And sticking with DST also sucks, see minikites' comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15564160). So this really does seem to be the best of bost worlds. I'd vote for it.
If you want to have constant day lengths, you can't make sunrise your reference. It's physically not possible. There are (almost) exactly 24 hours between each solar noon. There aren't 24 hours between each sunrise, that's why it moves every day. You'd have to change your day length at least twice a year.
Perhaps in the past this would have been ok, but today it's IMO definitely not worth the additional complication that comes from changing day lengths.
edit: I didn't read parent comment properly. Updated my comment.
Quoting the OP: "It would mean that a given clock time on day N+1 is no longer exactly 24 hours later than that same clock time on day N, but I don't think that would matter for ordinary life. I'd be willing to put up with that if it means I get the benefits of DST (more evening light in summer) without the two big discontinuities a year."
This is a good suggestion, however, it might not be useful globally. People in the tropics/around the equator get so much sunlight that they would not want to trade the convenience of our current time systems with having to adjust it based on the sun just for that extra daylight.
People on the equator get no more sun time then anybody else. It's just that theirs is evenly distributed, they get ~12 hours of sun every single day of the year.
They'd be completely indifferent, their current clocks would still work, they'd just be annoyed at the other time zones moving around on them.
Fair enough, although my statement was more about the amount of sunlight they get per day, for all days of the year versus someone closer to the poles having to adjust to constant fluctuations.
You're right when you say that they get ~12 hours every single day, but their clocks would still have to account for the slight changes (by a few minutes) in time for the sunrise. Which means changing their clocks everyday/every few days, based on the sunrise. But for what? They anyway get ~12 hours sunlight, so it's not a worthy tradeoff for them, compared to someone in Massachusetts.
If only humans worked like batteries, soaking up the summer sun to use it in winters..
Yeah, it really screws with us up here. Once you get up above the meridian, days get pretty short in the winter. Moving those hours around helps exactly none. No farmer has their life improved. It's not saving energy. It's just a dumb setting on the clock.
It's super depressing in December and January when you get up to go to work in the dark, and by the time you get out at 5, it is pitch dark again.
I do wish we'd fallen back earlier, like we used to. I'd much rather have that extra hour of daylight in the morning when I could maybe use it, rather than on my commute home.
Yeah, you know where I live, as I recall? You should come visit. ;-)
Anyhow, we'd have to throw the clock off a full two hours to get any benefit. It's just getting light at 0700 and already getting dark at 1600 - during the shortest days. Daybreak was at about 0700 today, maybe later. It is raining. I couldn't tell and I didn't look online,
The meridian? I assume you must mean some line of latitude, and after some searching, it looks like the 45th runs through Maine so it's my best guess.. I don't really remember there being a colloquial name for the 45th parallel though I remember seeing the sign every family roadtrip through OR to CA.
Time zones aren't for farmers; they're for employees who have employers who won't (or can't) let their employees set hours that give them free time in the daylight.
There's also opposing needs: working folk like afternoon sun so they have daylight when they get off work, parents with school children like morning sun, so it is light when their children are waiting for the bus, and in the winter there's not enough daylight to satisfy both groups of people.
Exactly, not for farmers. Farmers do work whenever they need, and use whatever light there is, when it is.
The fight to keep DST is about merchants more than anything else. Shopping is increased during the week if it is still light after you get home. When you get home and it is already dark, you are more likely to just stay home. I personally don't think it has anything to do with employers wanting to deny employees daylight. They mostly want a known schedule for customers and co-workers. Make DST -2 hours or get rid of DST and I think employers wouldn't care at all either way.
It's dark when we go out. It is dark when we come home. We get down to about 8 hours of daylight, I'm pretty sure. 8:15, I think? I could Google that. I'm at about the 47th.
8:25 is the shortest day in Seattle (a tad north of the 47th), which is further north than anywhere else that isn't in WA (except for that little piece of MN).
That's being nit-picky, though, as the practical outcome is that anything less than nine hours means you'll go to work in the dark and come home in the dark.
The point of fussing with time zones (or the start-time for school/work, if you're in some weird place where people are capable of that) is so that you can go from "no morning or afternoon sun" to "morning or afternoon sun". You could tweak your 8.5 hours of daylight so that the sun rises at 6am and most people go to work/school in the sunlight and the sun sets at 2:30, or you could tweak it so that the sun rises at 10am and most people get some evening sun until 6:30.
It's not great but it's an option, instead of demanding the sun rises at 8am and sets at 4pm so that noon is noon and no one gets to enjoy it.
The implication earlier in the thread was the continental U. S. But if you want to go the out-of-context route, you should have chosen “terrestrial north pole”.
It would probably take quite some time to prove, but I suspect depression, alcoholism, etc would improve a bit with more “access” to daylight. No one enjoys seeing the sun set by 5, but it probably has a more profound impact on a further subset.
We have SAD here, quite a bit of it. The missus suffers from it a bit, so I plant her under special lights and feed her tasty food until spring. I'm pretty sure she is part bear. She hibernates for the winter.
I, of course, love it.
But, yeah, there are real mental health impacts from the loss of sunlight. It causes actual harm.
LED bulbs have been a godsend for me. About 12W of LED light roughly replaces a 100W incandescent bulb. This means that given a light socket rated for a 300W maximum, I can plug in a tree of Y-splitters and 25 LED 100W equivalent bulbs. The amount of light is glorious :-)
I get her specialty spectrum lamps. She knits and crafts and lives under them until spring when, I kid you not, she goes out and forages in the woods. (Fiddleheads.) She isn't really a bear.
New Hampshire is usually against anything liberal Massachusetts proposes. They have a massive inferiority complex up their despite basically being dependent on Massachusetts for work.
I really hope NY get on board as well. Being in Manhattan during the winter, the sun is gone many days by 4pm, sometimes earlier depending which part of the city you are in (which skyscraper is blocking the last bit of sunlight). As a native Texan it's tough to adjust to :O
Thinking a little bit more about this, I'm wondering how much this would really help. Yes, there would be more daylight in the evening, but given the latitude, how much longer in the morning would it be dark? I found this handy tool to get a feel for it:
Well that explains why I feel like winter nights are somehow worse and darker than summer ones. In summer, it's mostly not night at all: the twilight periods eat half the clock-nighttime. In winter, twilight gets cut in half and combines with the losses of daylight to extend nighttime.
Nowhere in Manhattan is that true (though perhaps I'll grant that a building might occlude the sun, but you're exaggerating). Conservatively, if we pick Albany, NY as the "northernmost extent of Manhattan", the earliest sunset is ~4:21pm.
I would rather see the planet stop using time-zones altogether. Let's all go UTC, adjust our clocks and schedules once and be done with it.
It doesn't matter what number my clock says at noon/sunrise/sunset. If it is about working-hours coinciding with daylight, businesses can adjust their working hours as needed (and post them on their site without you having to convert to local time to know when you can call)
edit: the link below just changed my mind. dammit, I hate being wrong.
All of the arguments seem to assume you have today's current tools and knowledge at your disposal, just with timezones abolished. This is clearly not what would happen. The real answer to "What time is it there?" without timezones would be the same exact thing, you google "what time of day is 4:25 in australia?" and google would tell you something like, "it's equivalent to 8:00 where you are"
That doesn’t help with the day/date mismatch. Switching everyone to UTC for absolutely everything solves a few problems (international meeting scheduling confusion, cranky programmers) and creates huge problems for almost everything else. Not to mention that access to technology like that is not universal.
For many people the standard communication medium nowadays is not a voice call but an asynchronous chat message. I wouldn't bother looking up the time in Melbourne, I'd just send a WhatsApp message. Uncle Steve can reply at his convenience.
Bare in mind that just because Uncle Steve is awake that it is not necessarily convenient for him. In the scenario he likes to stay in bed a bit later. This is no problem if you simply send him a message. No need for any lookups or actuarial tables or astronomical calculations whatsoever. If we want to voice chat we can do so after he has responded to the asynchronous chat message.
Bare in mind that the answer to "what time in it" post timezones would be "mid-morning", or "late evening" or "noon". ie. conveying the information you actually need.
However I also think that 'wall clocks' should be something more like the wizard time peaces in the various harry-potter movies.
They'd all have fuzzy times like "dawn, noon, dusk". What is now 6am would be "early morning", 3 hours later 'morning'. Evening would be 1800 and late evening 2100. The times closer to mid-day would be on a denser schedule (finer granularity).
No, that's not the case. When I'm in New York, most stores open at 9 in the morning. When I'm in London, most stores open at 9 in the morning.
If we all used UTC around the world, I'd have to calculate the difference for all the times that I'm used to. In London the stores open at 9 in the morning, but if I travel East a bit into Europe they open at 12, and dinner is at 11.
It has nothing to do with jet lag. Currently you only have to do any time calculation is you're working across time zones, once you're there and dealing with things in that time zone there's no real difference from what you're used to.
I problem I see with that is date. If you are switching to UTC, the us will everyday between 2-6 pm local time switch to a new day (= date = weekday). So your workweek will be monday 9pm to saturday 4 am or so. Public holidays will be some weird time too. And problems like sheduling meetings with people in other latitudes exist further because you have to ask them for their time preferance instead of guess by business hours. (Not to say that it is impossible, but you get some inconviniences from it too)
The major problem here is that far too much effort was put into accommodating everyone by including them in the eastern time zone. Last time I looked, I think something like 48% of the US population lives in it, and it's just unnecessarily large. Obviously there are benefits, but it creates a ton of perverse consequences too.
Realistically, the eastern time zone should probably stop between OH/PA, west of West Virgina, east of TN, etc.
But of course we'd then need 5 time zones to cover the continential US to keep other time zones from becoming far too large.
4 time zones is enough to cover the 48 states unless you want half-hour zones or radically different sunrise times on one coast or the other. Just need to reduce the sizes of Eastern and Central to better match the longitude lines.
It's even more subtle than that - about half of Connecticut is heavily involved with business in NYC, and would probably be quite unwilling to jump an hour over.
To a lesser extent, south-western Vermont is economically linked to the Albany metro area, and would also likely vote against a shift.
Were you to poll on support for moving New England over to Atlantic time, I'd bet you'd wind up with a map closely matching that of local support for the Boston Red Sox vs New York Yankees: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/23/upshot/24-ups...
FTA: The report said Massachusetts should not act alone, or else it could disrupt "commerce, trade, interstate transportation and broadcasting" across the region. A majority of other states in New England would have to jump on the time-zone train, too.
Everyone whines about DST, but I love the DST "timezone" in summer. I leave work in the sun. It feels like I still have time to play and have fun after work.
I mean... you can't have DST if you don't change. DST is the fake time. If you get rid of it, you're in normal time.
Sooo...
The options are
A) Complain about 1-hour change and about how it was made for farmers 100 yrs ago
B) Complain how you miss DST because the summer hours were so wonderful and man can't we just stay in DST--you know, that fake time we just made up--all the time?
I opt for the first option--the constant whining from others one--because the alternative would be constant whining from me. :D
Two things to say: a) come spend winter in Sweden... in Lapland the sun does not set at all in June and there is darkness around the clock in January; Stockholm is not that far up North, so we get a few hours of daylight in mid-December; and b) if lack of daylight in the winter is such an issue, maybe move to Southern California, or somewhere even closer to the equator.
Three things, actually :-) c) consider spending your winter months in the Southern Hemisphere. Some animals migrate vast distances twice a year.
I was actually surprised during a visit to Stockholm (granted, in May) that it was not light that much later than my native Seattle in the summer. I guess there's probably a reason major cities in Scandinavia are not all that far north in their respective countries :) I've been above the arctic circle in the summer, but thankfully never in the winter.
What difference would that make? You still have to deal with almost sixteen hours of darkness in December. Shifting clocks around isn't going to change that physical reality.
I would like my sunset to be around 8:30 pm every day. That way I always have daylight after work. That's just my preference, I know it wouldn't work for everyone.
>If we stayed on Standard Time throughout the year, sunrise here in the Chicago area would be between 4:15 and 4:30 am from the middle of May through the middle of July. And if you check the times for civil twilight, which is when it’s bright enough to see without artificial light, you’ll find that that starts half an hour earlier. This is insane and a complete waste of sunlight.
>If, by the way, you think the solution is to stay on DST throughout the year, I can only tell you that we tried that back in the 70s and it didn’t turn out well. Sunrise here in Chicago was after 8:00 am, which put school children out on the street at bus stops before dawn in the dead of winter.
Yes, there is, and it ties into a whole mess of interrelated standardisation, information, and control capabilities. Beninger's book is a fascinating exploratiion of this.
But only if you think there should be no particular correspondence between solar time and clock time. (I'm not going to have that argument at this moment, though.) Eastern Standard Time in Massachusetts is a good match:
It's both north and east. And I think that was the point of the article, that New England has it particularly bad for this.
Most people think that east coast cities are on a north-south axis, but as you go up I-95 (the major highway connecting these cities) you are actually traveling northeast. It was a head trip for me being from DC when I realized I could drive straight north for 5 hours and end up in Rochester, NY, or drive "north" on 95 for 5 hours and end up in New York City, but the distance between those two points was also itself a 5-6 hour drive.
