I feel that this is what we should be using instead of the current illogical time system.
We also need to switch to 13 months at 28 days each. Makes things so much easier.
Relevant https://m.xkcd.com/320/
I had a roommate for a semester in college who essentially lived on a 40 hour schedule. He’d stay awake for 24 hours straight, then sleep for 16 hours. Not sure if he managed to pass any of his classes that year.
I honestly feel pretty close to that, not as egregious but maybe like 16 to 20 hours awake to 8-12 hours asleep. Roughly 16-10
There’s pros and cons., though personally I used this calendar for my fiction writing.
I’d like to find a way to sync the lunar cycle and solar cycles since the earth’s, moon’s, and revolutions around the sun are soooo close (5 days off) plus it’d make sense to keep in theme with the Babylonian-esque base-60 system (where 60 is readily divided and a factor of 360 days, 12 months, 30 days, etc).
Which is pretty much what the Ancient Egyptians did.
*edit: pretty much have 5 “fake days” and add a sixth “fake” day to account for the gradual desync.
New year’s week sounds good haha
That is really nice! People take vacations around the new year anyway.
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I’d personally prefer 12 months with 30 days each, a 6-day week (makes for even rotations in shifts, 4 on 2 off), and an inter-calary week of 5 to 6 days at the new year.
If we’re going for broke on this I’d also want to convert to the dozenal system over decimal, as 12 is more easily divisible by smaller numbers which means easier division for numbers we use more often (like 3 or 4), which means that ¼ would be 0.3 and ⅓ would be 0.4.
12? Ew. As someone who relies on my fingers to count I repudiate such discriminatory system!
you can still use your fingers. it’s how we got our standard of time. Back then they counted the joints in our fingers minus thumb. 4 sets of 3 for our four fingers and 3 joints per finger. Then 5 sets of 12 to make 60. as they would use the fingers on the other hand to track how many times they counted to 12.
My favorite system like this is the Oksapmin counting system. They use a base 27 system. It’s based upon counting upper body parts.
You still get to count on your fingers. You use your thumb to count each bone in your 4 fingers to get up to 12. (“10” in the new system). Then you have the option to either continue with your other hand up to 24, or use it as an abacus, keeping your place while you count up to 144 (“100”).
You expect me to remember all that? Which thumbs? How many knuckles? When? Who?
Fuck it. Lets get real and just go all the way back to Sumeria. Sexagesimal numbering system here we come.
I like that with 13 each month starts on a Monday and ends on a Sunday. Makes that calculation super easy.
With six days a week for a 30-day month, each month would also start with the same day.
7 day weeks are such a mess
True. But I think as long as the weeks aren’t cut up by months it’s still a massive simplification.
A dozenal system is more difficult in multiplication. Decimal: 10^7 =10000000, 10^8=100000000, 10^9=1000000000, etc.
Dozenal: 12^7= 35831808, 12^8=429981696, 12^9=5159780352.
Gets very messy very quick.That’s because you’re working in base 10. That person wants to covert to base 12.
In which case teaching kids to count becomes more difficult because we have ten fingers
Unless you use your thumb to point to the phalanges of each finger.
Ok that’s me convinced. I’m on board train dozenal!
Since we can count to “10” (12) on one hand, we can use the other hand to count sets of “10”, bringing us up to “100” (144). With decimal, we’re stuck at 20, and that’s only if we’re wearing sandals.
Yeah that’s true.
In base 12 12^7 would be written as 10000000 too.
In dozenal (duodecimal), 6+6= a dozen, but we write “dozen” as “10”. A dozen dozen is not 144; it is “100”. 3 dozen is not 36; 3 dozen is “30”.
We would have two additional digits between 9 and “10”.
We would have to rewrite our multiplication table entirely. 2 * 6=10. 3 * 6=16. 4 * 6=20. But, when we do memorize the new table, it is just as consistent and functional as our decimal system.
Math checks out, but who do we name the other month after? Another Roman emperor?
We can just name it after some guy named John. We can call it Johnuary
Smarch. Just gotta watch out for that lousy Smarch weather.
Not to mention the Ide of Smarch. Beware!
How about Sextuary after August and before September? It counts up from there until December anyway.
Honestly just numbering them would be easier haha
But then do we skip unlucky 13, and right from 12 to 14?
Nah, we swing hard the other way: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 666
That’ll make Christmas interesting.
Yes please! I love that system so much I made it the default in my fantasy novels.
An alternative is 10 months where each are 36 days for even numbered months and 37 days for odd number months
A benefit for 28 days is all months are 4 weeks.
Our time syatem is not illogical and if you think it is you haven’t thought about the consequences. The only bad thing about timezones is how far they swing away from their ideal position sometimes.
Sega used this in their pioneering MMO from ~1999, Phantasy Star Online. “Beat Time”. The idea was to help you coordinate meeting times with people regardless of time zone. The problem was we had to convert it to regular time to have any idea when 725 beats was or how long 150 beats from now was.
Eve Online have something similar too. The Eve time is just Reykjavik time, which makes conversion easier. I used to have a clock on my phone screen to show Reykjavik time to remind me of the event time with my space friends.
I constantly got the day wrong on ops. Saturday 0200… Uhh shit. Friday night?
That’s simple. It’s at 12:80 PM. Wait… no… yeah. Whatever, let’s just run Famitsu Attack or Endless Nightmare 4 again.
But we’re having lunch at 12:90.
Alcoholics hate this (its not 5:00 somewhere)
But for that one magical moment, it’s @5.00 everywhere
It’s stupid to remove timezone.
Why?
Why?
Their value is so that we all can imagine what the sky looks like when we say “seven am”.
But why is that important?
Because it’s what make the time have a meaning. The time when you eat, when you go to sleep or wake up, when you go to work,…
In fact, you’re looking at it the wrong way. The time is localised because that’s how it make sense for people. And that’s how it make sense for physics too. Relativity means each place has its own time.
The question should be why do you want to change this?
I’d be with you if they were static - but the current situation of timezones that change regularly is a nightmare.
Are you talking about winter time vs summer time? Then it’s a whole other matter, completely irrelevant to timezones.
No, I’m talking about timezones themselves changing. Countries regularly change details about timezones.
That’s still not a technical problem.
- How is it not a technical problem? It sure as hell has been a problem for me more than once when implementing things, especially once timezone definitions between two systems drift apart.
- Why does it matter whether it’s a technical problem? Neither you nor I have been talking about technical problems thus far.
Solving technical problem is what an engineer does. Asking people to do things differently so that the engineer doesn’t have to solve the problem is what exactly?
In that case, why don’t we switch up timezones every day? Make it even harder for engineers. More problems = more technical solutions, right?
I don’t see how your point makes any sense.
No it’s not. Time zones are a source of incredible confusion for programmers and are the cause of countless computer bugs that affect billions of people.
If we all used UTC time, you’d get used to it. You’d simply get up at xx:00 and have lunch at yy:00, etc. The numbers we use now (like 6 or 12) are completely arbitrary. You would get used to your day cycle using different numbers and the next generation would think literally nothing of it.
It would be a mess talking to anyone about time where you do not live.
Say that you wake up at 06:00, everyone understands. Remove all time zones and now you wake up at 14:53. Anyone not native to your location would have no clue where in the sky the sun is relative to you and what that actually means for your day.
Would 14:53 for you post removal be compared to 06:00 or 09:00 pre removal? What if oyu are porned post removal and do not have the frame of reference for the old system. How would you go about it then?
I can see the merit in keeping time zones.
Could you imagine traveling without time zones? It would be actual hell.
Normally you wake up at 1300, but then you travel to japan, you don’t know when they wake up. So maybe you ask the hotel staff or maybe people will start putting signs up “Japan wakes up at 0300”. I mean it’s cool you don’t need to change your watch or wait for your phone time to update when the plane lands, but how do you know when lunch is? When do you go to sleep? If a meeting you’re having is at 1000, is that way late in the day meeting? Or is that a super early meeting and maybe you should get to bed early the night before. You would have no clue unless you do it on the regular.
Now, you could just download an app that tells you what time it is where you’re at currently relative to what you normally use (so in Japan while they think it’s 0300, your phone says 1300) so this would make these way easier for you since all the times are just normal. Every time you move around you just tell the app where you’re at and it adjusts the time is displays annnndddd…oh wait I just re-invited time zones.
I get your logic but no amount of bugs will ever be enough to justify making the entire world change their idea of time.
I mean
The world has done it before, several times.
Sure, OK. Changing standards has never ever happened before.
So because programmers are lazy and stupid we should change how people live?
What’s the point?
We have UTC/GMT my dudes. Just count times by that and boom, no time zones. You can even remove a colon, meaning you just end up with 4 numbers, like 1700 for 17:00 UTC (5pm Greenwich time)
I tried to have a discussion about this on reddit about how everyone should just use utc and he called me a lunatic because his working day would start at 3am instead of 8am, completely misunderstanding that utc 3am would be a different time to his current 3am and he just could not get his little head around it.
I’ve said this all my life and I can’t wait for the day we all shift to a single tike zone. While we’re on the topic, we also need to change a few more things - single global currency, zero customs duties, no passports, and the metric system with a single kind of 240v electrical socket/plug (my own preference being the UK plugs).
UK plugs are great, though EU ones will do just fine and are seemingly most common throughout the world.
Yeah I agree, but EU ones don’t have grounding usually
They have it optionally. But yes, making it mandatory would be amazing!
I don’t want to live in a OCD designed mcWorld
That system is far more illogical than the current time system what are you on?
It is a marketing ploy to sell watches, it was never intended to be logical.
Watches were not invented by the time the system was popular
Swatch Internet Time (or .beat time) is a decimal time system introduced in 1998 by the Swatch corporation as part of their marketing campaign for their line of “.beat” watches.
I could be wrong, but I’m fairly certain watches existed in 1998.
Oh, i thought you meant time zones
I could be wrong, but I’m fairly certain time zones existed in 1998.
You should have been there for it’s christening.
We’re getting rid of minutes/hours/seconds
YAY!
We’re getting rid of daylight savings time
YAY!!!
We’re getting rid of timezones
Yu…wait how the HELL is that supposed to work?
And we sat there, waiting for the other shoe to drop, crickets.
So how do you tell someone when your day starts? How do you coordinate multi content projects? What’s the minimum time segment? Just under 90 seconds. So no more microwaving for 30 seconds, or do we start with fractional beats?
It was just early internet clickbait.
The questions you raise all seem to have trivial answers. You can just… tell people those things? How is telling someone when your day starts any worse than telling them your time zone?
Also, coordinating projects across multiple continents becomes easier, since without timezones everyone just naturally communicates the correct relative times to each other. None of this “my time” or “your time” nonsense.
A timezone is a constant (barring DST shenanigans) offset, which works for all the hours of the day. I can look at my watch here in Germany and I know that it’s 8:15 in New York right now. So I know that it’s still early in the day for my buddy Jeff.
In the same-time everywhere logic, I would need to remember specific times, like “people in New York usually start working at 15:00 and stop at 24:00”, which is just plain inefficient.
Again, how is remembering whatever the New York offset is from your own work hours any different than remembering their time zone? If you have a remote coworker in a different time zone do you not already think things like “they’re not at their desk until 10 so I can’t schedule anything with them before that”?
The inconvenience you’re describing already exists and doesn’t change, you’re just used to the current specifics.
I collaborated with folks for many years in far eastern Russia - the only hard part was tracking DST and adjusting standing scheduled meetings accordingly.
Holidays that weren’t shared were much more of a pain to deal with than the time difference.
Honestly, all we need to do is eliminate time zones. It wouldn’t solve all the problems with time systems, particularly for programmers, but it would go a long way to solving the practical problems humans face, as well as eliminating one of the biggest machine problems.
Just everyone switch to UTC. As I write this it is 10:51 UTC. Anyone in the world can convert that to their local purpose. In eastern Australia, 10:51 is mid evening. In the UK it’s late morning. In western United States it’s late at night. If we always used UTC, people would just be used to this pretty quick.
It’ll never happen because approximately 0 people think about it outside of programmers.
The Navy and Air-Force use of Zulu time would disagree with this statement.
approximately 0 people think about it outside of programmers
It comes up all the time. Any time people are scheduling something between different time zones and run into trouble figuring out “is that your time or my time?” That’s an issue that would be resolved by not having time zones.
Just use UTC then.
Yes, that’s the idea.
My point is you use UTC to plan international meetings but keep timezones for day to day stuff. Better yet with computers meeting planning software takes timezones into account.
When I do a when2meet with my colleagues everyone fills it in their local time and it’s fine, and then the calendar event is timezone aware as well so it’s completely a non issue.
It being Zulu/UTC not it being time
It would take about 30 years
Maybe programmers should learn to do their job correctly instead of asking the whole planet to fix their simple problem for themselves.
The biggest machine problem ? That must be a joke!
It really isn’t that simple.
If all your system cares about is recording incoming events at a discrete time, then sure: UTC for persistence and localization for display solves all your problems.
But if you have any concept of user-defined time ranges or periodic scheduling, you get in the weeds real quick.
There is a difference between saying “this time tomorrow” vs. “24 hours from now”, because of DST, leap years, and leap seconds.
Time zones (and who observes them) change over time. As does DST.
If you allow monthly scheduling, you have to account for some days not being valid for some months and that this changes on a leap year.
If you allow daily scheduling, you need to be aware that some hours of the day may not exist on certain days or may exist twice.
If you poll a client device and do any datetime comparisons, you need to decide whether you care about elapsed time or calendar time.
I worked on some code that was deployed to aircraft carriers in the Pacific. “This event already happened tomorrow” is completely possible when you cross the international date line.
Add to all of this the fact that there are different calendars across the world, even if the change is as small as a different “first day of the week”.
Man I wish this was be the biggest problems I had to work on.
All I read here is lazyness.
No daylight savings time. Sold.
timezones make sense to me, and this just looks like UTC+1 with extra steps.
Decimal time is the interesting part.
I wish that all time and calendars were decimal. Or at very least we should have something like the Hobbit calendar where every month is the same amount of days and the same date is the same weekday each year.
You also listen to 99% invisible?
What is that?
It’s a podcast. One of the stories in this episode talks about Swatch Internet Time, how the French tried to make the day be 10h, etc: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/mini-stories-volume-17/
I remember having the wrist watch that had this under the time. Just the one shown on the wikipedia page, IIRC.
I’ve got a .Beats watchface for my garmin watch. It’s unusable. I love it.
Wow, this brought back memories and I feel old.
I don’t know, way back in the internet 1.0 days… my child brain hung out with some other kids of similar age on chat channels. Time zones fucking boggled my mind at the time, and I tried to sell some other people on this shit so we could always meet up at the same time to chat.
TL;DR - I “bought into” the marketting as a kid… I always did like watches, tried to convince some internet buddies to use the shit. Later in life, understood how timezones worked.
I pretty much just have to switch AM to PM and I’m pretty much there
