> Oh, my goodness, there'd be a couple of years of bumps and grinds as people readjusted their schedules.
Except for the literal billions of computers which will need replacing and trillions of lines of code you're going to need to rewrite, sure.
And redeploy the entire GPS system. And the code running on the mainframe in the back room of the basement which no one has touched in literal decades.
"readjusted their schedules" is such a ridiculous hand-waving away of serious problems with the idea.
One of the biggest problems is that weekdays completely cease to make sense. With timezones, the day of the week changes at midnight, when most people are asleep. You wake up in the morning, it's a new weekday, and it's the same weekday for as long as the sun is in the sky.
If we abolish timezones and choose UTC as the one time, the day of the week will change at 5pm in San Francisco. Say that you have an establishment that is normally closed on Sundays. It's 4pm on a Saturday, do you close in an hour because it is then Sunday? Or do you change your "schedule" so that your establishment is closed on SundayMondays instead? Or perhaps you keep it closed on SaturdaySundays? Because the concept of "Sunday" doesn't make sense anymore, "Sunday" is no longer a contiguous period of normal waking hours.
In San Francisco. In London it's business as usual. But in Sydney the day of the week changes at 10am. When is "Sunday morning"? 9am Sunday morning is the day after 10am Sunday morning. Every week has two Sunday mornings now. (And two Monday mornings!) Which one of them did you mean?
Adjusting computer systems is much, much simpler than getting humans to accept this idiotic system.
> Adjusting computer systems is much, much simpler than getting humans to accept this idiotic system.
Agreed -- I think of timezones much like coordinate systems: They're all representing the same point in (space|time), just in a slightly different format, each with different benefits/setbacks for biological things vs electronical things. Like latitudes and longitudes vs UTM coordinates vs local grid coordinates. "Number of milliseconds since January 1st 1970" can still describe the same global time-point as "First of July, 2019, noon". Timezones are there for people. Everything else can normalize on UTC.
That being said, I think the "universal" in coordinated universal time is a bit of a misnomer -- at some point in our interstellar future, are we going to have to start thinking more about factoring in time dilation? :-) we already have "coordinated Mars time".. Are we going to have an intergalactic day of many noons..
And getting humans to accept the system is easier than changing laws that specify when things can be open/closed. E.g. The US Postal Service, drinking establishments, hunting laws.
And even if those adjustments are somehow accepted, travelling anywhere longitudinally will be a world of pain to the traveler, to re-learn what should be common sense on the 'local' time to wake up, time for lunch, days of the weekend...
If only there was a system, some kind of longitudinal "zones" maybe, that would help your smartphone auto-adjust so it could show you when things like working hours, lunch, afternoon, etc occurs in the place you're in...
"Except for the literal billions of computers which will need replacing and trillions of lines of code you're going to need to rewrite, sure."
If anything, it's the computers that would have the easiest time of things. Time is already so random and janky that on the whole the computing world has dealt with it reasonably well. It would "just" mean one more entry for every timezone in the Olson timezone DB, and that's a lot of the work right there.
However, by the same token, if you want to get a sense of just how impossible this is going to be to get anyone to agree to from the political side, a read through the comments in the timezone DB can be constructive, such as: https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/master/europe
It'll really show you what anyone who thinks they can convince the whole world to change is up against.
I’m under the possibly mistaken impression that most computers already do everything in UTC and the “local time” which gets displayed is just calculated from that.
Well, switching to metric and switching to right-hand driving would be good things, painful in the short perspective, but extremely beneficial in the long perspective.
Abolishing time zones is just an incredibly dumb idea, and the drawbacks heavily outweigh the benefits if you actually think about it. So I'm actually glad that human inertia makes it impossible to do.
I wonder how beneficial switching to the metric system would really be. It's trivial to convert between systems if need be and pretty much all serious engineering/science work (where confusion can be costly) is done using the metric system these days anyways.
>Despite this being a "solved problem"(TM), it's not really trivial in any meaningful sense, neither for regular people nor for developers creating a system that should deal with units in both systems.
It really is trivial for "regular" people as everyone has a device in their pocket that can quickly convert to any unit you want (which is an infrequent thing to need in daily life). As for developers, there's lots of changes we could impose on the world to make our (developers) lives easier but easing the burden on developers should rarely be a consideration when considering such changes IMO.
Well, by that metric it's about equally trivial for any maths student to solve indefinite integrals (e.g. using Wolfram Alpha), right?
It's not that I disagree about the utility of modern technology, but I just think that some things are inherently difficult for humans even if there is a handy oracle to compute them.
The imperial system has shortcomings for small units, which means that regular people will encounter grams/millimeters/milliliters in their daily lives, so they are effectively using a hybrid system already, which is just the worst of both worlds.
Yes, converting is technically trivial, but you still have to reach for a calculator to do it.
>The imperial system has shortcomings for small units
Don't forget the medium and large units!
I guess miles on their own work fine, but it'd be nice if someone could say "2000 feet" and I didn't have to think about how many miles that means.
And our two speed measures of feet per second and miles per hour are close to equivalent (1 fps is about 0.7 mph) but nobody knows that to convert it in their heads. It just happens that 3600 seconds is the same order of magnitude as 5280 feet.
Not that metric is totally better in that regard since they're stuck with minutes and seconds too. There's 86,400 seconds in a day, maybe when we're making this big calendar change we can switch it over to 100,000 seconds at the same time.
Or we could change miles to be 3600 feet so that feet per seconds and miles per hour are equivalent. Added bonus, that's not too far off a kilometer.
0.7 and 1 are not close to equivalent even when speaking informally. The difference is the same as driving normal highway speed vs license suspension (or jail) speed
One thing I learned from a Disney movie of Goofy driving is that multiplying a speed in miles per hour by 1.5 gives a surprisingly close approximation to feet per second.
I wish the metric system didn't have shortcomings in the medium units, though. There's no (commonly used) parallel to feet in metric. Centimeters are too small for the kind of estimations feet are useful for. That's really the only imperial unit I care about.
You can use decimetres if you wish (0.1m or 10cm, so about ⅓ foot). In practise this isn't really a shortcoming, so hardly anyone does use them.
About the only place I see decimetre markings is depth gauges on rivers/canals/bridges, and rulers used by geologists when photographing a rock formation.
2 feet is about 600mm or 60 cm or 6 decimeters or 0.6m or 0.06 dekameters. Just pick whatever prefix that gives you the number of significant digits you want.
Metric doesn't "lack units", because there's only a single unit for every measure. Instead there's prefixes for every power of ten around human-scale measurements, and for every power of thousand for much smaller and much larger measurements.
Serious science experiments like the resoundingly successful controlled descent into martian terrain.
IMHO this is just the tip of the iceberg. I can’t even begin to fathom the inordinate amount of conversion mistakes there might be but we never hear about or even detect because this is not NASA yet have possibly damaging consequences.
The lander crash could have just as easily been happened using 2 different metric units. It wasn't caused by improper conversion, it was caused by no conversion. Each part assumed the other was using the same unit.
> The lander crash could have just as easily been happened using 2 different metric units
Nobody uses anything but meters and seconds with metric in science. But even if - using 2 different metric units would give answers differing by a factor of 1000 - a little easier to notice than Pound vs Newton (1 to ~4.45).
> Nobody uses anything but meters and seconds with metric in science.
A lander is engineering and science, and I can guarantee you that there is a non-zero probability of one part of a system working in m/s and another in km/h — which would lead to the exact same error.
The fact that converting measurements is trivial in theory doesn't mean that you don't have those measurements embedded in physical artifacts in non-trivial ways.
Any sort of machinery that deals with measurements, has some sort of "standard" embedded in it.
I'm a woodworker, so I'm going to pick on the world of woodworking.
A thickness planer (thicknesser if you're from the UK) dimensions wood to a consistent thickness. The adjustment is typically done by raising or lowering the bed relative to the cutterhead. There is generally a crank or handwheel that turns some kind of gear or screw mechanism that in turn moves the bed.
In the US, woodworkers generally use inches, and work in thicknesses that are some even number of 16ths of an inch.
It would be possible, in theory, to set any planer for any dimension in the continuous range of dimensions it supports. In practice, the adjustment mechanism is set so that a whole turn of the crank corresponds to some whole number of 16ths. Moreover, this is usually set up so that a whole number of 16ths lands at an easily repeated position: crank handle at 12 o'clock or 6 o'clock. This makes it blindingly easy to repeatably hit the same mark (within woodworking tolerances) every time you use the machine.
So far, so good.
The shop I belong to where I have access to a planer has a modern Powermatic planer. Powermatic no longer manufactures in the US, and the planer was a bit of a source of mystery to me until I dug up the docs and read them. One full turn of the crank is 1.5mm. I'll spare you converting: That's 1/16th of an inch, less 3.5 thousandths of an inch (thou, rhymes with cow).
That doesn't sound like much, but it adds up. Over 16 turns of the crank, you're now 56 thou off where you expected to be, or, almost exactly 1/17th of an inch[0]. Moreover, hitting 3/4" exactly (within woodworking tolerances) requires a bit of guesstimating about how much extra you need to turn the wheel past 12 o'clock or 6 o'clock.
Non-solutions to this problem:
1. Put a measuring device on the machine. They either aren't accurate enough, don't stay accurate, or cost a fortune (i.e. anything digital that is both accurate and stays accurate)
2. Work in metric. I would, happily, except for the fact that literally everything else in the shop is inches. Chisels in the US are an even number of 16ths of an inch wide. A dado stack for a table saw cuts dadoes an even number of 8ths, 16ths, or 32nds of an inch wide. The simple act of finding a measuring tape that's metric is a pain in the ass. I can go to Home Depot, Lowes, or any hardware store and find a dozen options in inches. If I'm lucky, there's ONE with metric, and it has inches on one side of the tape.
But wait, it gets worse if you're a metalworker. Metal lathes have a leadscrew that rotates a fixed number of rotations per rotation of the workpiece (non-continuously variable by gearbox). Those are threaded either in either metric or inches. To do metric work on a lathe that's natively inches (or vice versa), you need gears in the ratio of 254:100, reduced to 127:50. If that sounds like a lot of teeth on one gear, that's because it is; making that set of gears requires either an impractically large gear (won't fit on the lathe), or impractically small teeth (incapable of transmitting the required torque)[1].
Once you start making actual physical things, you find that your system of measurement is embedded in nearly everything around you in ways that are difficult to work around while maintaining sufficient accuracy and precision.
[0] Yes, this means that 1.5mm is almost, but not quite, exactly 1/17th of an inch.
[1] There exists a very close approximate solution that can be used subject to limitations you'd need to find a machinist to expand on.
When I did a little home improvement project I always thought what a PITA it is to multiply 5 and 3/8 inches seven times. Let alone divide that number by 3. Metric is so much easier.
The imperial system is a problem in daily life. Most of my American friends don’t know how many ounces are in a pound or how many teaspoons in a tablespoon. This makes price comparison at shopping very difficult and cooking is also harder. Sure you can survive but imperial is just an incredibly inefficient system.
Comparison shopping is difficult because the stores are allowed to get away with marking interchangeable items with wildly dissimilar units (type and/or magnitude), quoting per item, per ounce, per pound, per gram, per quart, etc., all on items that are sitting next to one another. All of the grocery chains that I've ever shopped at are guilty of this.
People who are serious about cooking know about the volumetric units used in cooking and the relationships between them. (teaspoons/3 = tablespoons)/16 = cups.
But your American friends who don't know how many ounces are in a pound? I hope you're kidding. That's basic stuff, taught in elementary (primary) school.
I am not kidding. Most seem to be resigned to the fact that it’s 12 or 16 and that’s close enough. Also nobody knows how many cups are in a pack of flour so buying something for a recipe is hard too.
These comparisons are much easier in the metric system : it is either per unit or per kg.
If it is per gram, it's easy still because *1000 or /1000 is very easy. (basically you just move the decimal point, no calculator needed)
It is because we count with base 10 numbers that metric is easy and imperial is difficult.
Another related thing is the nutritional value info box that every food item in the US is required to have. That's a good thing in itself, except the US allows this info box to show the values "per serving", which is usually a completely arbitrary measurement, making it impossible to compare two food items to determine which has more sugar, or which has more protein.
In the EU, the same thing exists, but it is always per 100g or per 100ml. No exceptions. So comparing two food items is always super easy. I don't know why the US allows this idiotic loophole of per serving.
it really doesn't help that you being non-american, could conceivably be talking about any one of about 20 different 'pounds'. America itself only uses the avoirdupois pound, but if you thrown internationalism into the mix, it could be a troy pound, an ISP or a non-US avoirdupois pound, maybe we're even talking about a russian pound... and that's all before we get to pound-mass vs pound-weight/pound-force
here, let wikipedia muddy the waters even more for us:
Just one example: when I’m working on a random unknown bolt, I have to try two sets of sockets on it because I don’t know if it’s metric or imperial. Worse, there are some sizes which are close enough to grip and seem like a fit, but which will damage the head when more than moderate torque is applied.
There are lots of little things like this, multiplied by millions of people.
(Numbers made up, based on what I read many years ago on [1], but most of the links are now dead.)
Situation: mother and 6 year old boy in hospital in the UK. In the UK, everything is metric except casual discussion of body weight and height, and road distances and speeds. And beer in pubs.
Doctor: I'm prescribing this drug, the nurse will give it to your son.
Nurse to boy: can you stand on the scale please? OK, 45… that makes the dose 5mL.
Did you notice the error? A 6 year old won't weigh 45kg, the digital scale is somehow set to pounds. The boy actually weighs 20kg — he's about to receive a double-dose.
Neither the nurse nor the mother (or the boy for that matter) noticed the incorrect weight, and the boy was seriously injured (perhaps killed, I forget) through an overdose of the drug. The NHS then replaced any scale that could give a reading in pounds, to prevent a repeat of the error.
In the rest of Europe, nurse or mother would have known 45kg wasn't a reasonable weight for a 6 year old boy, and investigated the problem.
I'm sure you can think of other technical or semi-technical situations where unfamiliarity with the metric unit can lead to mistakes.
This is particularly surprising given that most people in the UK use “stones” as a measurement for weight, so pounds would be just as confusing as kilograms.
What is the long term benefit of UK and Ireland switching to right hand driving? I guess it would make life easier for HGVs that's the only class of vehicles that regularly uses both systems. For everyone else it would be a lot of pain and little to no benefit.
I would think if -every- country changed to driving on the right, all cars could be LHD, and that would make vehicle design and supply chains simpler and lower cost? Depending, of course, if people are actually driving in the future, but having thought a bit about it maybe in the near future there won't be the need to have a physical connection to the steering rack or pedals so switching the driver's side will be easier and simpler in the future.
Buying a car from anywhere in the EU or wherever would be a lot easier, as it is a lot of 'grey' imports in the UK tend to be from Japan, I think, as they're RHD and have interesting vehicles in good condition.
IIRC it becomes difficult to register cars in Japan because of emissions standards once they are a few years old. That's why so many end up in Australia/NZ/UK.
I can't think of any apart from marginal production costs for right hand drive.
I can think of negatives though. For one, people for the most part are right eye and right hand dominant. That means that they can drive better on the left side of the road - if you look at racing cars where the driver can drive in any orientation, they generally historically had the gear stick on the left because you want your right hand on the steering wheel. Having your dominant right eye have a better field of view of the road and oncoming lane helps too.
Despite being one of the more densely populated countries in Europe, UK accident rates are well below almost everywhere else in Europe let alone the world. I don't think this is because UK road infrastructure is superior to eg. German road infrastructure - I think it is because we drive in a more "natural" position.
Driving on the left would mean chaos in the short term and then make our accident rates slightly worse for all eternity afterwards. Not really worth it?
Think it's more likely because we stick to the rules more than most countries. For example I was in Italy a few weeks ago and there's some weird risks they take where they think it's fine to cross the other lane of traffic when turning even when something's close and barrelling at them at full speed. A few seconds saved where a small distraction in the other driver could cause a side on collision.
I'd also be interested to see how those rates compare historically, I only drive occasionally and it's very noticeable that the UK is now plastered in speed cameras compared to even 10 years ago.
I don't know if switching what side of the road they drive on would have any benefits, but switching which side of the car the steering wheel is on could.
Around 89% of people are right handed, and 11% are left handed.
With the steering wheel on the right, as it is in most left side driving countries, most drivers have their most nimble hand on the door side, and their least nimble hand on the interior side.
But the door side only has a few things that you need to interact with--the handle to open the door, the lock button, maybe some power windows buttons. These are all things that do not require any finesse to operate.
The interior side has whatever is on the center console, and possibly a gear shift, and is also the side on which any interaction with the passengers take place. It's where the stupid touch screen is on cars so equipped. It's the side where you want your dominant hand.
This could be largely mitigated by adding voice control for the center console functions, and probably should be for safety purposes. "Hey car, turn on the air conditioning".
Don't you want to keep your dominant hand on the (rather important) steering wheel while you're using the other hand to adjust the volume of the radio, change gears, turn on the heating, or whatever?
I think it really makes no difference for the steering wheel. I've never been in a situation where my left hand was in any way inadequate to the task of steering my car.
(Well, one case: when driving a heavy vehicle at low speeds with no power steering. But in that case, my right hand is also unable to steer it on its own! Getting the truck out of the parking lot is a two-handed job.)
My intuition is that I would generally prefer to keep my left hand (less dextrous) on the steering wheel (only one moving part, controlled by big sweeping movements), and use my right hand (better at fine motor control) for tasks involving moving/pressing/twisting smaller controls.
My trip to Australia taught me that driving on the side you're not used to is very difficult at first, and definitely a safety hazard.
If the whole world drives on the same side, international travel involving driving becomes safer and some unknowable number of lives will be saved.
But long before that could ever happen self driving cars will become the norm, and human driven vehicles will be considered a savage ancient custom you can't believe we used to do.
Why not abolish timezones AND switch to metric? Now that we live our lives on the information superhighway, surely it's inevitable that Swatch Internet Time will eventually become the standard:
I remember a school teacher explaining how we [the US] were going to make the switch soon. A healthy number of years later I realized nothing happened and wondered what was going on. Many years after that I used the "MPH/KPH" button in my vehicle as a form of useless rebellion.
Kinda, it wasn't shot down. The US actually started down the path of conversion. The real reason that US metrication failed was that conversion was voluntary. The UK went through a similar change but metrication was mandatory for all industries. In the US most businesses and industries just decided it cost too much to change so they didn't.
Inches/feet/yards are pretty decent measurements. Better than metric, in some ways. It's miles where everything goes to hell. Fahrenheit's not really worth clinging to but does seem to be a closer match than celsius to sensible differences in temperature, using whole-number degrees only, and its 0-100 range (and somewhat beyond, with either basically translating to "effing cold" or "effing hot") matches up pretty well with common air temperatures in most populated areas, which is handy. I can see resisting a change there as it's "good enough".
Being able to trivially convert volume to mass and vice-versa for anything that's mostly water is a killer feature for metric, at least when it comes to cooking, which is the main place most people actually use volume and mass measurements in their lives. Switching there seems like a no-brainer.
Really, most people are using these measurements for household work, checking the weather and setting indoor temps, cooking, and travel distances (miles are fine there since they rarely/never need to be converted to anything else for that purpose). That's about it. The only place Imperial's a clear loser there, seems to me, is the kitchen. Most people aren't doing science—and it's telling that the kitchen, where they come the closest to it, is where metric might have a real advantage.
Definitely a great resource. It explains steady-state drawbacks of universal time, that is, drawbacks that would keep existing even after everyone has adapted.
"William F. Allen realized that time is not just some objective measurement of where the sun is in the sky. It is also about the needs of society"
As I wait for my remote team member half-a-world away to get online so we can have our meeting and I can go to lunch while she has her breakfast, this rings so true.
This is a great idea. While we're at it, we should standardise "up" so everyone is on the same page regardless of their location. "Up" should be the vector pointing at Alpha Centauri. This would make it so much easier for people around the world to talk about directions.
I was on an airliner getting ready for takeoff, the captain gives his announcement we are flying to such and such will be there in 3 hours etc.
This was in the USA and the captain had an australian accent. At the end of his announcement he said "And to the passenger that expressed concern, please be assured that I have received extensive training as to the direction of "up" in the northern hemisphere.
A "vector pointing at Alpha Centauri" is an incomplete definition, since a vector has a magnitude and direction. Also, Alpha Centauri has a declination of –60° 50′ 02.3737″, which makes it necessary to adjust for the time of the day. That would make people dizzy, which is unfortunate.
So I propose the following very simple definition:
Up - The direction defined by the position vector of Polaris with reference to the center of the Earth (not to be confused with North).
Down - The direction opposite of Up (See also: South).
This does give us the opportunity for international compromise.
Since GMT is the time in England, and the meter is (more or less) 3 Parisian feet, we should at least standardize "up" as the direction the Empire State Building goes.
I did a lot of scientific research and I've come to the conclusion that if we all just agreed to stop coming up with ideas that start with the phrase "if we all just agree to X." we'd stop wasting so much of each other's time.
> STEVE HANKE: You can trade 24 hours a day, almost around the clock in gold, currencies, stocks and everything else under the sun. And those are all time-stamped using Universal Time.
A surprising amount of finance is time stamped in New York time. Just for fun, Auckland time gets used a bit, too.
I work in a team distributed throughout the globe. It's very difficult to talk about "time" because everyone's timezone is so different.
What would be nice is if our computers always showed two times. The local time in a larger font, and then UTC time in a smaller font.
This way, when we need to talk about time in a global context, we can use UTC. But, because most of us live our lives in local time, we don't need to say something silly like, "I'm getting lunch at 22:00".
On Linux (KDE panel), adding a second Digital Clock widget set to UTC and in a different font on top of another one set to U.S. East (which shows date as opposed to zone): https://i.imgur.com/H6H8wOD.png
The reason the comments are snarky is because getting rid of timezones is a monumentally stupid idea that doesn't solve the problem it thinks it's solving.
When you are scheduling a meeting with people in a different timezone, you need to figure out what a specific time is and what a specific time means for both parties.
Because times have meaning, we know that 8:00 is breakfast, 12:00 is lunch, 18:00 is dinner and 23:00 is night and people are sleeping.
Timezones force you to do a lookup to figure out what the time is in the other location, and given that knowledge, you know because of universal global conventions what that time means, so you can avoid scheduling a meeting when they are probably sleeping.
If you remove timezones, you no longer have to do a lookup to figure out what the time is in the other location, because it's the same everywhere - yaaaayyyy!!! - but you still have to do a lookup to figure out what a specific time means. Is the sun up? Are they sleeping? Are they at work? You know that you wake up at 17:00, eat breakfast at 18:00 and have to be at work at 19:00, but you have no idea at what time people typically do that at the other location.
You have perfect knowledge of what the time is everywhere, but you have no knowledge of what times mean anymore. Great. And that's just one of the multiple issues with removing timezones.
In Urumqi they are using Beijing time, but doing everything two hours later. The official working hours are from 10:00 to 14:00 and 16:00 to 20:00. Even after being there for two weeks, it kept confusing me. Every time I looked at a clock (and you do this many times a day), it took me some mental effort to 'translate' the time on the clock to my own time of when I am used to do certain things. And this was only a two hour shift. Imagine if it would be 7 hours.
I think we should have two numerical time zones. One should be sun time and the other should be world time. Sun time could eventually become obsolete if not helpful for workdays and sleeping habits.
I thought about this. My watch needs to tell me (no matter were I am, by using GPS) what time are the most common for meals and what time is my meeting with the locals. What numbers it assigns to these are not material, but UGMT would make the most sense.
I once made a trip south of Chicago. Got to my destination in Indiana. I could not make sense of the miles per hour I realized for the trip. Then later on I realized that Indiana has two time zones and I had gained an extra hour between Gary and Indianapolis.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadWait, what did it do in between?
Except for the literal billions of computers which will need replacing and trillions of lines of code you're going to need to rewrite, sure.
And redeploy the entire GPS system. And the code running on the mainframe in the back room of the basement which no one has touched in literal decades.
Seems.... Risky
One of the biggest problems is that weekdays completely cease to make sense. With timezones, the day of the week changes at midnight, when most people are asleep. You wake up in the morning, it's a new weekday, and it's the same weekday for as long as the sun is in the sky.
If we abolish timezones and choose UTC as the one time, the day of the week will change at 5pm in San Francisco. Say that you have an establishment that is normally closed on Sundays. It's 4pm on a Saturday, do you close in an hour because it is then Sunday? Or do you change your "schedule" so that your establishment is closed on SundayMondays instead? Or perhaps you keep it closed on SaturdaySundays? Because the concept of "Sunday" doesn't make sense anymore, "Sunday" is no longer a contiguous period of normal waking hours.
In San Francisco. In London it's business as usual. But in Sydney the day of the week changes at 10am. When is "Sunday morning"? 9am Sunday morning is the day after 10am Sunday morning. Every week has two Sunday mornings now. (And two Monday mornings!) Which one of them did you mean?
Adjusting computer systems is much, much simpler than getting humans to accept this idiotic system.
Agreed -- I think of timezones much like coordinate systems: They're all representing the same point in (space|time), just in a slightly different format, each with different benefits/setbacks for biological things vs electronical things. Like latitudes and longitudes vs UTM coordinates vs local grid coordinates. "Number of milliseconds since January 1st 1970" can still describe the same global time-point as "First of July, 2019, noon". Timezones are there for people. Everything else can normalize on UTC.
That being said, I think the "universal" in coordinated universal time is a bit of a misnomer -- at some point in our interstellar future, are we going to have to start thinking more about factoring in time dilation? :-) we already have "coordinated Mars time".. Are we going to have an intergalactic day of many noons..
If anything, it's the computers that would have the easiest time of things. Time is already so random and janky that on the whole the computing world has dealt with it reasonably well. It would "just" mean one more entry for every timezone in the Olson timezone DB, and that's a lot of the work right there.
However, by the same token, if you want to get a sense of just how impossible this is going to be to get anyone to agree to from the political side, a read through the comments in the timezone DB can be constructive, such as: https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/master/europe
It'll really show you what anyone who thinks they can convince the whole world to change is up against.
- everyone switches to Dvorak keyboards
- British motorists start driving on the right*
- United States adopts the metric system
- Daily Telegraph admits a hard Brexit may have negative consequences for the population as a whole
* yes, I know, Dagen H, but 2019 UK is very different from 1967 Sweden
Abolishing time zones is just an incredibly dumb idea, and the drawbacks heavily outweigh the benefits if you actually think about it. So I'm actually glad that human inertia makes it impossible to do.
It's not that I disagree about the utility of modern technology, but I just think that some things are inherently difficult for humans even if there is a handy oracle to compute them.
Yes, converting is technically trivial, but you still have to reach for a calculator to do it.
Don't forget the medium and large units!
I guess miles on their own work fine, but it'd be nice if someone could say "2000 feet" and I didn't have to think about how many miles that means.
And our two speed measures of feet per second and miles per hour are close to equivalent (1 fps is about 0.7 mph) but nobody knows that to convert it in their heads. It just happens that 3600 seconds is the same order of magnitude as 5280 feet.
Not that metric is totally better in that regard since they're stuck with minutes and seconds too. There's 86,400 seconds in a day, maybe when we're making this big calendar change we can switch it over to 100,000 seconds at the same time.
Or we could change miles to be 3600 feet so that feet per seconds and miles per hour are equivalent. Added bonus, that's not too far off a kilometer.
1 beat = 1 minute and 26.4 seconds (86.4 seconds) in standard time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
They're useful for having people understand speeds at different scales, but only because the different scales of units line up stupidly.
Of course the effort to change it isn't worth it, it just makes you wish we'd got it right the first time around.
About the only place I see decimetre markings is depth gauges on rivers/canals/bridges, and rulers used by geologists when photographing a rock formation.
2 feet is about 600mm or 60 cm or 6 decimeters or 0.6m or 0.06 dekameters. Just pick whatever prefix that gives you the number of significant digits you want.
Metric doesn't "lack units", because there's only a single unit for every measure. Instead there's prefixes for every power of ten around human-scale measurements, and for every power of thousand for much smaller and much larger measurements.
IMHO this is just the tip of the iceberg. I can’t even begin to fathom the inordinate amount of conversion mistakes there might be but we never hear about or even detect because this is not NASA yet have possibly damaging consequences.
Nobody uses anything but meters and seconds with metric in science. But even if - using 2 different metric units would give answers differing by a factor of 1000 - a little easier to notice than Pound vs Newton (1 to ~4.45).
Is that m/s, km/h or kmps?
Sure, now. It took the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter to end the Imperial madness at NASA.
A lander is engineering and science, and I can guarantee you that there is a non-zero probability of one part of a system working in m/s and another in km/h — which would lead to the exact same error.
Any sort of machinery that deals with measurements, has some sort of "standard" embedded in it.
I'm a woodworker, so I'm going to pick on the world of woodworking.
A thickness planer (thicknesser if you're from the UK) dimensions wood to a consistent thickness. The adjustment is typically done by raising or lowering the bed relative to the cutterhead. There is generally a crank or handwheel that turns some kind of gear or screw mechanism that in turn moves the bed.
In the US, woodworkers generally use inches, and work in thicknesses that are some even number of 16ths of an inch.
It would be possible, in theory, to set any planer for any dimension in the continuous range of dimensions it supports. In practice, the adjustment mechanism is set so that a whole turn of the crank corresponds to some whole number of 16ths. Moreover, this is usually set up so that a whole number of 16ths lands at an easily repeated position: crank handle at 12 o'clock or 6 o'clock. This makes it blindingly easy to repeatably hit the same mark (within woodworking tolerances) every time you use the machine.
So far, so good.
The shop I belong to where I have access to a planer has a modern Powermatic planer. Powermatic no longer manufactures in the US, and the planer was a bit of a source of mystery to me until I dug up the docs and read them. One full turn of the crank is 1.5mm. I'll spare you converting: That's 1/16th of an inch, less 3.5 thousandths of an inch (thou, rhymes with cow).
That doesn't sound like much, but it adds up. Over 16 turns of the crank, you're now 56 thou off where you expected to be, or, almost exactly 1/17th of an inch[0]. Moreover, hitting 3/4" exactly (within woodworking tolerances) requires a bit of guesstimating about how much extra you need to turn the wheel past 12 o'clock or 6 o'clock.
Non-solutions to this problem:
1. Put a measuring device on the machine. They either aren't accurate enough, don't stay accurate, or cost a fortune (i.e. anything digital that is both accurate and stays accurate)
2. Work in metric. I would, happily, except for the fact that literally everything else in the shop is inches. Chisels in the US are an even number of 16ths of an inch wide. A dado stack for a table saw cuts dadoes an even number of 8ths, 16ths, or 32nds of an inch wide. The simple act of finding a measuring tape that's metric is a pain in the ass. I can go to Home Depot, Lowes, or any hardware store and find a dozen options in inches. If I'm lucky, there's ONE with metric, and it has inches on one side of the tape.
But wait, it gets worse if you're a metalworker. Metal lathes have a leadscrew that rotates a fixed number of rotations per rotation of the workpiece (non-continuously variable by gearbox). Those are threaded either in either metric or inches. To do metric work on a lathe that's natively inches (or vice versa), you need gears in the ratio of 254:100, reduced to 127:50. If that sounds like a lot of teeth on one gear, that's because it is; making that set of gears requires either an impractically large gear (won't fit on the lathe), or impractically small teeth (incapable of transmitting the required torque)[1].
Once you start making actual physical things, you find that your system of measurement is embedded in nearly everything around you in ways that are difficult to work around while maintaining sufficient accuracy and precision.
[0] Yes, this means that 1.5mm is almost, but not quite, exactly 1/17th of an inch.
[1] There exists a very close approximate solution that can be used subject to limitations you'd need to find a machinist to expand on.
People who are serious about cooking know about the volumetric units used in cooking and the relationships between them. (teaspoons/3 = tablespoons)/16 = cups.
But your American friends who don't know how many ounces are in a pound? I hope you're kidding. That's basic stuff, taught in elementary (primary) school.
It is because we count with base 10 numbers that metric is easy and imperial is difficult.
You can see the prices per unit on their websites:
https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/search?query=bottled%2...
Not sure if this is required by regulations or it’s just the supermarkets being customer-friendly though.
In the EU, the same thing exists, but it is always per 100g or per 100ml. No exceptions. So comparing two food items is always super easy. I don't know why the US allows this idiotic loophole of per serving.
it really doesn't help that you being non-american, could conceivably be talking about any one of about 20 different 'pounds'. America itself only uses the avoirdupois pound, but if you thrown internationalism into the mix, it could be a troy pound, an ISP or a non-US avoirdupois pound, maybe we're even talking about a russian pound... and that's all before we get to pound-mass vs pound-weight/pound-force
here, let wikipedia muddy the waters even more for us:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0a/Co...
There are lots of little things like this, multiplied by millions of people.
Situation: mother and 6 year old boy in hospital in the UK. In the UK, everything is metric except casual discussion of body weight and height, and road distances and speeds. And beer in pubs.
Doctor: I'm prescribing this drug, the nurse will give it to your son.
Nurse to boy: can you stand on the scale please? OK, 45… that makes the dose 5mL.
Did you notice the error? A 6 year old won't weigh 45kg, the digital scale is somehow set to pounds. The boy actually weighs 20kg — he's about to receive a double-dose.
Neither the nurse nor the mother (or the boy for that matter) noticed the incorrect weight, and the boy was seriously injured (perhaps killed, I forget) through an overdose of the drug. The NHS then replaced any scale that could give a reading in pounds, to prevent a repeat of the error.
In the rest of Europe, nurse or mother would have known 45kg wasn't a reasonable weight for a 6 year old boy, and investigated the problem.
I'm sure you can think of other technical or semi-technical situations where unfamiliarity with the metric unit can lead to mistakes.
[1] http://metricviews.org.uk/2009/12/nhs-risking-patients-lives...
The nurse is expecting a "big" value, but has no concept of either measure.
Buying a car from anywhere in the EU or wherever would be a lot easier, as it is a lot of 'grey' imports in the UK tend to be from Japan, I think, as they're RHD and have interesting vehicles in good condition.
I can think of negatives though. For one, people for the most part are right eye and right hand dominant. That means that they can drive better on the left side of the road - if you look at racing cars where the driver can drive in any orientation, they generally historically had the gear stick on the left because you want your right hand on the steering wheel. Having your dominant right eye have a better field of view of the road and oncoming lane helps too.
Despite being one of the more densely populated countries in Europe, UK accident rates are well below almost everywhere else in Europe let alone the world. I don't think this is because UK road infrastructure is superior to eg. German road infrastructure - I think it is because we drive in a more "natural" position.
Driving on the left would mean chaos in the short term and then make our accident rates slightly worse for all eternity afterwards. Not really worth it?
I'd also be interested to see how those rates compare historically, I only drive occasionally and it's very noticeable that the UK is now plastered in speed cameras compared to even 10 years ago.
Around 89% of people are right handed, and 11% are left handed.
With the steering wheel on the right, as it is in most left side driving countries, most drivers have their most nimble hand on the door side, and their least nimble hand on the interior side.
But the door side only has a few things that you need to interact with--the handle to open the door, the lock button, maybe some power windows buttons. These are all things that do not require any finesse to operate.
The interior side has whatever is on the center console, and possibly a gear shift, and is also the side on which any interaction with the passengers take place. It's where the stupid touch screen is on cars so equipped. It's the side where you want your dominant hand.
(Well, one case: when driving a heavy vehicle at low speeds with no power steering. But in that case, my right hand is also unable to steer it on its own! Getting the truck out of the parking lot is a two-handed job.)
My intuition is that I would generally prefer to keep my left hand (less dextrous) on the steering wheel (only one moving part, controlled by big sweeping movements), and use my right hand (better at fine motor control) for tasks involving moving/pressing/twisting smaller controls.
If the whole world drives on the same side, international travel involving driving becomes safer and some unknowable number of lives will be saved.
But long before that could ever happen self driving cars will become the norm, and human driven vehicles will be considered a savage ancient custom you can't believe we used to do.
https://www.swatch.com/en_gb/internet-time/
https://qntm.org/abolish
https://www.nist.gov/sites/default/files/documents/pml/wmd/m...
Being able to trivially convert volume to mass and vice-versa for anything that's mostly water is a killer feature for metric, at least when it comes to cooking, which is the main place most people actually use volume and mass measurements in their lives. Switching there seems like a no-brainer.
Really, most people are using these measurements for household work, checking the weather and setting indoor temps, cooking, and travel distances (miles are fine there since they rarely/never need to be converted to anything else for that purpose). That's about it. The only place Imperial's a clear loser there, seems to me, is the kitchen. Most people aren't doing science—and it's telling that the kitchen, where they come the closest to it, is where metric might have a real advantage.
Re: water, a pint's a pound the whole world 'round.
(Just my 1.58 pence)
Le sigh.
As I wait for my remote team member half-a-world away to get online so we can have our meeting and I can go to lunch while she has her breakfast, this rings so true.
The invention of standard time was more complex, more international, than america's NPR would have us believe.
On july 1st, let us also remember that basketball was invented by a canadian. (Go raptors).
This was in the USA and the captain had an australian accent. At the end of his announcement he said "And to the passenger that expressed concern, please be assured that I have received extensive training as to the direction of "up" in the northern hemisphere.
So I propose the following very simple definition:
Up - The direction defined by the position vector of Polaris with reference to the center of the Earth (not to be confused with North).
Down - The direction opposite of Up (See also: South).
How is the direction represented?
Since GMT is the time in England, and the meter is (more or less) 3 Parisian feet, we should at least standardize "up" as the direction the Empire State Building goes.
A surprising amount of finance is time stamped in New York time. Just for fun, Auckland time gets used a bit, too.
I work in a team distributed throughout the globe. It's very difficult to talk about "time" because everyone's timezone is so different.
What would be nice is if our computers always showed two times. The local time in a larger font, and then UTC time in a smaller font.
This way, when we need to talk about time in a global context, we can use UTC. But, because most of us live our lives in local time, we don't need to say something silly like, "I'm getting lunch at 22:00".
It's pretty easy to set up on Windows and I can't imagine it's hard on other OSes either.
I did that when I worked remotely so I wouldn't constantly have to translate time zones.
If it not already exists as a script, it would be very easy to create.
Unfortunately, can't do different font sizes. : T
When you are scheduling a meeting with people in a different timezone, you need to figure out what a specific time is and what a specific time means for both parties.
Because times have meaning, we know that 8:00 is breakfast, 12:00 is lunch, 18:00 is dinner and 23:00 is night and people are sleeping.
Timezones force you to do a lookup to figure out what the time is in the other location, and given that knowledge, you know because of universal global conventions what that time means, so you can avoid scheduling a meeting when they are probably sleeping.
If you remove timezones, you no longer have to do a lookup to figure out what the time is in the other location, because it's the same everywhere - yaaaayyyy!!! - but you still have to do a lookup to figure out what a specific time means. Is the sun up? Are they sleeping? Are they at work? You know that you wake up at 17:00, eat breakfast at 18:00 and have to be at work at 19:00, but you have no idea at what time people typically do that at the other location.
You have perfect knowledge of what the time is everywhere, but you have no knowledge of what times mean anymore. Great. And that's just one of the multiple issues with removing timezones.