What would be the offset be? Which time zone would you use when time zones are set on a longitudinal basis and all the longitudes converge at the poles?
Yes I know. But the problem isn't what the UTC is, everyone knows what it is. The problem is what the time is. What time zone does north pole belong to, aka what is the time at the north pole?
A UTC value of X has many times associated with it. Given the same UTC, the time could be 3 PM in NYC and 4 AM in Tokyo the next day. Saying use the UTC without providing a offset is pretty much meaningless. Imagine if you asked me, "what time is it where you are" and I responded with the UTC. You'd have no idea what time it was where I'm at.
UTC offset zero ( london ) doesn't make sense because the north pole also encompasses other longitudes and other times zones. Why not use the other time zones since they are just as equally valid or invalid as london?
Logically, asking for the time at the north pole is as absurd as asking someone to point north at the north pole. It doesn't make sense. It's only when you take a step away from the north pole that you can answer "what is the time" and "which way is north". At the north pole, there is no "north" anymore and there is no "time". Saying use UTC is meaningless, but looking at the downvotes, it's abundantly clear people either don't understand what UTC is or they missed my point completely.
The suggestion is that they would all agree on UTC 0 not because it's their current time zone, but just for ease of coordination. They could choose any time zone for this purpose if they all agreed on it, GMT just happens to be the most universally recognized and least biased option.
> The suggestion is that they would all agree on UTC 0 not because it's their current time zone, but just for ease of coordination.
That wasn't the suggestion at all. The parent used words he doesn't understand. He has no idea what UTC is, just like you. And rather than reading the article, learning about UTC and trying to understand the issue, people with a superficial understanding just downvote and comment nonsense.
UTC is like floating point numbers, people who just superficially come across it think they know what it is but when they talk about it, you can clearly tell they had no idea what it really is. I've done my best. Can lead a horse to water but can't force him to drink it.
It was clearly the poster's intent, regardless of whether they articulated it to your satisfaction. You can have your pedantic victory about the definition of UTC. Enjoy. And stay safe.
I'm afraid that I do actually now know what time it is where you are, to the nearest minute at any rate. Nothing about your being at the (geographic) North Pole has impeded me in the slightest. Given that my telepathy is on the blink again today and yet I have managed to ascertain what time it is where you are from you, something must be wrong with your model of how one asks the time. Try SNTP; it's simpler. (-:
The article mentions that many of their instruments do. Not sure why the researchers don't follow suit, it would certainly make life easier. Perhaps fiddling with time zones keeps them entertained.
> The ship is filled with 100 people from 20 countries, drifting at the mercy of the ice floe, farther from civilization than the International Space Station.
That probably depends on where the ISS is, doesn't it?
Edit: Not sure what the orbital path of the ISS is. I suppose it would indeed depend on where it is. The question would be: where in the path is more than ±417 KM away from a city.
//ignore Seems like the ISS is always closer. 400KM vs 817KM.
> The ISS maintains an orbit with an average altitude of 400 kilometres (250 mi) by means of reboost manoeuvres using the engines of the Zvezda module or visiting spacecraft.
> Alert, in the Qikiqtaaluk Region, Nunavut, Canada, is the northernmost permanently inhabited place in the world, at latitude 82°30'05" north, 817 kilometres (508 mi) from the North Pole.
But presumably the space station passes over the middle of one ocean or another, where it is not only 400km up but also some number of hundred kilometres away laterally?
There's a lot less of that very-distant ocean than you might think. You need about 700 km of lateral distance on Earth to get 800km distant from a point 400km over the surface.
Start drawing 700km bubbles from random specks of land in the ocean, and the uncovered ocean disappears quite quickly. Bermuda, the Azores, and Newfoundland conspire much of the North Atlantic between the US and Europe. Seychelles, the Maldives, and the British Indian Overseas Territories similar get a decent coverage of the eastern Indian Ocean. Random Polynesian islands also manage to provide a surprisingly good coverage of the South Pacific (almost contiguous all the way to Hawaii), although the gaps are more evident here.
I don't have hard numbers here, but I'd hazard a guess that the ISS is closer to civilization about 80% of the time--not bad, considering that civilization occupies far less than 30% of the surface.
The ISS's orbit is inclined 51.6 degrees; the southernmost point of Hudson Bay is at 51.2 degrees latitude or so (from Google Maps). So the ISS just barely goes over Hudson Bay.
In Europe, 51.6 north is roughly the latitude of London, Amsterdam, Berlin, or Warsaw.
I always find it interesting that as I sit here on the south coast of England, Glasgow in Scotland is significantly further away (approx 450 mi) than the ISS when it orbits overhead. It's one of those details that shows that 'low Earth orbit' really does mean 'low'.
Another edge-case highlighting the usefulness of global time; maybe a soft rollout of UTC at the North Pole is a good start in wait for the rest of the world to catch on?
But what's the point of a global time when the sun rises and sets at different times across the world anyway? Humans live by the 'sun clock', not by UTC. For instance, to arrange a remote meeting you still need to check what time will be convenient for the people around the world, and a global time doesn't make that any easier (arguably even worse). Just because UTC makes sense for machines doesn't mean it makes sense for humans. And machines should adjust to humans, not the other way around.
only if you adjust manually. Given a universal time and a location, you can determine time of (solar) day just like you can determine the day name (mon,tues etc).
We have already rolled out UTC. Literally, we: servers are mostly UTC.
As for the time zones that descend from UTC, they're nowhere near gone: the idea might look appealing if you have Greenwich in your backyard, but everybody else is going to have a bad time. Introducing a breaking change "12 PM is not anywhere near noon" after hundreds of years is bound to be as successful as decimal time - I mean, we're still dealing with the fallout from Julian to Gregorian time migration, and that one started in 1582!
A simplified case: how many days are there between Jan 1, 1918, and now? Trick question! Depends on where you ask - USSR transitioned to Gregorian calendar in 1918, dropping Feb 1-Feb 13. (Actually data format which stored dates as "days since 1900-01-01"...in an undefined time zone - years are the same length everywhere, right?)
Anything that deals with historical data still has to deal with this...the same way that Y2k38 started biting in 2008, because people do have calculations that extend for decades from the present.
And those are both actual date computation quirks which I have personally met, in code; that's not to mention the cultural weirdness of "Red October" happening in November.
Also Stellarium is an outstanding piece of FOSS software, you can play with your position, time of day and time of year. Please dont file a bug report because the sun does only set once per year at the north pole. Stellarium is not made for flat earthers.
How does that even make sense for a flat earther? Is their explanation for the posted article is that it's part of some round earth propaganda machine?
Norway's Troll Station, in Antarctica, follows UTC (geographically accurate for them) in the southern summer and UTC+2 in the southern winter (to facilitate communication with Norway) - so they do daylight savings time, but backwards! (Source: https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2014-March/020705.html)
At the South Pole station, NZ time is used since it's supplied from McMurdo (which is supplied from Christchurch). However the tourist camp a km away is on Chile time since they are supplied from Union glacier and Punta Arenas. The tourist camp people were nice enough to invite us on Christmas, even though for them it was like 3 am when we visited.
3 am to me means in the middle of the night while I'm sleeping. So I'm curious, do people at the South Pole typically follow a similar sleep/wake cycle despite the time zone they follow?
I think the staff at the tourist camp just tries to accommodate the tourists, so I'd guess they'd mostly stay on Chile time, but I don't really know.
At the research station though a normal schedule is mostly followed, at least for meals. Some people keep odd hours of course, and I think there are people on night shift for certain things (e.g. meteo is always manned).
I do point out that polar night is not that absolute. Even when sun doesn't rise above the horizon, there is still quite discernable day-night cycle from twilight to midnight and back, especially if you are not exactly on the pole.
It's really just another form of distance, whether you express that in terms of cesium nuclear energy state changes, or the distance a clock hand moves. So d / t is really d_1 / d_2.
If the north pole is all the time zones this means different latitudes are have different time zone coefficients. The closer to the equator the more defined and separate of a time zone reality
58 comments
[ 6.5 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadA UTC value of X has many times associated with it. Given the same UTC, the time could be 3 PM in NYC and 4 AM in Tokyo the next day. Saying use the UTC without providing a offset is pretty much meaningless. Imagine if you asked me, "what time is it where you are" and I responded with the UTC. You'd have no idea what time it was where I'm at.
UTC offset zero ( london ) doesn't make sense because the north pole also encompasses other longitudes and other times zones. Why not use the other time zones since they are just as equally valid or invalid as london?
Logically, asking for the time at the north pole is as absurd as asking someone to point north at the north pole. It doesn't make sense. It's only when you take a step away from the north pole that you can answer "what is the time" and "which way is north". At the north pole, there is no "north" anymore and there is no "time". Saying use UTC is meaningless, but looking at the downvotes, it's abundantly clear people either don't understand what UTC is or they missed my point completely.
That wasn't the suggestion at all. The parent used words he doesn't understand. He has no idea what UTC is, just like you. And rather than reading the article, learning about UTC and trying to understand the issue, people with a superficial understanding just downvote and comment nonsense.
UTC is like floating point numbers, people who just superficially come across it think they know what it is but when they talk about it, you can clearly tell they had no idea what it really is. I've done my best. Can lead a horse to water but can't force him to drink it.
It was clearly the poster's intent, regardless of whether they articulated it to your satisfaction. You can have your pedantic victory about the definition of UTC. Enjoy. And stay safe.
Me: "What time is it where you are?"
You: "It is 18:45 UTC."
I'm afraid that I do actually now know what time it is where you are, to the nearest minute at any rate. Nothing about your being at the (geographic) North Pole has impeded me in the slightest. Given that my telepathy is on the blink again today and yet I have managed to ascertain what time it is where you are from you, something must be wrong with your model of how one asks the time. Try SNTP; it's simpler. (-:
23:07:57 UTC
What time is it for me? Should I be preparing for bed or getting ready for breakfast? Am I in NYC or London or Tokyo?
> Nothing about your being at the (geographic) North Pole has impeded me in the slightest.
Who says I'm at the north pole?
> yet I have managed to ascertain what time it is where you are from you
Oh, you mean you need to know my location/time zone/offset? That's my point genius.
UTC doesn't tell you the time. UTC + offset tells you the time.
It's to make coordination with people on land easier. If that's Russia, use Moscow time.
Presumably they use the time that is most convenient to synchronize with some current activities.
That probably depends on where the ISS is, doesn't it?
//ignore Seems like the ISS is always closer. 400KM vs 817KM.
> The ISS maintains an orbit with an average altitude of 400 kilometres (250 mi) by means of reboost manoeuvres using the engines of the Zvezda module or visiting spacecraft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station
> Alert, in the Qikiqtaaluk Region, Nunavut, Canada, is the northernmost permanently inhabited place in the world, at latitude 82°30'05" north, 817 kilometres (508 mi) from the North Pole.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alert,_Nunavut
Start drawing 700km bubbles from random specks of land in the ocean, and the uncovered ocean disappears quite quickly. Bermuda, the Azores, and Newfoundland conspire much of the North Atlantic between the US and Europe. Seychelles, the Maldives, and the British Indian Overseas Territories similar get a decent coverage of the eastern Indian Ocean. Random Polynesian islands also manage to provide a surprisingly good coverage of the South Pacific (almost contiguous all the way to Hawaii), although the gaps are more evident here.
I don't have hard numbers here, but I'd hazard a guess that the ISS is closer to civilization about 80% of the time--not bad, considering that civilization occupies far less than 30% of the surface.
In Europe, 51.6 north is roughly the latitude of London, Amsterdam, Berlin, or Warsaw.
> Coordinated Universal Time, which is based, ironically, on the position of the sun relative to Earth.
As you say, UTC is not a sun clock. It is based upon Atomic Time.
I also wondered who, knowing history, would consider the concept of December not to be fabricated. (-:
UTC is most definitely a sun clock. It is coordinated to correspond to within 1 second of mean solar time at 0º longitude.
As for the time zones that descend from UTC, they're nowhere near gone: the idea might look appealing if you have Greenwich in your backyard, but everybody else is going to have a bad time. Introducing a breaking change "12 PM is not anywhere near noon" after hundreds of years is bound to be as successful as decimal time - I mean, we're still dealing with the fallout from Julian to Gregorian time migration, and that one started in 1582!
Anything that deals with historical data still has to deal with this...the same way that Y2k38 started biting in 2008, because people do have calculations that extend for decades from the present.
And those are both actual date computation quirks which I have personally met, in code; that's not to mention the cultural weirdness of "Red October" happening in November.
Edit: -3 for correct science. Good work HN
> Edit: -3 for correct science. Good work HN
You have to explicitly say that you are a flat earther. Otherwise people on HN assume standard science as source of knowledge.
If you are not a flat earther, you might consider watching this video while closely observing the north pole: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLRA87TKXLM
Also Stellarium is an outstanding piece of FOSS software, you can play with your position, time of day and time of year. Please dont file a bug report because the sun does only set once per year at the north pole. Stellarium is not made for flat earthers.
At the research station though a normal schedule is mostly followed, at least for meals. Some people keep odd hours of course, and I think there are people on night shift for certain things (e.g. meteo is always manned).
So even when the sun is technically "set", it is often just under the horizon, and lighting things up.
What is t, really?
It's really just another form of distance, whether you express that in terms of cesium nuclear energy state changes, or the distance a clock hand moves. So d / t is really d_1 / d_2.
Edit: added screen shot https://imgur.com/a/xw8Z7qr