The radical plan to destroy time zones

[cpzilliacus]

Washington Post: The radical plan to destroy time zones

All around the world, time zones make little sense. Russia currently has 11 time zones, while China just has one. Spanish people are said to be constantly tired because they are in the wrong time zone. Nepal is —inexplicably — the only country in the world to have a time zone that is set to 15 minutes past the hour.

Looking over this chaotic landscape, it's reasonable to ask: Are time zones inherently flawed? That's what Steve Hanke and Dick Henry think.

A few years back Hanke, a prominent economist with Johns Hopkins University and a senior fellow with the CATO Institute think tank, and Henry, a professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins, teamed up to propose a new calendar designed to fix the inefficiencies of the current one. The plan was dubbed the "Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar." Last month, after reading a WorldViews story about Pyongyang time , Hanke reached out to us to detail another idea that he and Henry had devised to fix the chaos caused by time zones.

The plan was strikingly simple. Rather than try to regulate a variety of time zones all around the world, we should instead opt for something far easier: Let's destroy all these time zones and instead stick with one big "Universal Time."

[jeffandnicole]

So instead of just Spanish people being in the wrong time zone, now 23/24ths of the world will be in the wrong time zone. 

Yay for fixing problems that don't exist!

[kkt]

Russia has 11 times zones because it has a lot of longitude.  China has less longitude, plus a central government that's happy to set times zones for Beijing's convenience and ignore the hinterlands.  Kinda like this economist.

UTC is already available for anyone who wants to use it.  That's mainly astronomers and people in global transportation or communications.  For most everyone else, they'd rather have sunrise in the morning hours and sunset in the evening hours, even when it's imperfect.

[CNGL-Leudimin]

In China in addition to Beijing time (UTC+8) the Xinjiang Uyghur government has set an unofficial time zone more consistent with its longitude, UTC+6.

And yes, here in Spain we are in permanent DST, but we are not constantly tired, we simply adjusted our customs accordingly. Right now it's 11:07 p.m. (5:07 p.m. Eastern), if we were in the correct time zone I'd probably go to sleep at this hour, maybe a bit earlier.

[wxfree]

I'm all for it, as long as the Universal Time is always the same as my local time.

[cl94]

If you really care that much, use UTC. For the rest of us, there isn't a reason. Time zones mainly arose because of railroads and the faster transportation they brought. Before then, every town had its own local time based on the sun (you traveled so slowly that it didn't matter). There isn't a reason to synchronize everything.

[Jardine]

How about 1440  time zones ?

With GPS, Blue tooth, WWV, cell phones and everything is connected anyhow, just have all clocks keep track of UTC, position and then calculate and display local solar time to the minute.

[vdeane]

Do these guys really think it's easier to look up what every single locality's working/waking hours are than it is to look at a time zone map?  They basically want to return to what life was like pre-time zones, except with forcing everyone to memorize a new calendar.

[kkt]

Ask Napoleon how well people adapt to having a radically different calendar forced upon them.

[Pete from Boston]

I saw this article this morning, in bed.  I did not need to go to Washington, DC, to get the Post do it.  I did not have to go to Johns Hopkins to hear this idea.  I simply pulled out the unbelievably powerful networked supercomputer in my pocket (no, I did not have it in my pocket while I was in bed, stop interrupting) and found the article effortlessly. 

This same magic tool will tell me exactly what time it is anywhere whenever I ask. 

It's 10:44 a.m. in Ulaan Bataar right now.  3:44 a.m. in Kinshasa.  3:45 a.m. in McMurdo Station, Antarctica (looking it up, as you can see, takes some time).

It's 11:19 in Pyongyang (I got distracted by the TV).

See?  No new time plan.

And don't get me started on the calendar.  Every scientist and technocrat thinks they're smarter than the general public who are doing just fine.

[DTComposer]

So, if I understand this right:

Right now, along a particular latitude, sunrise occurs for everyone at say, 7:00 AM. The sun is at its highest point in the vicinity of 12:00 noon, and sunset is at 7:00 PM. I can travel anywhere in the world, and the above holds true (noting the effect of changes in latitude), so my sunrise is always at 7:00 AM.
With Universal Time, perhaps now my sunrise is at 2200. OK, I adjust. But then I travel a couple thousand miles, and sunrise is now at 1900. So my concept of what the world should be like at 2200 is no longer true.

Currently, the abstract notion of assigning numbers to the passing of time is pegged to tangible, visible events.

They want to assign essentially a random, abstract number to everyone without reference to any physical, visible event. That seems more confusing, not less. What common meaning does 0700 have to two people 10,000 miles apart if there's no common visible event (the sunrise) for both of them?

It seems like it's the equivalent of making everyone speak a common language, but the words mean different things depending on where you are. So we all learn "apple," "ladder" and "ball," but what's called a "ball" in London is a "ladder" in New York and an "apple" in Tokyo.

[Duke87]

I think the key point this sort of idea misses is that any sleep issues people have are caused not by the number on the clock but rather by the expectations society places upon them of when they have schedule obligations.

Whether I have to be at work at 9 AM Eastern Standard Time or 14:00 UTC, it's the same thing and using one as opposed to the other doesn't change whether my body likes being awake at the time necessary to make that happen. If the issue is that people don't like when they need to be somewhere, allowing flexible work schedules whenever practical may be a better answer than messing with the clocks.

Using UTC everywhere also has a couple of major drawbacks.
One is that it fails to provide numbers which have any relation to human perception - our internal biological clocks are calibrated by the sun, and intuitively we want our external clocks to behave similarly. Regardless of where you are, what time it is should give you some idea of where the sun is in the course of its progression across the sky.
Another is that for regions of the world not at low numbered longitudes, it makes keeping track of dates a major headache. We humans perceive a day as beginning when we wake up and ending when we go to bed. It is a deliberate feature of the way we keep track of time that the date changes when most people are at least home even if not asleep just yet, so that the calendar date is the same throughout a human day. UTC everywhere would make the date change at what's currently 7 PM for the eastern US and 4 PM for the west coast. Saying "I'll come visit on March 3rd" would become an ambiguous statement, since it'd be a different day depending on whether you were visiting in the morning or the evening.

[bandit957]

I read that there was once a plan to institute universal time, but the hours would be designated by letters. You'd have A:00, B:00, etc. But local time would still be designated by numbers.

[wolfiefrick]

I don't know how I feel about this.

[lordsutch]

Both solutions create issues of their own. If we keep all time in UTC but schedule things based on local noon, it creates problems because people do poorly when dealing with odd time offsets and modulo 60 math is hard for most of us to do off the top of our heads (when does a 1 1/4 hour meeting end that starts at 3:38 pm?).

On the other hand if we keep time based on local noon, scheduling anything that involves people more than a degree or so east or west becomes a nightmare. That's the whole reason standard time zones were created. It also relies on clocks being coordinated to their current location automatically, which requires a lot of battery power to do anything globally reliable (locking to GPS requires a lot of battery power, longwave and shortwave time signals are notoriously interference-prone; good luck doing either underground or inside a large building).

[Pete from Boston]

It will simplify all our lives.  For example:

The calendar stipulates that in years whose corresponding Gregorian calendar starts or ends on a Thursday (so much for tossing out the Gregorian Calendar) there will be an extra "mini-month" called "Xtr."  If this is too hard to keep track of, there's an easy-to-remember list: 2015, 2020, 2026, 2032, 2037, 2043, 2048, 2054, 2060, 2065, 2071, 2076, 2082, 2088, 2093, 2099, 2105...

If this is still hard, there is another "simple" way to follow along on the author's website:

"I am indebted to Irv Bromberg for pointing out that a simple way exists to test whether a year contains a Xtr (or Extra) month..."

"Here is a fortran subroutine which uses this rule, to determine whether or not the year "iyear" contains a Xtr (or Extra):"

[lines of computer code snipped, the point is clear]

[noelbotevera]

Why don't we just have one single time zone, then not give a crap to anyone else who has their sun set at 8 AM. sarcasm

[Rothman]

If this is too hard to keep track of, there's an easy-to-remember list: 2015, 2020, 2026, 2032, 2037, 2043, 2048, 2054, 2060, 2065, 2071, 2076, 2082, 2088, 2093, 2099, 2105...

Maybe easy to remember for savants...

[cl94]

If this is too hard to keep track of, there's an easy-to-remember list: 2015, 2020, 2026, 2032, 2037, 2043, 2048, 2054, 2060, 2065, 2071, 2076, 2082, 2088, 2093, 2099, 2105...

Maybe easy to remember for savants...

Time and the calendar are so ingrained in our culture that changing it would create quite a disturbance. Time as we know it has basically existed near its current form (sunrise AM, sunset PM) for as long as records have been kept. While the Gregorian calendar is a relatively new change, all it really did was make a negligible change to the length of a year (less than 11 minutes) in order to ensure the solstices fell within 3-4 days of each other in each year, with a similar system being used since Roman times. The change? Centurial years not divisible by 4 aren't leap years (i.e. 1900 was not a leap year) and, at the time, everything was shifted forward by a week and a half.

Basically, by changing the time and lengths of months, you'd be screwing with what has been set in human culture since there has been a remotely-widespread calendar and time system.

[Pete from Boston]

I'm going to rise above my bias for a second (my bias = leave everything alone).

We have messed with the calendar for centuries.  In 1752 we not only skipped 12 days that year, we moved New Year's Day by nearly three months.  We survived.

That said, I don't see a general clamor.  I don't see a problem.  What benefit warrants this much meddling?

[lordsutch]

The other thing to bear in mind is that the Gregorian calendar took almost four centuries to become universal among those countries using Roman-derived calendars. There were countries still using Julian dating in the 20th century, most notably the Russian Empire, hence why the October Revolution took place in what most other countries considered to be November...

If anything moving away from time zones would be even more disruptive, because it would also affect countries using the Islamic and Jewish calendars as well.

[kkt]

Yes, we messed with the calendar, but we messed with it in evolutionary ways.  One less leap year per century and standardize the beginning of the year from the inconsistent prior usage.  Hanke and Henry want to mess with it in revolutionary ways, that it's by no means clear would make things better on the whole.

If nothing else, about the calendar, religious Jews, Christians, and Muslims regard the 7-day week as governed by the commandment about the sabath.  If you try to get people to stick extra days in the middle, the religious will keep their own calendar for religious use and the mandated one for civil use.  Additional calendars in use does not make life simpler, it makes life more complicated.

[CNGL-Leudimin]

About the calendar, I prefer the current one as the days of the year rotate through all weekdays, so any day of the year can fall in any weekday (yes, even February 29th, which for example was a Wednesday in 2012 and this year is a Monday). I wouldn't like to have every day of the year always in the same weekday. However I like the fact this calendar proposal has a February 30th.

As for a unified time I've already adopted Eastern Time (six hours behind mine for most of the year) for the purposes of this forum. This leads to a weird schedule where I wake up just before 2 am and I go to bed shortly before 6 pm. It also allows me to post in otherwise out-of-reach hours like 4 am , but as many of you might know I don't post when the forum becomes more active (6 pm to midnight) because I'm sleeping then. This doesn't have stopped me to set my profile so it shows my time, though.

[vdeane]

One thing I think is interesting is that these guys don't care about syncing the day with the sun but still care about syncing the year with the seasons.  If you're gonna get rid of one, might as well get rid of both.

[Pete from Boston]

One thing I think is interesting is that these guys don't care about syncing the day with the sun but still care about syncing the year with the seasons.  If you're gonna get rid of one, might as well get rid of both.

I lost patience before I logically considered all the implications of their calendar, as most people would, but if there are something like six years between adjustment "mini-months," won't the calendar drift off the seasons periodically?