this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
1264 points (98.1% liked)
Comic Strips
12967 readers
2173 users here now
Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
The rules are simple:
- The post can be a single image, an image gallery, or a link to a specific comic hosted on another site (the author's website, for instance).
- The comic must be a complete story.
- If it is an external link, it must be to a specific story, not to the root of the site.
- You may post comics from others or your own.
- If you are posting a comic of your own, a maximum of one per week is allowed (I know, your comics are great, but this rule helps avoid spam).
- The comic can be in any language, but if it's not in English, OP must include an English translation in the post's 'body' field (note: you don't need to select a specific language when posting a comic).
- Politeness.
- Adult content is not allowed. This community aims to be fun for people of all ages.
Web of links
- [email protected]: "I use Arch btw"
- [email protected]: memes (you don't say!)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
if timezones were done correctly it would be and the numbers wouldn't be that arbitrary
It definitely would not be, regardless of whatever "done correctly" means. Solar noon at exactly 12:00 is only going to happen on a single line of longitude. If you have a timezone centered on that line and exactly 15° (one hour) wide then solar noon will be up to 30 minutes away from 12:00 depending on your east/west position in that timezone.
It was exactly this realization that the numbers were arbitrary and 12:00 didn't need to be solar noon that led to the creation of timezones in the first place, so that it's not 4:14 in Norwich while it's 3:52 in Birmingham and just travelling from city to city doesn't mean you're changing your watch constantly and it becomes actually possible to write a sensible rail schedule.
Timezones are already a step toward an arbitrary standard time for the purposes of making communication easier and not needing to change your watch just because you moved around. UTC everywhere would just be another larger step in that already established direction.
The next step is to stop talking about "Daylight Savings Time" and "Standard Time" and phrase these as UTC offsets.
The Eastern timezone uses UTC-5 over the winter. We use UTC-4 over the summer. In summer, if they used UTC-5, the sunrise in New York would be around 4AM. Which is way too early. New York should not be on UTC-5 in the summer. But there is no real problem with New York using UTC-4 year round.
Detroit, on the other hand, would have sunrise after 9AM in winter if they used UTC-4. Which is absurd; they cannot use UTC-4 year round. But, there is no real problem with them using UTC-5 year round.
The solution, then, is not to select permanent DST or Standard Time for the entire timezone. The solution is for the states (or localities) to each select which UTC offset makes sense for them, and the next time they are on that offset, they do not switch again.