this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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Today I Learned

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I feel that this is what we should be using instead of the current illogical time system.

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[–] [email protected] 98 points 7 months ago (6 children)

We also need to switch to 13 months at 28 days each. Makes things so much easier.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 20 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I had your mom for a semester in college

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago

I hope you cleaned her urn when you were done.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 7 months ago (1 children)

New year's week sounds good haha

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago

That is really nice! People take vacations around the new year anyway.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago (19 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (4 children)

12? Ew. As someone who relies on my fingers to count I repudiate such discriminatory system!

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago

Wow. A dozenal system sounds useful! We should use it for measuring distances!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago

Fuck it. Lets get real and just go all the way back to Sumeria. Sexagesimal numbering system here we come.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (8 children)

Math checks out, but who do we name the other month after? Another Roman emperor?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

We can just name it after some guy named John. We can call it Johnuary

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[–] [email protected] 68 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 52 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

That's simple. It's at 12:80 PM. Wait... no... yeah. Whatever, let's just run Famitsu Attack or Endless Nightmare 4 again.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Alcoholics hate this (its not 5:00 somewhere)

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago

But for that one magical moment, it's @5.00 everywhere

[–] [email protected] 28 points 7 months ago (19 children)

It's stupid to remove timezone.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago
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[–] [email protected] 28 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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)

[–] [email protected] 15 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (4 children)

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).

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 7 months ago (1 children)

That system is far more illogical than the current time system what are you on?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (4 children)

It is a marketing ploy to sell watches, it was never intended to be logical.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 7 months ago (8 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 7 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 7 months ago (7 children)

It'll never happen because approximately 0 people think about it outside of programmers.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 7 months ago (4 children)

Anyone who works with people in different time zones. Which is a lot more of us as we go remote.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (6 children)

Eliminating time zones would make things worse. Right now you know that from 10am to 3pm local things will be opened with close to 100% certainty. Remove time zones and now you have to find out what are normal opening hours for the country where you're trying to call.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago

Yeah removing them is not a good idea. But they do need a nice global time complement for anything that is international such as broadcasts on the internet. I hate converting time zones to figure out when an event or broadcast starts.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago (6 children)

I feel like trying to switch to this would cause more problems than it would solve. If you switch to this time system, what do you do about all the other units of measure that include a time component? Either everything has to change, or you have to start using two different time systems.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 7 months ago

Something something xkcd new standard

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago

No daylight savings time. Sold.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)

timezones make sense to me, and this just looks like UTC+1 with extra steps.

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