My five-year experiment with UTC

Incidentally, this works for someone close to the UTC time (3h off for Moscow) for the reasons you mention.

It likely does not generalize at all.

They also haven't faced an issue where an event is booked by someone else at a DST-affecting time: as that time changes between two days, you now need an extra "if" in your brain (is it DST there? Europe and US are on different cycles there too).

I've tried booking all the cross-timezone meetings in UTC, but didn't get far with it: it was more work for everyone compared to somewhat reduced confusion and suddenly overlapping meetings.

> It turns out a lot of people are confused by flight times like “Wednesday 1:20am”, because if you are catching an 1:20am flight, you are heading to the airport on the previous day before midnight […]

If you use 24-hour ("military") time—00:00 to 23:59—this becomes less confusing. Perhaps an attempt to culturally shift from using 12-hour to using 24-hour time would be useful. (In the US it'd probably less of a challenge than metrification.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_representation_b...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-hour_clock#Use_by_country

> because what is the early morning of Wednesday if not just Tuesday night prolonged?

This is what really grinds my gears with the official definition of "night" and "morning".

Tuesday 21:00-23:59 is considered "night", and then Wednesday 00:00 is considered "morning", which is highway insanity to me. No one would say they were going out 'till "Wednesday morning" if they went to the pub until 02:30 Wednesday.

IMO it only starts being "morning" around 05:00, maybe even 06:00.

> one successful attempt at addressing this problem is Japanese late night anime schedules

Depending on the channel, the "new date cut-off" (more accurately: 日付変更) sometimes varies. Some channels start the day at 5am, others at 4am, and so on. Because of this, one gets to see wild things, such as a time-table scheduling a show at "29:30" whereas another channel would write "05:30".

In any case, your claim is correct. The people who stay up to watch late-night shows do not consider their day finished around those hours, and the times are intended to reflect that. However, there is still inconsistency around the hour of the new day.

A similar issue exists in video games. I know of one game that "starts the new day", so to speak, at 5am, and another game that does so at exactly 12am. To add further confusion, many Japanese websites and games are designed with the assumption that the user is always in Japanese Standard Time. (Most Japanese do not travel abroad, and Japan itself has exactly one time zone, thus Japanese programmers rarely ever think about time zones). Thus, when overseas, you may see the new day in a video game start at 1pm local time!

I believe all these problems are caused by time zones, not solved by them. If the current date/day of week wasn't vaguely connected to sleep/wake cycle, we wouldn't be conditioned to assume it was.

For instance, we handle 24 hour clock (with 60 minute hours?! WTF?) fine, even if it's insane and we use the decimal system elsewhere. Because we got used to it when we grew up. Many even have the clock reset in the middle of the day, ending up with things like two hour activities spanning from eleven to one! (Don't get me started on shit like "half four" - it means different things depending on where you are, but it never means two!)

Heck, there's a whole, huge country that gets by on inches and ounces and pounds and miles and whatnot - a mind boggling amount of extra mental energy required, and with the exception of some recent lapse when selecting their boss dude they seem to be doing mostly as well as (and over the previous century arguably somewhat better than) the rest of us in the thinking department.

If we grew up with date/day changing in the afternoon, every kid in preschool would have it figured out already. "Early morning flight confusion" would seize to exist (except, perhaps, for the poor bastards who'd happen to live close to wherever we decided to place the prime meridian), because everybody would know what "1:20" meant, and not randomly guess at something based on when they happen to sleep.

I don't get the flight example? Wednesday 1:20 AM = Thursday 1:20 (24 hr notation)?

Anyway it seems to me this whole problem arises with 12 hour notation.

Right. The 7-day week cycle is also completely arbitrary, perhaps the most arbitrary of all time duration units, but having something of that nature has proven useful.

The 7-day week originated in ancient Mesopotamia, particularly Babylon, around the 3rd millennium BCE. It was tied to the observation of seven celestial bodies visible to the naked eye: the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Each day was associated with one of these "planets," a system later adopted and refined by other cultures.

The Babylonians passed this concept to the Jews, who formalized it in their religious practices, linking it to the biblical creation story in Genesis, where God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, the Sabbath. This Jewish tradition influenced the structure of the week in the Western world.

The Romans also adopted the 7-day cycle by the 1st century CE, replacing their earlier 8-day market cycle (nundinae). They named the days after their gods, aligned with the celestial bodies: dies Solis (Sun), dies Lunae (Moon), dies Martis (Mars), dies Mercurii (Mercury), dies Iovis (Jupiter), dies Veneris (Venus), and dies Saturni (Saturn). These names persist in Romance languages (e.g., French: lundi for Moon, mardi for Mars).

The 7-day week spread through the Roman Empire and was cemented by Christianity, especially after Emperor Constantine made Sunday a day of rest in 321 CE. Other cultures, like the ancient Egyptians and early Chinese, had different cycles, but the 7-day week became dominant globally due to Western influence, trade, and colonization.

It’s not perfectly aligned with natural cycles—365.25 days in a year don’t divide evenly by 7—but its cultural and religious roots have made it a near-universal standard.

> someone who spends all their time in Arizona would quickly get used to the fact that they now eat dinner at 12:00 UTC instead of 7pm. But it would make traveling more tedious: you'd have to re-learn the mapping every new place you went.

Following local times won't spare you from having to learn local culture anyway, such as Spanish dinner times ranging around 21-23.

Also, thanks to daylight savings, the current time in England is 1 hour off UTC, so for 6 months of the year it's not even a good estimate for that.

I can't tell if your comment is intentionally ironic, as in you're saying we need to enforce your view on others that enforcing their view on others is bad.

If this person was vandalizing cultural treasures or something to pressure everyone to use UTC, then yes I agree his forced technocratic fix to a social issue is bad. Just writing about it and sharing an opinion is actually very constructive, even if you disagree with his take.

Sometimes people interpret the complexity of the world as something to be eliminated rather than confronted and managed.

People have been blowhards for as long as there have been people. Live and let live.

Maybe it manifests from "timezones are a difficult problem for my profession, lets get rid of them".

Pragmatism is the rejection of principles on principle.

"I decided time zones should be abolished..."

It reads as tongue-in-cheek to me :)

> Here’s Adam’s story of how living by UTC transformed his productivity, and why it might work for you, too.

> Give it a try, you might find it as liberating as I do.

Did you miss these quotes, or are they also part of the absolutism? Here are some ways I read it, which seem like fair interpretations and also don't make the author stand out as being particularly dogmatic or authoritarian:

Considering the quotes I provided, it seems likely that the author may have been suggesting that we stop using timezones as a society in order to mitigate the only two downsides that they listed, since those downsides only exist as a result of society still using timezones while they as an individual stopped using them.

Another way to read it could be that the author made a statement they believe is probably true ("timezones should be abolished") but they were not fully convinced. To gain confidence, they decided to gather further information: "I began with myself...To my surprise, it was easy" and then ended with two downsides of their experiment, suggesting that they realize it may not be a perfect solution, at least right now.

A third way one could read it is to consider that the author didn't propose fines, jail-time, or any other specific penalties for continued use of timezones in their hypothetical world. Without enforcing a penalty, what does it even mean to "abolish" a timezone? In the context of the whole post, it seems to be more of a thought experiment imagining what could be if society as a whole switched, rather than a prescription of what must be.

The unwillingness to engage with the author's thought experiment strikes me as more dogmatic than anything the author wrote, but perhaps I am not fully considering other possible interpretations.

Eh, I think it's more a drive to simplify things that exist because of inertia/"that's how we always did it". Time zones are arbitrary and silly (sun is most likely not halfway at noon for most of the zone), daylight savings is even worse. Imperial units too, get rid of them.

Could be worse. Mecca has the world's biggest clock dial.[1] Originally, it was to be set to solar time at Mecca, but that was just too confusing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clock_Towers

I like to think .beats might've caught on, if they were UTC-based instead of UTC+1, because Swatch is headquartered in Switzerland, and I think that little offset made it obviously tongue-in-cheek.

Since ICQ shut down, I have stayed in the right mood by using the uh-oh sound as my phone message alert for high-priority people.

Well that took me back.

For some reason no friends or family took me seriously when I brought it up at the time.

> If you know your metric longitude, you know the local time shift, and vice versa.

I've also thought that setting time using longitude could make sense. Especially since I and many people tell time, schedule meetings, etc using a device with a GPS. This article [0] makes an interesting point about the effect that time shift based on longitude would have on computers in the same data center.

> At the equator, the position directly underneath the mean Sun travels west at about 463 metres per second. That means a standard rack unit is about one millisecond wide. ... So, strictly speaking, continuous time zones mean that clocks on machines in different parts of the same data centre — neighbouring racks, even — will need to be set to different times, depending on the exact positions of those racks.

It concludes that you would have to choose a single reference point to represent the time of a machine and that:

> We might even consider applying this consistency across all machines in any given data centre. This would simplify tasks such as e.g. collating accurately timestamped log entries from multiple machines. We would ignore the real longitudes of the various machines and set all of their clocks to the same local time. The interior of the facility would become an area of uniform time; a "time zone", as it were.

[0]: https://qntm.org/continuous#sec1

I've only heard "metric time" refer to strictly powers-of-ten seconds (kiloseconds / megaseconds / ...), not your fractions of a day.

Have you seen the French revolutionary decimal time? It's closer to your proposal but with 10 hours/day instead of 25, for more consistency.

Why reinvent the second when it already independent of the time it takes earth to spin.

is a day spinning around 360 degrees or from highest point of the sun?

and the rotation speed isn't constant anyway...

> most phones allow dual time display,

That's how I have conky setup on my desktop. "Year : Julian Day : HH:MM:SS" in both local and UTC. With a fixed width font and the two right above each other it's exceptionally useful. It makes looking at logs captured in UTC much easier to parse.

It also enables common culture. If someone says they got up at 5am for a flight then it is widely understood that that is pretty early for a typical person, without having to explain as much in words.

If someone says they didn't get home until late, you know they probably mean 9 to some small hour of the morning etc.

Yes! Whenever people say that we should have one timezone I always bring this up. Either you have to look up what time it is in another country or you have to look up what time of day it is. Either way you still have to look it up.

Somewhat, but it does so poorly.

If you're scheduling something with someone non-local to yourself, you need not only know their time zone, but you also need also consider their latitude/longitude and what time of year it is so you account for the potential use of daylight saving time and their current sunrise/sunset times.

For example: if you schedule something at 7PM - is that daytime or nighttime? Well, if it's the first of October, and the person is in Kansas City, the answer is daytime. However, if they're in Phoenix, the answer is nighttime. And here's the kicker: the fact that Kansas City uses daylight saving time is irrelevant, as it would still be mostly light out even if you used standard time due to its higher latitude.

In fairness, that's not what they're arguing for. They're advocating using UTC for yourself, and since no one else does that you'll inevitably get good at conversions to other time zones.

Yep, it's now a lookup table.

It shouldn’t have used both L and I though, and probably also have dropped O, in favor of adding X and Y.

Oh, that's brilliant.

And if your language doesn’t use the Latin alphabet?

I like the concept of a global time that maps to local time, and while I am unconvinced that Latin letters are the best way to do that, I can’t think of a better way. It’s either letters of some sort, symbols, or names, and none of those sound good.

UTC for data is perfect for events that have occurred. It has corner cases for planned future timing that require further thought and probably storing wall time + locale.

My co-workers consistently stick with UTC, but they refuse to include the time zone in strings in their databases. Drives me crazy.