There have been several concepts drawn up about using space mirrors as a way to focus the light from the sun into a deathray

We could keep the 0 hour as the “middle” of the night and 12 being the “middle” of the day (though I’m not sure if that’s really the sun’s high spot for the day for any places).

But with fully controlled mirrors, we could make it exactly 12 hours, so we could just then switch to the 0 hour being when the sun comes up.

i would aruge that the arbitrary factor of “9am being morning” is entirely to do with the fact that morning is actually a solar time phenomenon, whereas global time does not have the concept of morning, since it is merely imitating the local solar time.

Local solar time being the literal point in the sky that the sun is in.

It gets even funnier if we include people who aren’t “normal” I for one, consider noon to be morning.

Or, we could collectively realize time is but an illusion and transcend this silly problem.

I meant doesn’t change with respect to time zones. Leap times are still relevant in that scenario as each solar rotation doesn’t divide into a whole number of days and leap seconds due to variance in rotation.

With respect to the meridian I envision it rotating around the earth once per year, hence sidereal. So 0000 would rotate around the earth through the course of the year. Each day it would be one degree farther.

Most likely is I’m just completely full of shit.

peak colonial baggage

I get the thought, but wouldn’t changing it just end up performative?

I think changing the date system from AD/BC to CE/BCE is peak performative, and that’s coming from me as an atheist. We still use the same years based on the mistaken belief of when the Christ was born.

Where would we change UTC to be? Best place I could think of is where the current International date line is in the middle of the Pacific but that area is already a clusterfuck of zig zagging not that current UTC 0 is much better. And then, what do we call it? Do we keep UTC because it was a compromise between English and French speakers? Should we go with Mandarin Chinese since that is the most widely spoken language natively in the world? But there is plenty of colonialism within Chinese history of the Han people versus all other Chinese ethnicities and languages. Or English because it is the most widely spoken language when adding first and additionally spoken languages (definitely colonialism there)?

I’d sincerely love to know your thoughts on this. I’ve pondered it before and couldn’t come up with a good change besides using an artificially made language like Esperanto but that comes with a whole host of other issues.

if i can’t have anything nice, you can’t have anything nice, and only the people who can’t have anything nice will have something nice >:)

Go play EVE Online. The servers used to have (still, do I think, but shorter) daily downtime that was scheduled using UTC and it led to everyone using UTC since the game server itself used that time.

There’s dozens of us! Yeah practically it’s almost entirely an aesthetic effect. I’ve kept it that way and haven’t had any problems from it, though.

The title partially answers this.

https://www.timeanddate.com/time/gmt-utc-time.html

GMT is a time zone officially used in some European and African countries. The time can be displayed using both the 24-hour format (0 - 24) or the 12-hour format (1 - 12 am/pm).

UTC is not a time zone, but a time standard that is the basis for civil time and time zones worldwide. This means that no country or territory officially uses UTC as a local time.

No it doesn’t. “Time zones around the world are expressed using positive or negative offsets from UTC, as in the list of time zones by UTC offset.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time

Time now in UTC is 10:33, no matter where on the planet you are.

UTC has leap seconds to keep it aligned with earth’s rotation. Otherwise all timezones would slowly shift away from having any correlation with solar time. Between UTC and IAT, UTC is the more human-useable and thus better.

I’d fuck with atomic time, but at that point i want a perfect calendar system also.

I say we ditch this nonsense altogether and go back to vague descriptions of the Sun’s position in the sky.

To offer a differing opinion, why is null helpful at all?

If you have data that may be empty, it’s better to explicitly represent that possibility with an Optional<T> generic type. This makes the API more clear, and if implicit null isn’t allowed by the language, prevents someone from passing null where a value is expected.

Or if it’s uninitialized, the data can be stored as Partial<T>, where all the fields are Optional<U>. If the type system was nominal, it would ensure that the uninitialized or partially-initialized type can’t be accidentally used where T is expected since Partial<T> != T. When the object is finally ready, have a function to convert it from Partial<T> into T.

The problem isn’t having empty values, it’s not tracking that in the type system, so the programmer and the compiler don’t have any information about whether a value can be null or not and the programmer has to figure it out by hand. In a complex program that’s essentially completely impossible. The innocently created bomb that causes your program to crash can be in absolutely any value.

There are ways to track it all by disallowing null and using optional values instead, but some folks would rather stick with type systems that haven’t moved on since the 1960s.

This is actually the best approach.

Obviously they are getting timezone information otherwise the app could only display whatever time the user entered in.

If you want to sort things by the actual time, it’s simple and performant if all of the times are in the same timezone, and UTC would be the standard one to use. Pushing the timezone calculations to the client makes sense because the UTC time is correct, it’s just a matter of displaying it in a user friendly way, ie. show the time in the user’s timezone.

Dick sucking time

Everyone complaining about timezones is truly missing the forests for the trees.

Save a slap for the dude who invented sundials, and another slap for the dude who invented civilization.

No, see, how it would work without timezones is:

• Everyone would use UTC and a 24-hour clock rather than AM/PM.
• If that means you eat breakfast at 1400 hours and go to bed around 400 hours and that the sun is directly overhead at 1700 hours (or something more random like 1737), fine. (Better than fine, actually!)
• Every area keeps track of what time of day daily events (like meals, when school starts or lets out, etc) happen. Though I think generally rounding to the nearest whole hour or, maybe in some cases, half hour makes the most sense. (And it’s not even like everyone in the same area keeps the same schedule as it is now.)
• You still call the period before when the sun is directly overhead “morning” and the period after “afternoon” and similarly with “evening”, “night”, “dawn”, “noon”, “midnight” etc.
• One caveat is that with this approach, the day-of-the-month change (when we switch from the 29th of the month to the 30th, for instance) happens at different times of the day (like, in the above example it would be close to 1900 hours) for different people. Oh well. People will get used to it. But I think it still makes the most sense to decide that the days of the week (“Monday”, “Tuesday”, etc) last from whatever time “midnight” is locally to the following midnight, again probably rounding to the nearest whole hour. (Now, you might be thinking "yeah, but that’s just timezones again. But consider those timezones. The way you’d figure out what day of the week it was would involve taking the longitude and rounding. Much simpler than having to keep a whole-ass database of all the data about all the different timezones. And it would only come into play when having to decide when the day of the week changes over.)
• Though, one more caveat. If you do that, then there has to be a longitudinal line where it’s always a different day of the week on one side than it is just on the other side. But that’s already the case today, so not really a drawback relative to what we have today.

All in the same time? But… Then the sun might go down at noon. That doesn’t make sense…

Wait… Noon? Noooon…

The word noon comes from a Latin root, nona hora, or “ninth hour.” In medieval times, noon fell at three PM, nine hours after a monk’s traditional rising hour of six o’clock in the morning. Over time, as noon came to be synonymous in English with midday, its timing changed to twelve PM.

Oh now that’s worse

Life, that is. It would just make life a little easier.

I do 👍

well that’s a domain

Well, UTC didn’t exist in 1800, it would have been GMT, and that might not have been too popular so soon after the war of independence. Even if you convinced all of the USA to use one time zone for the railways, it would be different elsewhere and you’d still get time zones.

Maybe you’d get further with the project with the airlines in the first half of the twentieth century, but I’m not sure that that level of internationalism would have gone down well in a rather war torn world.

I’m not a solipsist.

24hr clock supremacy