Are we going to let the British continue to get away with it? Even the excuse of "that's the way it has to be to keep things simple" would cause the French to revolt. Again. They still don't like to talk about the fact that it's Greenwich and not Paris that's the prime meridian.

Swatch's "Internet time" was a decimal system designed to mitigate the problem because no-one would have any idea what the old time was supposed to be, but people are used to the base-60 system. It didn't and won't catch on.

And it doesn't fix the "0 isn't my midnight" problem, which is pretty close to the original.

It also doesn't fix the "what time of day is it elsewhere in the world" problem, which still requires knowledge of time differences. You know. Time zones.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Decimal is bad anyway. We should first convert all our math to duodecimal.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

"What time is it, Mother?" "It is 7XƐ, child. Eat your breakfast."

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Too high, duodecimal flips at the 50 minute mark or right after 7:4E. Though you could get away with doubling the length of an hour easily enough with duodecimal or just ignore minutes and seconds completely and make everything just be an hour as the standard measure( so that 7;50 is actually seven hours and 26 minutes). It's such a better base for doing mental math.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

I was using a Swatch-like duodecimal system of 12³ = 1728 beats per day. This is actually more accurate than minutes of which there are 1440 and actual Swatch beats which are 1000 per day.

Since I haven't stated (or decided, for that matter) where the meridian is, we have no idea where this is, but it's clearly morning. Or is it. It's probably 10 minutes to some hour or another, or thereabouts, if midnight aligns with old time somewhere. Which it doesn't have to.

"Mother why do our eyes bleed."

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

the correct time zone is UTC not Greenwich Mean Time.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

I never said the time zone was GMT, only that the meridian is Greenwich. Subtle, yes, but if the meridian for UTC isn't the one running through Greenwich, let me know.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Actually you only mentioned timezone "who gets to have the time zone where noon is directly overhead" and then went into a rant about England vs France. You never once mentioned the meridian.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

They still don't like to talk about the fact that it's Greenwich and not Paris that's the prime meridian.

But sure, I didn't explicitly connect the dots.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

We're talking about this: "Who gets to have the time-zone that’s noon at noon?"

That established the context that we are talking about time zones.

[–] CodeBlooded 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Who gets to have the time-zone that’s noon at noon

I am asserting that we abandon this concept of “noon” having to be precisely when the pixels on the my clock take the form of “12:00”.

Who cares? Just let “noon” be whatever mid-day is where you live.

0 isn’t my midnight

Same thing, why does it matter? Why do people cling to this? Midnight should be when you are mid-way through the night, regardless of what time a clock shows.

It also doesn’t fix the “what time of day is it elsewhere in the world” problem, which still requires knowledge of time differences. You know. Time zones.

I don’t have time zones memorized, so I have to look up this information when I need to know it anyway. I did say in my post that the [time] “zones” would still exist if I had my way with UTC. I do still think it’s valuable to know the operating hours for different parts of the earth- I just think we can track this without having to have the madness that is time zones. However, while answering this, I do feel what you’re saying. Perhaps we do keep time zones, but only as a way to tell time that is secondary to UTC? (As compared to today, where UTC is often an afterthought, if people even think about it at all.)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Stealing from another commenter: Are you OK with referring to days of the week as Tuesday/Wednesday, or do you propose abandoning day names altogether? If you say your local day is Tuesday which doesn't align with someone else's Tuesday, you've still got the old time-zone problem just at a coarser grain.

As for "secondary time" yes. That's called local time. Which is what the initial proposal was trying to be rid of.

Now riddle me this: What time do you have your computer's motherboard set to?