{"id":2792,"date":"2010-03-12T01:26:28","date_gmt":"2010-03-12T05:26:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/?p=2792"},"modified":"2010-03-12T01:26:28","modified_gmt":"2010-03-12T05:26:28","slug":"on-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2010\/03\/12\/on-time\/","title":{"rendered":"On Time"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve ranted before about the fact that military time just makes so much more sense. Restarting the counter at 12 doesn&#8217;t make sense.<\/p>\n<p>I started this thinking it was a really sensible critique of our horribly-broken system of time, but upon re-reading it, I&#8217;m starting to think that it may instead be a disturbing look into how my mind functions.<\/p>\n<p>Aside from our broken 12-hours system, here are some more things that bother me about time:<\/p>\n<ul>\n    <li>Time is continuous. It does not shift forward an hour or backwards an hour based on daylight.<\/li>\n    <li>As someone developing code that uses timestamps and is used across many time zones, <em>time zones are a disaster<\/em>. If I wake up at &#8220;4pm&#8221; and eat lunch at &#8220;1am,&#8221; who cares? There is no need for us to shift our numbering to match that of others. UTC works great here, as it&#8217;s the standard from which timezones are calculated. I&#8217;m going to wake up at 12:30 UTC to get ready for work. Like everyone else on the East Coast, I have to start my day at 2pm. The argument about cross-continental telephone calls is nonsensical. Instead of thinking, &#8220;It&#8217;s midnight there, I shouldn&#8217;t call!&#8221; I should think, &#8220;It&#8217;s 9pm! They go to bed at 6pm over there, so my call wouldn&#8217;t be appreciated!&#8221; It&#8217;s actually the same calculation.<\/li>\n    <li>60 seconds in a minute. 60 minutes in an hour. 24 hours in a day. Why are the numbers so ridiculous? We could at least use metric time, with consistent intervals, e.g., 100.<\/li>\n    <li>Why are seconds, minutes, and hours distinct counters? I once wrote a little script that would display time of day as a number, 0 (very start of the day) to 100 (very end of the day). As you wanted more specific time, you added decimals. As time was less important, you dropped digits. <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Significant_figures\">Significant figures<\/a> &#8212; &#8220;50&#8221; is noon-ish, &#8220;50.0000&#8221; is exactly noon.<\/li>\n    <li>Worse than the 60\/60\/24 thing, there isn&#8217;t even a consistent number of days in a month. In fact, there aren&#8217;t even a consistent number of days in a year, thanks to leap years.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I think I need to get a 24-hour wristwatch and keep it in UTC. I&#8217;m used to making the conversion between real time and outdated 12-hour time, so calculating timezone offsets mentally wouldn&#8217;t be that much worse. But even this is outdated, since it still uses seconds, minutes, and hours.<\/p>\n<p>Can we all get together and boycott Daylight Savings Time? The benefits are great, but in the mind of an engineer, it&#8217;s a crude hack put in just to accommodate certain special conditions. Time is constant, and daylight is cyclical. If the problem is that you&#8217;re sick of doing things in the dark, the fix isn&#8217;t to hack time, it&#8217;s to <em>stop scheduling events in the dark<\/em>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve ranted before about the fact that military time just makes so much more sense. Restarting the counter at 12 doesn&#8217;t make sense. I started this thinking it was a really sensible critique of our horribly-broken system of time, but &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2010\/03\/12\/on-time\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2792"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2792\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}