Maddenation
Universal Time
David’s entry got me thinking. You knew it was coming. It was only a matter of, well, time. Let me introduce a little simplification that I like to call Universal Time. Universal time, as the name suggests, would be the same in every corner of the earth. No time zones; no International Date Line; no muss, no fuss. Let me begin with a story.
A number of years ago, an associate of mine made a business trip to Australia. Al mapped out his schedule ahead of time using PROFS, the IBM communications product that was the predecessor of modern emailing / calendaring software. After Al left, I got word that we had a problem in Japan and needed someone to meet with our affiliate ASAP. It made sense to have Al stop in Japan on his way back from Australia. I looked up Al’s schedule and saw that he was nearing the end of his trip and would be visiting a friend of mine in Australia the next day. I called Russell to ask him to have Al call me when he got there. Russ said, “He just left.” It turns out, Sydney time was 15 hours ahead of us and at the time I called, it was tonight here, but tomorrow there. Al had finished his meeting the day before and was catching a plane that morning. Al’s scheduling program hadn’t kept up with the fact that he was going to be on the other side of the International Date Line.
Even today, when scheduling a meeting, MicroSoft Outlook uses the local time of the person calling the meeting to set the time. So a 10 am meeting in New Jersey is 9 am Houston time, 7 am Los Angeles time. People sometimes miss meetings because they don’t know what time zone the meeting was scheduled in.
I think it’s ridiculous that our jet-setting, fast-paced society still changes the clock every thousand miles or so to make the sun rise at about the same time everywhere. It’s even more confusing than that. Some places set time zones on the half-hour, or even the quarter hour! Thus, Calcutta (Kolkata to Indians) is currently 9 ½ hours ahead of us, while Chatham Island, New Zealand is 16 hours 45 minutes ahead of us! This idiocy has got to stop. We need Universal time.
Universal time is based on one simple fact—that currently, no matter where you are, it is now. Einstein’s theories notwithstanding, it is easy to understand that now is the same for everyone. If you’re watching a cable news correspondent in Baghdad and a bomb goes off, you see the effects in a second or two, depending on how many times the TV signal has to bounce off the satellites. It didn’t happen 7 hours ago, and you’re certainly not peering 7 hours into the future. It happened just now, even if the local time there is “tomorrow morning.” What’s important is not what time it is there, but what people were doing at the time, and how many people were killed.
Universal time would simplify everything. The day would be set, as it is now, based on the Earth’s relative position in its orbit around the sun. The time would be set in the same way. Check with the astronomers or take it as Mean Greenwich Time or whatever the world can agree on. Just make it the same time everywhere. And while we’re at it, let’s end the am-pm nonsense. There are 24 (or so) hours in the day, so let’s put 24 hours on the clock. Then all you have to do is figure out what time you want to go to bed and what time to start work. Just like now, only the numbers might change.
As I write this, it’s almost midnight on 9/24/03, so it’s 5am in Greenwich, England. So on Universal Time, I’ll have to get used to going to bed in the wee hours of the “morning” and going to work (or golf) at 1 or 2 (13 or 14) in the “afternoon.” When I travel, I don’t have to reset my watch, I just need to know when the meals are served and when the meetings are held. I go to bed when I get tired, or I give myself enough time to sleep and get ready before the next event. If I want to know when sunrise is, I look in the paper, just as I do now.
So when do you think I can convince the world to go on Universal time?
Dad • Ideas • 09/25/03 • 4 comments
Comments
AJ • 09/25/03 • 11:28 PM:I’m in. Whole-heartedly. That’s not an invitation for Dan to start singing the most popular Extreme song either.
Universal Time is the way to go not only because Microsoft Outlook is inept and likes to run foreign code for the sole purpose of discovering if it’s a virus, or because Al missed what would have definitely been an awesome trip to Japan, but mostly because time-zones are the root of the evil that is daylight savings time.
Come to think of it, if we can ever get universal time, we also need to get right on having a universal language. Other than the ones we already have, of course: music, love, food, love of ND football (wait…that’s not one. I must be being hypnotized by this Irish run website again) etc.
But seriously, what’s up with timezones? How come somebody smart wasn’t in charge of deciding if we get to have them or not? Who’s in charge now? Who can we petition to have this remedied?
Dad • 09/28/03 • 8:28 PM:The good news is there may be someone in charge. The bad news is it’s probably the same guys who guard the standard platinum-iridium bars in France.
Patrick • 10/28/03 • 10:19 AM:If you’re interested in ammunition / information about our current time-management system (Standard Time / Daylight Saving Time), see this site. It also has some other interesting “exhibits” on things like calendars and the history of butter making.
Dad • 09/06/05 • 11:27 PM:As this site indicates, it’s worse than I thought! The earth’s spin is continuously slowing and the “atomic clocks” aren’t. To take this into account, 32 “leap seconds” have been added to the atomic clocks since 1972. But something is wrong. This would suggest that the earth is slowing it’s spin by roughly a second per year, whereas the actual estimate of this slowing is only 0.0015 seconds per century! Why are the atomic clocks being corrected so much?
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