A radical plan to destroy time zones | Hacker News Reader

A radical plan to destroy time zones

washingtonpost.com

8 pointsjakobdabo13 comments

An appropriately academic look at the problem. Ignore all the reasons its done the way it is and scream "We should this because physics!"

While fixing everything about times and dates seems great in the abstract, these guys sound approximately like the French revolutionaries proposing their new calendar.

And at least the French came up with new names when they were doing things differently. The headaches that come from relabeling the calendar -- to one that looks confusingly the same, except that "January 1" has a different meaning than it used to -- would probably cause a century of bugs and confusion.

Obligatory links to relevant posts:

"You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform" http://qntm.org/calendar

"So you want to abolish time zones" http://qntm.org/abolish

In the Vernor vinge novels they use unixtime and units of kilo and mega seconds as handling time issues across space would be nightmarishly complex.

Its surprising how quickly you get a grasp of the units, made me realise all our time stuff is just arbitrary convention.