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A New Idea: Replacing Daylight Saving Time With 'Universal Solar Time' (medium.com) 234

Most clocks are handled automatically by computers, points out Tora (Slashdot reader #65,882). So in lieu of daylight saving time, "what about shifting time each month, rather than twice a year?"

On Medium developer Brandon Gillespie offers the details of "Universal Solar Time." The clock is adjusted up by 10 minutes every month for the first six months, and then down by 10 minutes in the same manner, and can be offset by your timezone. The computerized systems can handle the time shift the same on the 1st...just like they currently do twice a year.

The benefit of such an automated system is the day cycle stays perceptibly the same — the sun is up roughly at the same period each day for any given month. While there are many challenges to such a system, such as what to do with all of the analog clocks, the advantages of a system like this should give all of the positive benefits of Daylight Savings, without the negative impact on a person's day.

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A New Idea: Replacing Daylight Saving Time With 'Universal Solar Time'

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  • by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @04:40AM (#60674228) Homepage

    Though anyone whos worked on code that tries to account for daylight saving knows its not as simple as you might first think.

    However, the real problem is people - do Mr Gillespie honestly think people are going to dick about resetting their clocks and watches by 10 mins every month when they moan enough about doing it once a year? If he does then his understanding of human nature is somewhat lacking.

    • by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @04:48AM (#60674248)
      The best thing, is don't account for DST in your code. Use UTC internally and leave the daylight savings stuff in the presentation / input layer. That said, I've seen plenty of broken brain damaged code written by people who don't seem to understand that time zones are a thing.
      • by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @05:31AM (#60674366) Homepage

        Thats the sane thing to do , unfortunately I worked on one system where data from around the world arrived with a local timestamp and had to be converted to UTC before processing at head office. The amount of effort to generate a UTC timestamp locally would have been next to nothing , the work at head office to properly account for most off the worlds timezones was an absolute bloody nightmare.

        • There are a lot of legacy programs out there. Many created as a home grown program that fills a need and "organicly" grown over time to be a vital software component to an industry.

          Being every OS, Hardware and programming language handles and abstracts date time differently. Means a lot of this code will have a very hard time being rewritten to such a rapid DST change.

      • _This_. When possible, I urge this approach for systems deployment, configuration, and new environments. The issue is compounded by software that doesn't understand that the sender timezone and the recipient timezone are don't communicate well with each other.

      • by Sique ( 173459 )
        Financial transactions have to use DST for legal reasons. If some amount is due Oct 1 at 9 a.m., it's the actual time, and not some internal UTC which you then display via the presentation layer. UTC works fine if you are coding mainly for machines, and users should just read out the time or set it once in a while. But whenever you code something for the user layer (and financial transactions are a very important part of it), you have to deal with DST.
    • by Joce640k ( 829181 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @05:19AM (#60674338) Homepage

      do Mr Gillespie honestly think people are going to dick about resetting their clocks and watches by 10 mins every month when they moan enough about doing it once a year? If he does then his understanding of human nature is somewhat lacking.

      This. There's a whole shitload of clocks/watches out there that don't adjust themselves automatically.

    • by Bender0x7D1 ( 536254 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @08:02AM (#60674692)

      Another major annoyance is that the North and South Hemispheres go in opposite directions. So, when we go to 9:10 in the USA, Australia would go to 8:50.

    • Though anyone whos worked on code that tries to account for daylight saving knows its not as simple as you might first think.

      For the first five seconds until a standard algorithm and supporting code becomes available, like a Perl script to recognize a valid URL string.

      However, the real problem is people - do Mr Gillespie honestly think people are going to dick about resetting their clocks and watches by 10 mins every month when they moan enough about doing it once a year? If he does then his understanding of human nature is somewhat lacking.

      More and more clocks are computer controlled and auto updating. That's phone, dvr, and clock on the wall that listens to the time broadcast from the atomic clock in Colorado, and a plug in alarm clock I have, gathering dust because I don't use it anymore.

      The stove is its own thing and I never bother to reset it whenver power goes out.

  • by nosfucious ( 157958 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @04:44AM (#60674236)

    I'm a night person, or at least a late person.

    Two or three hours of daylight savings time - your round, please. And then leave it that way.

    When that first ray of sunshine hits through the window, my first thought is "Fek that shit", followed by "can't we just get rid of that yellow thing?"

    • by KiloByte ( 825081 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @05:05AM (#60674310)

      There's no point in shifting the TIME -- instead, we should move the SCHEDULE.

      Today, I get sunrise: 06:49, sunset: 16:09 -- yet official work hours are 9:00-17:00. We're supposed to be rested before work, so leisure time goes after. Ie, we get hit by the yellow crap while sleeping, yet run around during the night.

      Sticking with noon when the sun is in the zenith (or close by), and moving work hours to start at 6:00, would be same as those three hours of dayling time, without redefining the clock.

      • by sjames ( 1099 )

        Good luck implementing that when there are so many micro-managers that blow their tops over any 30 second deviation in clock-in/out time.

    • by Joce640k ( 829181 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @05:21AM (#60674344) Homepage

      When that first ray of sunshine hits through the window, my first thought is "Fek that shit", followed by "can't we just get rid of that yellow thing?"

      Maybe you could get some curtains.

    • ...When that first ray of sunshine hits through the window, my first thought is "Fek that shit", followed by "can't we just get rid of that yellow thing?"

      Lying? Please. We're all adults here. When the first ray of sunshine hits through the window, your first thought is "Oh shit, where's my coffin!?!"

      That "yellow thing" provides all life on earth. I know that doesn't matter much to the undead, but still...

    • When that first ray of sunshine hits through the window, my first thought is "Fek that shit", followed by "can't we just get rid of that yellow thing?"

      Paraphrasing: Big yellow eye in the sky, we hatess it. Gollum

  • by Bert64 ( 520050 ) <bert AT slashdot DOT firenzee DOT com> on Monday November 02, 2020 @04:44AM (#60674238) Homepage

    Time is supposed to be a constant, not some arbitrary schedule.
    Do it another way, keep time constant but vary the time you actually do things according to the availability of (and need for) daylight.

    Most jobs can be done just as well during darkness hours. Many people work indoors, where electric lights are almost universal. Most people would be better off doing their work during darkness hours, and then spending their free time during daylight to get some vitamin D. Even those who still work outdoors can usually do so using artificial lighting.

    Those who have to travel to/from a workplace would also be better off doing it during daylight for increased safety.

    • by lsllll ( 830002 )

      Those who have to travel to/from a workplace would also be better off doing it during daylight for increased safety.

      Covid time not withstanding, this will simply not work. In Winter in most countries in the northern hemisphere with the most workers, there just isn't enough daylight to allow for both travel to/from workplace to happen during daylight.

      • Re:Stupid... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by demon driver ( 1046738 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @05:27AM (#60674356) Journal

        Those who have to travel to/from a workplace would also be better off doing it during daylight for increased safety.

        Covid time not withstanding, this will simply not work. In Winter in most countries in the northern hemisphere with the most workers, there just isn't enough daylight to allow for both travel to/from workplace to happen during daylight.

        And again the problem is not that there wouldn't be enough daylight (except really far up north), but the fact that people are expected to work eight hours a day instead of, perhaps, four or maybe five, and even now that there has been COVID-19 many, even if they could and would work from home, still are expected to commute to a workplace.

      • by Bert64 ( 520050 )

        How many of those workers actually NEED to work during daylight hours?
        Assuming they actually do need to work during daylight hours, they will only be doing a very limited number of hours per day anyway - since daylight hours are short in those places.

        If it's not possible for travel to take place during daylight then at least part of the travel can, which is an improvement on the current situation where typically none of the travel occurs during daylight.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Only because they demand you are there for a solid 8 hour block every day.

        Move to flexible working times, have few core hours when meetings will be scheduled (with the added bonus of keeping the number of pointless meetings down) and let people work around that as they see fit.

    • Time is supposed to be a constant, not some arbitrary schedule.

      Thn feel free to use TAI for those applications that require constant time.

      Basically everything else is trying to fudge time to hold a compromise of astronimical time and having 8 day office hours (despite varying daylight hours) that is stable enough that you can run train and plane time schedules on it.

  • by ebrandsberg ( 75344 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @04:48AM (#60674252)

    Scheduling conference calls is bad enough as it is. Now we have to adjust times every month? Screw that!

  • Idiots (Score:4, Insightful)

    by lsllll ( 830002 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @04:50AM (#60674258)
    That is the most stupid idea I've heard in the past 24 hours. As if we already don't have enough issues with time differences between countries and setting time on many not-internet-connected devices, we're going to multiply our pain by 6 and do this every month? Just stick with one fucking time and be done with it. It's not that hard.
  • by arcade ( 16638 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @04:51AM (#60674260) Homepage

    First of all, this seems to only solve for areas close by the equator. Where I live, sunrise today was 07:42. In 5 days, it'll be 07:55. That's that month of adjustment done for in 5 days ... :P In the summer, sun was up 03:53 - 22:43 at peak. During winter, it'll be up 09:19 - 15:13 at worst.

    How those 10 minutes should be adjusted each month. Heh, that would be an "interesting" discussion.

    Now, the other problem is, of course, implementation and consequences of implementation in critical systems ..

  • Let's replace a minor nuisance with a year-long hassle.
    • How about don't do the minor nuisance nor the year-long hassle?

      DST needs to die.

      • Why change them 12 times a year when we could be changing them 365.25 times per year instead? Or even 8766 times! Hell, we could make it continuously variable and just spend all of our time changing the clocks.

  • Whatever happened to the calendar idea someone came up with several years ago where all the days are exactly the same each month and every year?

    Meaning, January 4th would always be a Wednesday every year. February 4th would always be a Wednesday, etc. ,etc.. And each month would only have 30 days.

    If I remember correctly, there would be no leap day it would be a leap week once every 4-5 years to even things out. And there would be no daylight savings.

    Supposedly the only people who hated this idea were banker

    • Sorry, that seems mathematically impossible as a year has roughly 365 days ... you should know that actually.

      • So you are suggesting either speeding up or slowing down the orbit so we can get a nice round number of days out of it? I like it.
      • I shouldn't have been lazy and just look it up. Here is what I was thinking of...

        http://nucal.blogspot.com/2018... [blogspot.com]

      • Has been done before. Those calendars added some special days which aren't part of a regular week/month so that these make up the remainder of 365/7

        Of course you might end up with an additional day between Sunday and Monday...

    • by robbak ( 775424 )

      The calendar like that I recall gives every year a 'year day' that is not given a day name. Say, the last day of the year is a Saturday, then you have the 'year day', and then the new year always starts with a Sunday.

      In the case of leap years, you'd just have a 'leap day' in addition to it.

      • Congratulations, your birthday is now on a Tuesday for the rest of your life.

        • That's how Martin Luither King Jr. must feel as for some reason his birthday is always the 3rd Monday in January...

          • I think Martin Luther King Day should be changed to coincide with Columbus Day, neatly solving multiple problems:

            1. Guarantees a "real" mid-October holiday that everyone, not just bankers & government employees, gets to have (vs those that use feigned political correctness as an excuse to cancel a holiday & make people work)

            2. Maintains the cadence of, "3-day holiday weekend every 6-8 weeks". 10/15 is ~6 weeks after Labor Day, which is ~5 weeks after July 4 [which only creates a 3-day weekend ~half

  • ...but if they are any good. This one is not. First, it's a non-starter. For it to work the whole world should use it, and if we cannot agree on the metric system, what are the chances. Then, computers may be capable of handling the changes, but at a cost. Not only smartphone have to tell the time. There are zillions of embedded clocks that would have to be reprogrammed, from elevators to safe boxes. Think Y2K, but worse. Also schedules for anything that is 24 hours. Also... well, I stop, this is so inane as to not be worthy of more analysis.

  • by ad454 ( 325846 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @04:59AM (#60674294) Journal

    Here is yet another stupid idea. Each year when we fall back in the fall we turn our clocks back by 1 hour and 5 mins in order to make up for the hour we lost when we spring forward in the spring, plus 8.33% interest.

    Seriously though, rather than all of these daylight savings schemes, just stick to year-round standard time like many countries and some states and provinces.

    Standard time is the closest time to astronomical time, in that in the ideal middle of a time zone, noon is the middle of the day in the midpoint between sunrise and sunset, and midnight is the middle of the night in the midpoint between sunset and sunrise.

    Both noon and sunset have real astronomical meaning and we should set our clocks reasonably close to it.

    For those of you advocating for year-round daylight savings, this is the wrong approach. Instead just shift school, work, and other activities including TV shows one hour earlier if that is more convenient, rather than FU*K with our clocks.

  • If his primary goal is "to keep the day cycle consistent throughout the year", this will work perfectly at either 10 degrees North of the Equator, or 10 degrees, south, depending on how he calibrates it, and it will fail miserably everywhere else.

    Source:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    He also didn't consider that the days are getting shorter on one half of the planet while they're getting longer on the other half. So now we've got 2x the number of time zones than we had yesterday. Not a benefit.

    One must co

  • >Most clocks are handled automatically by computers

    No. No they aren't.

    >The benefit of such an automated system is the day cycle stays perceptibly the same -- the sun is up roughly at the same period each day for any given month.

    The guy is very truly an idiot. Changing wall time has absolutely zero effect on how long the sun is up each day.
  • This is actually an old idea, and in no way new.
    One version of it that I heard about in the 90s, and the basic idea wasn't even new then, the called Sunrise time. That one didn't go by 10 minute increments, rather it had it adjusted so every day sunrise was at the same time. (I forget what time that was, this was over 20 years ago after all.)
    • This is actually an old idea, and in no way new. One version of it that I heard about in the 90s, and the basic idea wasn't even new then, the called Sunrise time. That one didn't go by 10 minute increments, rather it had it adjusted so every day sunrise was at the same time. (I forget what time that was, this was over 20 years ago after all.)

      You may be thinking of Byzantime Time, where the clock is set to 0 at sundown. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] .

  • by sxpert ( 139117 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @05:33AM (#60674380)

    just stop shifting the bloody times already.

  • Will it also go around and change the clocks on all my appliances every month as well?

  • This was the original Daylight savings that was actually adopted , but without the increments, suggested by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • 6x worse (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Jerry Atrick ( 2461566 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @05:55AM (#60674452)

    An idea only 6x worse than the mistake it's copying.

  • by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @05:57AM (#60674460)

    But this is truly a post which reminded me why I no longer pay Medium any attention. This is simply the dumbest thing I've ever heard for so many reasons:
    - It doesn't address the complaints about daylight savings time.
    - It doesn't address the fact that most clocks are not adjusted by a computer, just the one's on people's phones.
    - It doesn't solve any problem.
    - It artificially pegs time to an event which it has never been in the past for whatever reason.
    - It shows a complete lack of understanding of computers.
    - It shows a complete lack of understanding of time.
    - It shows a complete lack of understanding of the damn planet with a tilted axis spinning around the sun.

    I for one am in full support of legalising smoking weed, but the at least have the professional curtesy to not do it at work while writing.

  • Kind of makes one want to find out what heâ(TM)s developed and actively avoid it.

    Seasons have worked forever. Much the same as standard time has worked for humans.

  • For most of the world, the amount of daylight changes more than +/- 1 hour between winter and summer anyways, so it's really a solution looking for a problem. Having lived a lot of years in countries that did away with it entirely, having moved back to one that still uses it feels like a colossal step backwards. It's a shame the EU has backed off of pushing this through, as the US, being one of the only countries that even vaguely aligns with a +/- 1 hour daylight difference certainly isn't going to lead an

  • That this guy has never written any code having to do with time. We have two of these events a year and can't get it right, and he thinks we can get it right when it's happening monthly? Are you kidding me? Has this author written software before?

    Also, 'what to do about the analog clocks' is kind of an insurmountable hole in this plan. There's more analog clocks in my house than computer connected ones, and that's not going to change.

  • In a time when artificial lighting is so ubiquitous why bother changing the clocks to better match the day/night cycle with our daily routines?

    There's a large portion of the population that work indoors, so when the sun rises and sets is of little consequence. With many people doing business regularly that crosses time zones, and international borders, there's little need to change the clocks. In fact the system we have now of changing our clocks regularly messes with international business. If we were t

  • The only reason why daylightsavings was introduced was to try and save energy, it had nothing to do with biological clocks. The best thing to do is stop daylightssaving crap and not change the clock this spring (as wintertime is the old 'normal' time)..
    • by Megane ( 129182 )

      The only reason why daylightsavings was introduced was to try and save energy

      [Citation Needed]

      If it was about saving energy they would have called it "Energy Saving Time".

    • Weird, I always thought DST was invented because bureaucrats needed more things to do.

  • by dHagger ( 1192545 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @06:33AM (#60674548)

    This is a very US-centric idea. Daylight savings time might make some sense in the zone 20-40 degrees from the equator (and even there I see limited rationale for it), while outside that zone the length of the day either varies too much or not enough. With most of continental US inside this zone, and most of the rest of the worlds population outside it (except China, which does not observe DST anyway) and advocating for abolishing DST, I find this idea really ignorant.

    (For those who failed geography and are too lazy to look at a map; New York is at a similar latitude as Madrid, which is in southern Europe, and Nashville is south of the capital of the African nation of Tunisia. Sweden, Norway and Finland all have capitals close to 60 degrees north.)

  • If you are designing a wacky complex system, why not go all in? Why not about 20 seconds every night? Or even 1 second every hour or so? That would be imperceptible. If you make the assumption the problem is easily fixed by computer (spoiler, it isn't), why not use their power to the maximum possible?

  • a system like this should give all of the positive benefits of Daylight Savings, without the negative impact on a person's day.

    Impossible. There are no positive benefits of DST, and nobody would be on time for anything ever. I've lived in places without DST for over a decade, and it's always a nightmare living in places that have it.

    Just abolish it for 5 years, and if anybody really misses it that much, they can try to convince everyone to switch back. If people love switching the time so much, it should

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by r2kordmaa ( 1163933 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @07:04AM (#60674594)
    There are no benefits to shifting clocks, its nonsense.
  • Even if one granted the dubious assertion that all the existing kitchen appliance timers and wall clocks are somehow unnecessary and could be replaced with new solar time clocks, how the heck are people with wristwatches supposed to be expected to follow this scheme? It would be impractical beyond belief. And then you would still equally have the issue of all the legacy electronic and IoT devices that will never have their firmware updated. No, not good.

  • We would make a jump back in time, where every town or country had it's own local time. Look for railroad timetables from the 1800's or 1900's.

    Like many wrote it before in the various comments, it doesn't make sense.
    In this synchronized world, it would be a nightmare to setup a meeting across timezones and shifted local times...

    On top of this, you would instantly render a lot devices obsolete that are not synchronized with an external source, or which do not accept update timezone tables.

    Just use the "KISS"

  • Ever tried to say something has to happen at 9am, June 10th and then dealt with a DST rule change? It is a nightmare depending on how your DB is structured internally. It took *months* for Oracle and Sybase to patch their systems right so that the DST change in 2005 didn't totally f' up (and Windows and Java, too). Billions of dollars spent (flatlining NASDAQ for a season) that didn't gain one dollar in new sales - spent just to keep the systems running accurately at all.

    Yeah, it all made for easier adjust

    • by acroyear ( 5882 )

      and geeze, i didn't even think of how the below the equator would need to adjust in the other direction.

      "So it is 10:20 for me, that's...9:40 for you, right?"

      ridiculous...

  • I actually had to check the article post date to make sure this was a real story. There are SO many things wrong with this idea.

    1) The entire idea rests upon the assertion that most clocks are set by internet time. That's just false, even in technologically advanced countries, let alone developing countries. I have 5 clocks in my house that set by internet time (2 laptops, 2 phones, cable box). I have 8 clocks that don't. I abhor changing those 8 clocks twice a year, let alone twelve times. I also have two

  • How about "no"?

  • Better: ditching DST. Possibly even better: using universal time for everywhere. Sure, it would be weird at first. Maybe where you are the sun would rise at 3 PM in the summer and set at 5 AM. Maybe your store is open during the day but for you that happens to be 11 PM to 1 PM. But people would quickly get used to it wherever they are. Time is just a number, and it's easy for people to adjust to new numbers if you dive in head first. And if it's 1 AM everywhere at the same time, that makes programmin

  • Imagine finding an uninhabited Earth-like planet and being able to start fresh. No legacy issues to contend with. From day one, it would be an advanced and harmonious society. Clocks would continuously synchronize down to the second; noon would always be solar noon.

    And anyone in possession of a legacy timepiece would be sacrificed in the nearest volcano.

  • by Immerman ( 2627577 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @09:39AM (#60674930)

    Before we even consider making daylight savings time even more complicated, how about we evaluate the premise first? Has anyone managed to *prove* that there are any benefits to having daylight savings time at all?

    There's all sorts of benefits that have been touted for moving an hour of summer sunlight from early morning to late evening. And yet, every actual study I've heard of has concluded that there are no actual measurable benefits to doing so, and lots of negatives.

    So, how about we just be done with it and ditch daylight savings altogether as a failed experiment that has been kept running long after its premise was disproved?

  • by WaffleMonster ( 969671 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @12:33PM (#60675922)

    The time at every point of the country should be set such that 12:00 always coincides with local noon.

  • by SlithyMagister ( 822218 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @01:08PM (#60676170)
    In machine control systems, exactly when an event occurs in relation to other events is often important.
    This will cause an increase in errors as technicians attempt to figure out time relationships across the boundary.

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