An anonymous reader shares a report [may be paywalled]: Anyone who has struggled to schedule a conference call across multiple time zones should pity the poor residents of Indiana. For decades, the Midwestern US state has been in flux over whether to observe Central or Eastern time. Some counties even switched time zones twice in as many years during the mid-2000s. This situation must be particularly baffling to the people of India and China, whose countries span thousands of miles yet obey a single time zone — whatever the cost to their citizens’ Circadian rhythms. Today’s time zones are a 19th-century invention, driven by railway engineers’ desire to harmonise schedules across states and countries. Now that we travel at internet speed, the system is breaking down.
[…] One of the first modern-day attempts to disrupt time zones came, counter-intuitively, from a watchmaker. In 1998, as dotcom hype was crescendoing, Swatch tried to divide the day into 1,000 “.beats,” each lasting one minute and 26.4 seconds. “Internet Time exists so that we do not have to think about time zones,” Swatch declared. Swatch no longer produces .beats watches and the idea has been largely forgotten. In 2011, economist Steve Hanke and physicist Richard Conn Henry suggested a slightly less radical version of the same idea. Instead of replacing the current 24-hour system of timekeeping altogether, they argued for replacing the “cacophony of time zones” globally with Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), sometimes also known as Greenwich Mean Time. “The readings on the clocks . . . would be the same for all,” they wrote, while office hours or shop opening times would be adapted locally. This seems even more feasible today, in a world when the nine to five has been replaced by gig-economy jobs and homeworking parents spend their evenings with laptops on their knees.
But such a change to global UTC would create new headaches of co-ordination. We would no longer be able to ask, “What time is it there?” to understand when it might be appropriate to call someone. Assuming our calendars tracked UTC in the same way they do local time today, days of the week would become a confusing concept for many parts of the world. When the clock passes what we now call midnight, Monday would tick into Tuesday at lunchtime in some places and breakfast in others. No amount of fiddling with the numbers on the clock can change the fact most people will want to work when it’s light and sleep when it’s dark. Your thoughts?
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot