Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Bralbaard]

Daylight saving time is the best thing ever.

(It means my birthday lasts an hour longer every seven years)

[Reelya]

It's the 5th, and it's still dumb, and I'm halfway convinced that time zones as a whole are dumb, but like so many dumb things it's sunk into our societies.

I don't think time zones are dumb. let me explain why.

Imagine it's 7pm in your local reference time and you call someone in a different city, and they say "it's 3am why are you calling now?". You immediately know their time-offset relative to you, and can then determine a good time to call, just from that information.

However, how does this conversation go without time zones? You call someone at relative time of 7 in the evening, which could be e.g. 1100. Then the person yells at you "it's 1100 why are you calling now?". Since neither of you know what "1100" means to the other person, you'd have to share your time-offsets, then subtract one from the other, work out who's ahead and who's behind, before you even know whether 1100 means day or night to the other person.

Sure, you wouldn't have to reset your watch when you travel if timezones were abolished, but which is easier, resetting your watch to local time or memorizing vastly disparate opening and closing times for each city you visit? Which is easier, reseting your watch for each city and adjusting for time offsets, or memorizing the specific business opening hours of each place?

[Trekkin]

It's the 5th, and it's still dumb, and I'm halfway convinced that time zones as a whole are dumb, but like so many dumb things it's sunk into our societies.

I don't think time zones are dumb. let me explain why.

How about if it's 7pm in your local time and you want to call someone else and decide whether it's a good time to call. In the current system, you look at the time difference and say "well it's 3am there" and you immediately know the full context of that. However, if time-zones are abolished, then it would be 7pm everywhere and then you're left doing complex mental algebra to work out what time of day "1900" means in different places. you still need to know their relative displacement in hours, but now you've lost the short-hand understanding that "3am" conveys. So it's like bringing in THAC0 in Dungeons and Dragons: an entirely unnecessary bit of mental gynamstics, just because you wanted to get rid of timezones.

There's also the fact that you'd have to memorize opening and closing times for stores in every city you go to, because "9:00am to 5:00pm" won't be a simple thing any more: "In this city offices open from 1100 to 1900, while in the city we're going to next, they open from 2300 to 0700. Thus, you lose complete context of whether that means the sun is up or any such details.

No, timezones are not pointless, because times convey meaning, and if you abolish that meaning then they are arbitrary and you need to start memorizing tons of bullshit instead.

It works the other way around, too. If I ask my international associates if they can make a 6:00 PM conference call, then they've all got to remember where I am and convert the time to their time, and so on with every reference to any time any of us might make; if 6:00 PM were the same time for us all, they'd only have to remember when they're free and awake.

Yes, times do convey meaning. They'd do better to convey the same meaning for everyone. Right now, if some firm or other is open from 9 to 5, I have to look up their address to know when I should call them. I don't care where they are; it's a wholly unnecessary step, and one requiring the consultation of some external thing. By contrast, "complex mental algebra" works everywhere, especially when you recognize that it's just modular arithmetic.

There's no way to avoid having to encode location into time to make it work, time zones or no, provided you need to know the time relative to the local day/night cycle. I don't think we often do, and complicating the process of synchronization across time zones in order to accommodate that seems misguided, particularly now that activity isn't as tied to day/night cycles as it used to be. If I have to give up "12:00 AM means midnight" in order to get "12:00 AM means the same time no matter where you are", I think that's a good trade, even more so in light of the fact that "noon" isn't really a physical concept anyway. We already need to look up where the sun will be at any given time of the day; why not just put those charts on a common time?

[Reelya]

Sure, but you can say "6PM GMT" and solve that problem. You have the choice of using local or global time now, taking the choice away fixes nothing. But like I said "12am means the same time everywhere" in fact causes as many problems as it solves.

e.g. say now you say "Teleconference call at 6pm, EST" and someone says "but that would be 3am for me, can you reschedule?". You have enough information from just that one exchange to know what it means for that person and come up with some sensible suggestions for alternative times.

But if time zones are abolished, and you e.g. say "meeting at 1800!" which is appropriate for you, then how easy is it going to be for the other person to convey what that means to them in terms of relative time of day? It's going to be more complex. So even for the one situation where enforcing everyone to use global time helps, it's just as likely to be a pain in the ass because it becomes near-impossible to express relative time of day.

[Trekkin]

Sure, but you can say "6PM GMT" and solve that problem. There's no easy fix for the reverse situation where time-zones were abolished and you only have GMT time, whether or not time zone OR GMT would be most useful for a situation. You have that choice now, taking the choice away fixes nothing.

It fixes ambiguity. Right now, if I just say "6 PM", you don't know if I mean 6 PM your time, my time, GMT or any of 23 others. Having only GMT eliminates all other possibilities and reduces the possibility of error or one of us doing the conversion incorrectly. Choice inevitably leads to error.

Besides, time zones already don't exist for the vast majority of calculations involving time; they're purely for the benefit of humans, who are increasingly using computers to tell them when to do things anyway. The more calculations are offloaded to machines, the less important computational simplicity is -- and the more error can be traced back to complexities in data entry, like having to remember a number in multiple bases, a boolean AM/PM value and a time zone correctly just to unambiguously identify a single time.

[Reelya]

But if you can offload it to a computer then you can have the computer work out the GMT time for you for your business transactions, and just work off relative time of day for normal human stuff. No need for everyone to use GMT clocks for every aspect of their life.

Humans still need some concept of time, and local time of day is the most important reason for that.

The main problem is that expressing everything everywhere in GMT time loses an entire layer of meaning, meaning you need to constantly clarify what that time means relative to the story you're telling. e.g. if I hear there was a huge train accident at 7am in some city, I know that that means people were killed on their way to work and not their way home, I don't need to be told, or look up, the GMT offset for the city, or even be told which city it was, to make sense of the information. If everything was GMT then if I heard about a train accident that happened in some city at 0700 I have no idea if that means an empty train derailed in the middle of the night or a packed train at rush hour. Context is important, and local time allows you to express ideas about time and events, in a general way, without needing to express it differently for each city. GMT might be handy for meeting scheduling but it's going to be balls for expressing concepts about how humans operate within the context of time.

[Trekkin]

But if you can offload it to a computer then you can have the computer work out the GMT time for you for your business transactions, and just work off relative time of day for normal human stuff. No need for everyone to use GMT clocks for every aspect of their life.

Humans still need some concept of time, and local time of day is the most important reason for that.

The main problem is that expressing everything everywhere in GMT time loses an entire layer of meaning, meaning you need to constantly clarify what that time means relative to the story you're telling. e.g. if I hear there was a huge train accident at 7am in some city, I know that that means people were killed on their way to work and not their way home, I don't need to look up the GMT offset for the city to make sense of the information. If everything was GMT then if I heard about a train accident that happened in some city at 0700 I have no idea if that means an empty train derailed in the middle of the night or a packed train at rush hour. Context is important, and local time allows you to express ideas about time in a general way without needing to express it differently for each city.

Depends on the kind of story. If you're curious about the train, there's going to be more you want to look up anyway, and at some point you'll find how full it actually was rather than how full you heuristically determine it to be.

However, if you'd like the ability to guess, what you're accepting is that every time you use in an international context has more data that needs to be recalled by fallible brains and entered correctly for the computer to work out the time correctly. GIGO. Might as well make things as simple for humans as possible and reduce everything down to a single number without all these bits hanging off.

And why does the local time of day matter so much anyway? What direct need do you have of the Sun?

[Reelya]

What direct need do you have of the Sun?

Ah, vitamin D and not getting cancer for a start. It's extremely unhealthy to have weird hours. Deadly unhealthy. You need the bright light of the sun to keep your day/night cycle aligned:

http://news.mit.edu/2016/night-shift-cancer-risk-0728

Why working the night shift can pose a cancer risk
New study reveals a link between circadian clock disruption and tumor growth.

A handful of large studies of cancer risk factors have found that working the night shift, as nearly 15 percent of Americans do, boosts the chances of developing cancer. MIT biologists have now found a link that may explain this heightened risk.

In humans and most other organisms, a circadian clock governed by light regulates the timing of key aspects of human physiology, by controlling cellular activities such as metabolism and division. In a study of mice, the MIT team found that two of the genes that control cells’ circadian rhythms also function as tumor suppressors.

Loss of these tumor suppressors, either through gene deletion or disruption of the normal light/dark cycle, allows tumors to become more aggressive.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/312064.php

Working night shifts disrupts the body's circadian rhythm, which a number of studies have found may raise the risk of cancer development. Now, researchers have shed light on the mechanisms behind this association.

Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) reveal that disruption to the circadian rhythm also leads to the impairment of two tumor suppressor genes, which can spur tumor growth.

Lead author Thales Papagiannakopoulos, of MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and colleagues publish their findings in the journal Cell Metabolism.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21870422

A hypothesis that there is a potential link between exposure to light at night and the risk of breast cancer was formulated for the first time by Stevens in 1987. Since then, relatively few epidemiological studies have been carried out in this area (15 studies including 8 cohort and 7 case-control studies). All of them are reviewed in this article. The majority of the epidemiological studies performed to date have focused on the association between shift work and breast cancer risk, few studies have reported an increased risk of other cancers, including colorectal cancer, endometrial cancer, prostate cancer and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. In six out of ten studies, a statistically significant association between night shift work and risk of breast cancer has been shown (OR = 2.2; 95% CI: 1.1-4.5 in nurses in Norway with > 30 years of night shift work). The increased cancer risk has been reported in nurses, radio-telephone operators, flight attendants, and women employed in the enterprises, in which 60% of employees work at night.

http://www.newsweek.com/night-shift-healthy-late-shifts-increase-cancer-risk-poor-health-629210

Is Working At Night Healthy? Late Shifts May Increase Risk of Cancer And Lead to Poor Health

A reverse work schedule—clocking in the hours at night and sleeping when nine-to-fivers of the world are wide awake—may have a long-term detrimental impact on health. According to a new study published Monday in Occupational and Environmental Medicine, a BMJ Journal publication, night shift work can hinder the body’s ability to take out cellular “trash” and repair damaged DNA. The result over time is an accumulation of cellular garbage and the formation of cellular lesions that can increase cancer risk and may contribute to other poor health outcomes.
...
Bhatti conducted a study based on 50 shift workers that measured a specific biomarker known as 8-hydroxydeoxyguanosine (8-OH-dG), which is associated with the development of lesions when regular cellular metabolism produces oxidation, which reacts with DNA. “In most cases the cellular repair machine will cut out of the damage and it will be excreted from your urine," he says.

However, Bhatti observed night shift workers appear to expel much less of the product. Overall, night shift workers had much lower levels of 8-OH-dG in urine compared to people who worked daytime shifts. The researchers found that on average urinary 8-OH-dG levels in people who worked night shifts were only 20 percent of those observed who worked regular daytime shifts. Bhatti says this biomarker, in particular, is also linked to increased risk for cardiovascular disease, suggesting this might be a pathway linked to a variety of negative health outcomes.

Bhatti’s study shows that melatonin, the hormone produced by the pineal gland that regulates the sleep-wake cycle, plays a critical role in this cellular process. His team measured melatonin levels as well and found a clear association between lower levels of the hormone and less 8-OH-dG in urine.

Yes, the actual cycle of the day is vitally important to human health. Another thing GMT-only would do would be to give companies another excuse to force people onto weirder hours but at remote locations where the costs are lower, tied into office hours at HQ, even though that's shown to be extremely bad for you. And then you'll get cancer from it and they'll sack you without benefits. All for the sake of making meeting scheduling more convenient for head office.

[Trekkin]

MIT's news, Newsweek, a literature review seriously trying to draw statistical significance from the raw number of studies supporting them and...Medical News Today? Really? This is what passes for probative? I had this whole thing ready about how low-incidence cancers can inflate relative risk measurements even when the absolute difference is tiny and how it's important to dig into the crosstabs of longitudinal studies retroactively to help control for now-known risk factors, but it feels like I'd be putting the cart miles before the horse, now.

Yeah. There's really no point in continuing this. You...you have fun with your news articles. 'Bye.

[Reelya]

You have some serious level of confirmation bias bro. There's absolutely no good reason at all to force the whole world on GMT time. For every proposed benefit there are at least equal amounts of problem that it would cause. And there is enough medical evidence that not having a proper day/night cycle is unhealthy. The "benefits" of GMT are already in the balance, any risks at all makes it not worth it.

And why should MIT be a non-viable source of information? It was research done at MIT. It's ridiculous to reject a study for the reason that it was mentioned in MIT news. None of your rejections of the research are in fact of any merit, they're entirely spurious. The articles mention the journals that the original research was published in, while being specific enough to get a general idea of what was found.

BTW you actually make me worry about you, you act collosally peevish about other people linking articles, to an irrational level of dickishness about it, and you're here actually arguing that evidence that a having a proper day/night cycle is important to human health is junk science... do you live in a basement? Do you go outside at all? Yes, fuck the sun, it's of no use to truly englightened souls such as yourself.

[Folly]

What direct need do you have of the Sun?

Ah, vitamin D and not getting cancer for a start. It's extremely unhealthy to have weird hours. Deadly unhealthy. You need the bright light of the sun to keep your day/night cycle aligned

https://qz.com/992779/the-idea-that-you-need-to-get-sun-for-vitamin-d-is-a-myth/

[Reelya]

As the article states you do get Vitamin D from sunlight exposure. But the foods listed in the article do not contain enough to replace the sun in any sort of practical sense:

https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminD-HealthProfessional/

... you could get your daily Vitamin D from eating 10 egg yolks (but you're only allowed 6 yolks per week due to heart concerns). Or 10 ounces of tuna a day*, or one 3-ounce salmon steak per day (expensive). Or, you could drink about 1 litre of special vitamin-fortified milk or juice per day, which ... is not a practical option for normal people. Are you going to drink 1 litre of special bioengineered juice every day of your life, thus turning into a big fattie all for the purpose of not needing sunlight?

* tuna contains mercury. Canned tuna is lower on the foodchain and you can eat maybe 10 ounces a week (20% of vitamin D) but if you like fresh tuna you'd better only have 3 ounces a week since that's higher in the foodchain and much higher in mercury.

Full replacement of the sun's vitamin D is not a realistic option for the vast majority of people. You just don't get enough from normal foods that you can eat safely.

[Dorsidwarf]

Wait trekkin was serious about "the world should ditch timeona and use 24-hour universal time based on the GMT?

Your entire post reds like a troll science post where all facets are carefully cherry picked so that only data supporting a purposely fallacious point is presented. Why should 90% of the world spend billions readjusting their infrastructure so the corporate elite might gain a tiny, arguably nonexistent benefit to productivity

[MrRoboto75]

The argument is silly.  We all know there are four corner days formed by the square rotation of the earth, creating four days when only one is tracked on the incorrect calendar.  We really should be adjusting for that.

[Reelya]

Wait trekkin was serious about "the world should ditch timeona and use 24-hour universal time based on the GMT?

Your entire post reds like a troll science post where all facets are carefully cherry picked so that only data supporting a purposely fallacious point is presented. Why should 90% of the world spend billions readjusting their infrastructure so the corporate elite might gain a tiny, arguably nonexistent benefit to productivity

Haha yeah, I especially like the part where none of his points are supported by any empirical sources, yet he holds the opposing view up to the highest possible standards of scientific rigour and acts like a snob about it.

If you post news sources he has a go at that, if you post articles from the university who did the research he has a go at that, if you post ncbi.nlm.nih.gov papers, he also says that the research itself doesn't meet his standard of academic rigour, yet he never supports his stuff with sources of any level at all - e.g. his "the sun doesn't matter to human health" assertion which we're just expected to take as a FACT on Trekkin's say-so without any studies done at all.

He wins the "citation war" by not citing anything himself, thus ensuring he can't be held to the same standard while just looking for the slimmest reasons to slam down any opposing evidence without actually reading the articles, checking the sources, or debating the evidence. It's actually fascinating the level of confirmation bias that presents.

There's a thing about academic rigour - you're supposed to apply it to your own statements, that's what it's for. It's not a weapon for slamming down everyone else's objections to your baseless assertions. That's not how professional academics works.

Also there's a disconnect there: "I'm better than you because I have a science degree. I reject all counter-evidence until 100% proven". That's ... not how professional scientists think. A professional scientist takes uncertainty as a starting point and goes with the preponderance of evidence as a working hypothesis. Professional scientists relish the new and unproven, because it's fertile ground for discussion. The proven stuff is in fact completely boring to a proper scientist.