Too bad watches weren't common during the French Revolution
For some reason Napoleon fixed everything but the measurement of time and the desire to conquer the world.
You may have heard me talk about the swatch, the decimal unit of time invented by swatch.
Well, that may take a while to catch on. Before that, even, we need to get everyone in the world on the same time, Zulu time. That is going to slowly catch on in the new global, digital world as all servers operate on one timezone, in the same way that English is the official language of aviation.
If someone tells you that it won't work to have one timezone (with no "savings time", obv) because the sun comes up at different times on different parts of the world, you may safely assume that person regards you as a moron. He or she may also have been a mathematics major in undergrad.
People within time zones don't go to bed at the same time, nor do all businesses within time zones open at the same time. Time zones don't follow longitude lines. The sun rises at different times within yards of other places if you're in the mountains. The sun stopped being relevant at pretty much the same time artificial lighting became cheap, so it's time to get over it and move on.
As a prelude to that, however, the least we can do is move toward a uniform date-time system. This whole mm/dd/yy hh:mm am|pm thing is too QWERTY for me to take anymore. Therefore, I'm now switching to the 24-hour clock (which I'll avoid calling "military time", since I hope that will soon become antiquated as well).
The format I now use is yy.mm.dd hhmm, as in 09.10.04 2343. Sometimes if I'm in a hurry I'll omit the dots. One nice feature is that if you name files this way, they'll automatically sort the way you expect. One downside is the requirement for leading zeroes, and the ambiguity with regard to century, but I think both of those balance the needs for standardization and brevity.
I'm hoping Obama gets everything else fixed soon enough to 1. get us on that perfectly nice metric system that already exists, 2. get everyone in the world to drive on the same side of the road, and 3. standardize time. It shouldn't take guillotines to reset the global standards. Really it seems like the UN should be doing this stuff already, but apparently they are useless. It's about time to get a world government cranked up.
You may have heard me talk about the swatch, the decimal unit of time invented by swatch.
Well, that may take a while to catch on. Before that, even, we need to get everyone in the world on the same time, Zulu time. That is going to slowly catch on in the new global, digital world as all servers operate on one timezone, in the same way that English is the official language of aviation.
If someone tells you that it won't work to have one timezone (with no "savings time", obv) because the sun comes up at different times on different parts of the world, you may safely assume that person regards you as a moron. He or she may also have been a mathematics major in undergrad.
People within time zones don't go to bed at the same time, nor do all businesses within time zones open at the same time. Time zones don't follow longitude lines. The sun rises at different times within yards of other places if you're in the mountains. The sun stopped being relevant at pretty much the same time artificial lighting became cheap, so it's time to get over it and move on.
As a prelude to that, however, the least we can do is move toward a uniform date-time system. This whole mm/dd/yy hh:mm am|pm thing is too QWERTY for me to take anymore. Therefore, I'm now switching to the 24-hour clock (which I'll avoid calling "military time", since I hope that will soon become antiquated as well).
The format I now use is yy.mm.dd hhmm, as in 09.10.04 2343. Sometimes if I'm in a hurry I'll omit the dots. One nice feature is that if you name files this way, they'll automatically sort the way you expect. One downside is the requirement for leading zeroes, and the ambiguity with regard to century, but I think both of those balance the needs for standardization and brevity.
I'm hoping Obama gets everything else fixed soon enough to 1. get us on that perfectly nice metric system that already exists, 2. get everyone in the world to drive on the same side of the road, and 3. standardize time. It shouldn't take guillotines to reset the global standards. Really it seems like the UN should be doing this stuff already, but apparently they are useless. It's about time to get a world government cranked up.
posted by AdamB at 8:31 PM
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