h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

There's been talk lately of making Daylight Saving Time year round. I HATE this idea and truly hopes it goes away. I'm not personally a big fan of DST even in the Summer and now that it runs 8-9 months of the year, I like it even less. But the idea of it running year round is just right out. I'm perfectly OK with making work hours start one hour earlier as I like having a few more hours after work in the sun, but the whole point of NOON is that it should fall directly between sunset and sunrise. Time is arbitrary enough as it is. Shifting noon permanently one hour closer to dawn is just ridiculous.

Well, you can't have it both ways. Either the work day is central or the celestial event is. DST is all about giving you that extra hour in the summertime when you need it more. The alternative is that we work different hours in the summer (e.g. 8am-4pm March to September) but much of industry likes to be more controlling and standardised.

With two of the 4 time zones in the US we already have shifted the usual work schedule. While most people on the East coast work 9-5, most of us in the Central time zone work 8-4. In these days of flexible work schedules I see no problem with shifting traditional schedules as they are ever more arbitrary. But I'd rather keep the celestial basis for our clocks.

So what we need to do is use large rockets to change the tilt of the Earth.

Please explain that one Xanatic?

I'd like to have a year-round system for time, whether it's all celestial time or all daylight savings time, or something half an hour between them. I'm not fussy. Whenever the changeover takes place, it takes me about a week to get acclimated.

Xanatic's right. If the rockets go around the Earth fast enough they warp us back to the 1980s - I saw it in Star Trek IV.

All we have to do is go back to the time before the Earth tilted.

"I've spent a long time believing that CE stood for Common Event. I am now better informed." [Storm]

That's probably a Common Error.

The Chinese have a system for measuring the years. It goes back more than 4,000 years. In the Hebrew calendar, this seems to be the year 5775. And the year 1436 in the Islamic calendar.

There was a time when societies were isolated, and having different systems didn't pose a big problem. Now there's global communication.
Why wouldn't we have a common standard?

In carbon dating 1950 AD is used as year 0.

The changes in the day's length over the year is caused by the 23˚ tilt of the Earth's axis. If we change the tilt to 0˚, we wouldn't need Daylight Savings Time.

>>or is it the term "in the year of the Lord" that people do not like.<<

precisely that for me

>>The majority being bullied by the minority<<

aside of it not being bullying, I wonder how many Christians there are in the world compared to non-Christians who are reminded about the Christian religion every time they see a date. That sounds a bit like low-level bullying to me.

This is Year of Our Lady of Discord 3181.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discordian_calendar

Or we could go with this being the year 12015 H.E. (Human Era).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar

" I wonder how many Christians there are in the world compared to non-Christians who are reminded about the Christian religion every time they see a date" [Sho]

If they're fortunate enough to no longer have to fear Smallpox and beri beri and scurvy and plague, perhaps they'll find other things to worry about, that among them. In places where civil war rages, they may not have the time or energy to worry about measuring the years by reference to another religion's founder.

I'm sorry I brought it up.

I can understand that.

It's okay. What matters is that people understand what it all means.

I don't even bother to change my clocks.

The one in the bedroom is set to PDT, the one in the living room to PST, the ones on the cell phone and computer adjust themselves automatically and beyond that, all I need to do is a little arithmatic occasionally.

So often, clockschange automatically. It becomes difficult when you're not sure if they've changed or not.

These days it would surely make more sense for the whole world to be just one time zone using a 24-hour system, and you'd have to just get used to the idea that in your part of the world you went to bed at 1500hrs say, or had breakfast at 1800 hrs. If you were to arrange a phone call with someone on the other side of the world, you would just see that you were not in bed at the time of the call.

Anyone is free to live on UTC if they want.

I think we should just use some arbitrary date as zero and get on with it. 1st January 1970 for example.