I've got a friend who has long been a proponent of a decimal calendar. He can explain all the ways that it's practical, all the benefits we might get from it, all the clever tricks you can do with...
Exemplary
I've got a friend who has long been a proponent of a decimal calendar. He can explain all the ways that it's practical, all the benefits we might get from it, all the clever tricks you can do with it, etc. It's fun to listen to, and interesting to think about, but at a certain point it's always a kind of pointless discussion - to make that sort of change would be a tremendous amount of work and coordination, and the practical victory for the world would be marginal gain in simplicity.
This feels very similar. Yes, there's lots of technical solutions that the author has proposed, but they feel very idealised. I don't want every clock I own to need to be connected to the internet to figure out what time to display. I really like the feature that I can see how long something's been cooking by looking at a clock, and not by having to do calculations based on the time of year. It is a useful feature that a 10 O'clock meeting for me is probably going to be a something O'clock for the other participants, and that most of our calendars are oriented around the hour and half-hour marks.
The proposal overall feels like a kind of pastoral fantasy - cottagecore for nerds. It's difficult to take some of the claims about natural time solving such a wide range of problems seriously, especially with such a lack of evidence. There's just a vague insinuation that getting into a sun-based rhythm is natural, and natural is good. The argument in favour of being more seasonal is barely even present - we seem to be expected to take it on faith that we'll just be happier with more seasonal celebrations.
Much like my friend's decimal calendar, I can imagine having a really fun discussion about this at the right time with the right people. But as a practical suggestion, it's difficult to see it as anything but an absurd proposal driven mainly by a rose-tinted view of our "natural" origins. There's so many details that fall apart after thinking for longer than a few minutes. (How does seasonal work get paid fairly? How do we ensure vital goods are produced year-round if factories are just open less over winter?) And even if it were to work, the benefits feel so unconvincing.
I'm with you on the 'cottagecore for nerds' feeling (and honestly enjoyed your turn of phrase). The one thing that really jumped out at me in the article was: Working 11-hour days all summer...
I'm with you on the 'cottagecore for nerds' feeling (and honestly enjoyed your turn of phrase). The one thing that really jumped out at me in the article was:
Why not just make the normal work hours 9-4 in the winter and 7-6 in the summer?
Working 11-hour days all summer sounds god-awful, at least for some professions. Of course I know 12-hour shift-work is a thing. I've done manual, outdoor labour in summer for daily hours that often ran longer than 11-12-h days, and was more or less fine (though as physically tired as you could expect). But the computer-based work I do now? I'd be mentally fried and my eyes would strain themselves out of their sockets.
Reading the article, I could easily imagine the author was considering not just a change in work schedule, but also (nostalgically) the types of work that might be more conducive to varying seasonal hours.
Yeah, there's a lot of [citation needed] claims in the article. Proof? What about all the equatorial civilizations where there are not distinct seasons? Human life in the higher or lower latitudes...
Yeah, there's a lot of [citation needed] claims in the article.
Individual health would benefit by allowing people to live more in tune with their natural Circadian rhythms.
Proof?
Human beings have evolved to do most of our work during daylight hours, and to adjust our work output with the changing seasons.
What about all the equatorial civilizations where there are not distinct seasons? Human life in the higher or lower latitudes is a relatively recent thing, if we're speaking of evolution. I mean, humans aren't really evolved to "work" at all.
and this has produced an epidemic of insomnia and other negative health effects
An epidemic, now? Citation needed?
Moving to a system of seasonal time would likely cause a corresponding seasonal shift in production and work output.
This seems bad.
Winter and Summer used to actually mean something in terms of the day to day lives of people. In Winter, you spent most of your time huddled at home with your family through the long Winter nights. In Summer, you spent long days working the fields.
...is this supposed to be a good thing? I'm pretty glad I don't huddle at home with my family most of the time during winters.
In the Summer, you could look forward to the reduced workload that would come with the Winter months.
I really think most people were more terrified of dying of starvation when they had to sustain from food reserves more than they looked forward to "reduced workloads" a millenia ago.
Perhaps by returning to a system of natural time, we can rekindle some of that ancient magic, abandon our service to old spring clocks, and once again find our place as denizens of a living world.
I'll take the freedom of doing things I want to do when I want to do them, thank you very much.
Thank you for your point about equatorial countries. As someone that lives in the tropics, this just seem like a discussion westerners have with each other, because they mostly live in temperate...
Thank you for your point about equatorial countries. As someone that lives in the tropics, this just seem like a discussion westerners have with each other, because they mostly live in temperate countries. This isn't a global problem.
I agree on it being similar to cottagecore in feel. I dont even really need to worry about daylight savings time anymore, most of the clocks I look at are digital and change automatically. But...
I agree on it being similar to cottagecore in feel.
I dont even really need to worry about daylight savings time anymore, most of the clocks I look at are digital and change automatically. But this piece is talking about changing how we measure time, but also keeping the current way for things that need precise timing. So no there's a bifurcation time system where sometimes you are thinking of time in this "natural" time and sometimes you are thinking of it in the current system of time, and you'll need some mechanism or program to convert between those two as necessary, and you'd have to make it clear what kind of time you're talking about whenever you are talking about time.
It just feels way more complicated than sometimes having to understand that seasons make the sunlight half of the day shorter or longer. But it's presented as a return to simplicity because it's more "natural".
But, like, most of us don't start the workday at sunrise and end it st sunset anyway. I start work at 9, I can wake up anytime between sunrise and 8:30 and be fine. And even if I did want to wake up at sunrise, I could just do that without worrying about what number it is at.
Here's a better idea. Let's just work less so those hours mean more to us. A change like this would fundamentally break how most public transport runs.
Here's a better idea. Let's just work less so those hours mean more to us.
A change like this would fundamentally break how most public transport runs.
I did. It says nothing on how you'd get around a major city when everything becomes "eh, sometime soon" rather than actually usable. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for "Why am I awake at 7 to go to...
I did. It says nothing on how you'd get around a major city when everything becomes "eh, sometime soon" rather than actually usable.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for "Why am I awake at 7 to go to work in the dark" sucking so badly in winter, I just think we should collectively work less hours, rather than what would end up being the expectation that we work harder in the summer.
It would break everything. Put a pot on the stove to boil? You can no longer track how long it has been there just by looking at a clock since the length of a minute now changes based on the time...
It would break everything. Put a pot on the stove to boil? You can no longer track how long it has been there just by looking at a clock since the length of a minute now changes based on the time of year.
Really the easy solution is to just fix the way things are scheduled. Adopt different working hours based on the season. It's way easier than changing the actual definition of time based on the season.
Moving to less work hours is certainly a noble goal, but that's orthogonal to this discussion. You can change the change the standard work day from 8 to 5 to 10 to 3 or move the a 3 day workweek...
Moving to less work hours is certainly a noble goal, but that's orthogonal to this discussion. You can change the change the standard work day from 8 to 5 to 10 to 3 or move the a 3 day workweek with a fixed or seasonal definition of an hour.
Public transit and commuting are one of those things that would require more careful adjustment. But public transit schedules could be programmed to automatically adjust with the seasons.
Commute-centric transit service is already an outdated model. Work only represents a portion of total transit trips taken. This is why world-class cities like Paris operate through-running trains...
Commute-centric transit service is already an outdated model. Work only represents a portion of total transit trips taken. This is why world-class cities like Paris operate through-running trains with very high frequencies all-day, not just to center city destinations at peak commuting hours.
Timetable adjustments are inexpensive and easy to implement. The process is made easier in the modern day by computer programs that help eliminate conflicts while maintaining safe headways. The challenge is making the infrastructure upgrades necessary to accommodate effective transportation networks in general.
A computerized scheduling network would realistically require UTC for calculations, as the article says. For the end-user, it would have to "translate" that into longitudinal times. That's a head-scratcher for a person, but simple for an algorithm considering the curvature of the Earth is well-understood.
Exactly. The only real adjustment would be on an individual level. Maybe in the Winter your commute is an hour long and the Summer it's a half hour long. People already have to plan for seasonal...
Exactly. The only real adjustment would be on an individual level. Maybe in the Winter your commute is an hour long and the Summer it's a half hour long. People already have to plan for seasonal variations in commuting length, due to changing weather conditions, changing levels of traffic, etc.
Can I ask how people tend to use the word "orthogonal"? What do you "mean" by it? Like seperate but mentionable? Im on somewhat of quest to consolidate how its appropriate to use this word...
Can I ask how people tend to use the word "orthogonal"? What do you "mean" by it? Like seperate but mentionable? Im on somewhat of quest to consolidate how its appropriate to use this word...
Not sure how others use it, but I envision it in the geometric sense of the word. In geometry, two lines are orthogonal if they meet at right angles, they are perpendicular. A line can be...
Not sure how others use it, but I envision it in the geometric sense of the word. In geometry, two lines are orthogonal if they meet at right angles, they are perpendicular. A line can be perpendicular to a plane, etc.
But how does this work on ideas and discussions? Here's an example. Imagine two people are having a debate about tax policy. One wants higher taxes, one wants lower taxes. They're debating an issue along a certain axis. Then, one of them brings up something that has nothing to do with tax policy, say, prison reform. Prison reform is its own axis. Some might want harsher prison terms, some more lenient. There is an axis of opinions that people may lay along. But these two axes are orthogonal to each other. You can personally have any combination of beliefs about the appropriate levels of taxes or prison terms for various crimes. One does not strongly effect the other.
Saying a topic is orthogonal to the topic at hand does not mean that it is a foolish idea, it is in bad faith, or worthy of derision. It simply means that it's on an axis of debate unrelated to the one being considered. Tax policy and criminal sentencing are both topics worthy of discussion, but if a debate were being held about tax policy, it would be counterproductive to bring up criminal sentencing reform.
Orthogonal is unrelated. Like in this case, working more or less time during the day (as measured in absolute time) is unrelated to the separate question of how long an "hour" should be (when...
Orthogonal is unrelated. Like in this case, working more or less time during the day (as measured in absolute time) is unrelated to the separate question of how long an "hour" should be (when measured in absolute time). You can do either of those things separately with no effect on the other.
Somewhere, an engineer who has sunk untold hours into rejiggering date-time code for countless time zone edge cases is reading this and shrieking.
One obvious downside of such a system would be scheduling. How does one schedule a meeting or an international plane flight when not only time zones, but variable hour lengths are in play? Here again, our access to modern digital technology gives us options unthinkable to our forebears. When scheduling a meeting in modern scheduling systems, the systems already adjust displayed times for time zones. Such systems could be built to largely schedule things based on a fixed UTC or other system and then display time to individual users based on their local latitude, longitude, and time of year.
Somewhere, an engineer who has sunk untold hours into rejiggering date-time code for countless time zone edge cases is reading this and shrieking.
I had to perform extensive hotfixing, testing and retesting on control system software because of DST being abolished where I lived. And even outside that, certificates "broke", systems had to be...
I had to perform extensive hotfixing, testing and retesting on control system software because of DST being abolished where I lived. And even outside that, certificates "broke", systems had to be updated, it was absolute pandemonium. That was a minor change, comparatively.
Then, I worked alongside people developing part of a system involving shipping, and dealing with timezones as it is is already hard enough. Even whilst using libraries, there are so many edge cases and special conditions we need to take into account, we had to rethink a lot of things tens of times over.
I'm never going to willingly sign up for having to implement a clever system that takes into account latitude, longitude, time of year and so on when that makes it exponentially more difficult to apply this to critical systems, because even if I'm storing everything in UTC, I'll have to display it as "human time" eventually, and if I display everything as UTC (which makes sense, because at least where I work, we need to keep a logbook of events that is consistent throughout the year), I assume a lot of industries also will, meaning this proposal would be dead on arrival. Besides, it would drive me around a bend to have to think in microseconds when having to deal with timing on electronic circuits, but then I need to think in some abstract, ever-changing definition of hour when I want to do something else.
I already have to convert between metres and miles in my head, so I'm not too keen on having to do that when I need to be at the track at, say, "1600" four months from now, but my laptimes are measured in an unchanging unit of measurement.
This article also mentions that computers will also do a lot of the thinking for us, but I don't want to have to pull up a website to figure out what is the best time of day to call my relatives if it's the 26th day of winter, in Bristol... so on, so forth. I would very much like to look at my 1990s watch for a second and tell whether or not it's still too early for that. Said watch has barely enough processing power to keep the time, and naturally we would have to scrap a lot of existing material/hardware/software, but I tried to avoid this point because it feels a bit overdiscussed already.
I appreciate the initiative to create a discussion around how we could keep time better, but a lot of systems require stable timekeeping practices, which is rather easy to do with simple logic/circuits. This approach, however, would add great amounts of complexity which would require a lot more work. Also, Tom Scott has a video on him going mad over timezones, so I think that's a nice addendum to this whole situation
This is my obvious issue with the suggestion in the article. We'd just be adding another competing standard to the existing time paradigms (which thank God aren't too different at the moment). Not...
This is my obvious issue with the suggestion in the article. We'd just be adding another competing standard to the existing time paradigms (which thank God aren't too different at the moment). Not just that, but one that would need to be distinct from all scheduling, scientific timing, and other actually time sensitive operations. If any chunk of people adopted this as a means of living it would immediately create a class division and those living on the natural clock would be seen as a privileged class able to divorce themselves from practical concerns for the sake of minor mental health gains. They would also become more distant from the scientific world, and likely be a subset of the ruling class... So we'd have worse informed leaders.
Natural time is a neat idea. Thanks for sharing this article. It would be valuable to be more attuned to our circadian rhythms, even if our system of scientific time is still based on an electron....
Natural time is a neat idea. Thanks for sharing this article. It would be valuable to be more attuned to our circadian rhythms, even if our system of scientific time is still based on an electron. In addition to mental health benefits, paying more attention to the sun and less to artificial lights is a nice way to ground ourselves better in the real world which matters greatly.
I don't love the idea of relying exclusively on computers to determine natural time. You should be able to use an analog or non-internet-connected digital clock to schedule your life. This system would resolve all practical communication issues by computer offsets to UTC time. If you don't want your device in the IoT, you would be out of luck. I suppose you could bring a sundial everywhere you go, but that seems unreasonable.
You wouldn't have to necessarily use an internet connected device. Most modern wrist watches and wall clocks, whether equipped with a digital or analog display, do their actual timekeeping...
You wouldn't have to necessarily use an internet connected device. Most modern wrist watches and wall clocks, whether equipped with a digital or analog display, do their actual timekeeping digitally. You could implement this in these devices in an variety of ways. You could have a device that you manually entered the date and latitude, and it would automatically vary the time. Or you could have some sort of seasonal slider mechanism. There would be many ways to implement it that wouldn't necessarily require a constant internet connection, but at the exchange of a little more work on the user's part. When you moved your wall clock to a new city, you might have to fiddle with the settings a bit to be in tune with local time.
That's not true according to evolutionary psychologists. People have evolved with different internal cycles. That's why some people do their best work at night, and others in the morning. This was...
Human beings have evolved to do most of our work during daylight hours
That's not true according to evolutionary psychologists. People have evolved with different internal cycles. That's why some people do their best work at night, and others in the morning. This was a necessary trait for ancient man because it would be dangerous for an entire group of people to sleep at the same time. Someone would need to be awake at all times to protect the group.
Evo psych has a bad habit of making unfalsifiable claims/hypotheses. I'm not an expert on this topic but I do take what they say with a huge grain of salt. Himalayan mountain sized grains to be...
Evo psych has a bad habit of making unfalsifiable claims/hypotheses. I'm not an expert on this topic but I do take what they say with a huge grain of salt. Himalayan mountain sized grains to be honest.
For example we may all indeed have different circadian rhythms but there's no evidence of why that genetic expression might have occurred, and no real way to test that.
Ducks/Geese are known to keep one eye open when on the outer edge of a sleeping group. Marine wildlife have been observed turning half their brains off at night to maintain constant movement in an...
Ducks/Geese are known to keep one eye open when on the outer edge of a sleeping group. Marine wildlife have been observed turning half their brains off at night to maintain constant movement in an ever-shifting ocean. It’s not unreasonable for humans to have also evolved differing sleep patterns as well (I’m still waiting on a decent theory behind our medieval habit of “two sleeps” because I still experience this nightly).
That being said, the evolution of civilization has certainly outpaced our biological evolution so I’m similarly skeptical of claims that we needed proto-humans awake at all hours of the night to defend against raiders (since most wild predators would also follow a mostly circadian rhythm).
My best guess is that genetics breeds randomness (literally!) and this gets distributed across a population. If a bell curve were centered around sunset it makes sense for there to be early-risers and night-owls. Sexuality, gender, ASD, and even hair color are all accepted/addressed as a spectrum within the mainstream at this point, why should sleep (an activity we do ~1/3 of our lives) not similarly have a spectrum? It’s precisely because these types of spectrums appear across multiple phenotypes that I believe it’s just a quirk of our genetic mutations (through genetic recombination and/or cosmic rays).
Disclaimer: I’m not a biologist, just a human piecing together disparate experiences in a way that makes sense to me.
Last I'd heard the "two sleeps" was debunked I thought, but I may have missed something. (Not that you don't experience this, I do occasionally but I don't feel more rested when it happens. I just...
Last I'd heard the "two sleeps" was debunked I thought, but I may have missed something. (Not that you don't experience this, I do occasionally but I don't feel more rested when it happens. I just struggle to get back to sleep when I wake up)
But that's the difficulty with Evo psych, it ascribes motivation to evolution and compares us (often poorly ) with other animals, and then just ... Assets the hypothesis as the conclusion.
I do generally agree that it's likely that there's some sort of distribution of circadian rhythms - at least in our modern society. Which is a heck of an extraneous factor. What would be different if we lived mostly with natural light and minimal light pollution. (And does it matter if we can't actually replicate that anymore )
It's either a theory or a hypothesis, depending upon who you talk to. I've heard different evolutionary psychologists refer to it differently. I doubt it's something that could objectively be...
It's either a theory or a hypothesis, depending upon who you talk to. I've heard different evolutionary psychologists refer to it differently. I doubt it's something that could objectively be proven either way, although some discovery in the future may lead to an answer.
The clock is the one thing that is globally accepted as a standard. It's so simple that children aged 5 can understand the concept. I really see 0 benefit in changing it.
The clock is the one thing that is globally accepted as a standard. It's so simple that children aged 5 can understand the concept. I really see 0 benefit in changing it.
Someone must have written a library for determining sunup and sundown based on date and lat/long, right? Assuming that exists, implementing a basic "natural time clock" would be trivial and maybe...
Someone must have written a library for determining sunup and sundown based on date and lat/long, right? Assuming that exists, implementing a basic "natural time clock" would be trivial and maybe even fun!
This seems like a perfect opportunity to share So You Want Continuous Timezones, which goes into pretty good detail about a number of reasons why proposals like this wouldn't work. To fend off a...
This seems like a perfect opportunity to share So You Want Continuous Timezones, which goes into pretty good detail about a number of reasons why proposals like this wouldn't work. To fend off a similar sentiment I've seen here on Tildes, he's also written So You Want to Abolish Timezones
I've got a friend who has long been a proponent of a decimal calendar. He can explain all the ways that it's practical, all the benefits we might get from it, all the clever tricks you can do with it, etc. It's fun to listen to, and interesting to think about, but at a certain point it's always a kind of pointless discussion - to make that sort of change would be a tremendous amount of work and coordination, and the practical victory for the world would be marginal gain in simplicity.
This feels very similar. Yes, there's lots of technical solutions that the author has proposed, but they feel very idealised. I don't want every clock I own to need to be connected to the internet to figure out what time to display. I really like the feature that I can see how long something's been cooking by looking at a clock, and not by having to do calculations based on the time of year. It is a useful feature that a 10 O'clock meeting for me is probably going to be a something O'clock for the other participants, and that most of our calendars are oriented around the hour and half-hour marks.
The proposal overall feels like a kind of pastoral fantasy - cottagecore for nerds. It's difficult to take some of the claims about natural time solving such a wide range of problems seriously, especially with such a lack of evidence. There's just a vague insinuation that getting into a sun-based rhythm is natural, and natural is good. The argument in favour of being more seasonal is barely even present - we seem to be expected to take it on faith that we'll just be happier with more seasonal celebrations.
Much like my friend's decimal calendar, I can imagine having a really fun discussion about this at the right time with the right people. But as a practical suggestion, it's difficult to see it as anything but an absurd proposal driven mainly by a rose-tinted view of our "natural" origins. There's so many details that fall apart after thinking for longer than a few minutes. (How does seasonal work get paid fairly? How do we ensure vital goods are produced year-round if factories are just open less over winter?) And even if it were to work, the benefits feel so unconvincing.
I'm with you on the 'cottagecore for nerds' feeling (and honestly enjoyed your turn of phrase). The one thing that really jumped out at me in the article was:
Working 11-hour days all summer sounds god-awful, at least for some professions. Of course I know 12-hour shift-work is a thing. I've done manual, outdoor labour in summer for daily hours that often ran longer than 11-12-h days, and was more or less fine (though as physically tired as you could expect). But the computer-based work I do now? I'd be mentally fried and my eyes would strain themselves out of their sockets.
Reading the article, I could easily imagine the author was considering not just a change in work schedule, but also (nostalgically) the types of work that might be more conducive to varying seasonal hours.
Yeah, there's a lot of [citation needed] claims in the article.
Proof?
What about all the equatorial civilizations where there are not distinct seasons? Human life in the higher or lower latitudes is a relatively recent thing, if we're speaking of evolution. I mean, humans aren't really evolved to "work" at all.
An epidemic, now? Citation needed?
This seems bad.
...is this supposed to be a good thing? I'm pretty glad I don't huddle at home with my family most of the time during winters.
I really think most people were more terrified of dying of starvation when they had to sustain from food reserves more than they looked forward to "reduced workloads" a millenia ago.
I'll take the freedom of doing things I want to do when I want to do them, thank you very much.
Thank you for your point about equatorial countries. As someone that lives in the tropics, this just seem like a discussion westerners have with each other, because they mostly live in temperate countries. This isn't a global problem.
The article kind of sounds like they just want a time machine. There's good reasons nobody does things like "the old days".
I agree on it being similar to cottagecore in feel.
I dont even really need to worry about daylight savings time anymore, most of the clocks I look at are digital and change automatically. But this piece is talking about changing how we measure time, but also keeping the current way for things that need precise timing. So no there's a bifurcation time system where sometimes you are thinking of time in this "natural" time and sometimes you are thinking of it in the current system of time, and you'll need some mechanism or program to convert between those two as necessary, and you'd have to make it clear what kind of time you're talking about whenever you are talking about time.
It just feels way more complicated than sometimes having to understand that seasons make the sunlight half of the day shorter or longer. But it's presented as a return to simplicity because it's more "natural".
But, like, most of us don't start the workday at sunrise and end it st sunset anyway. I start work at 9, I can wake up anytime between sunrise and 8:30 and be fine. And even if I did want to wake up at sunrise, I could just do that without worrying about what number it is at.
Here's a better idea. Let's just work less so those hours mean more to us.
A change like this would fundamentally break how most public transport runs.
I did. It says nothing on how you'd get around a major city when everything becomes "eh, sometime soon" rather than actually usable.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for "Why am I awake at 7 to go to work in the dark" sucking so badly in winter, I just think we should collectively work less hours, rather than what would end up being the expectation that we work harder in the summer.
It would break everything. Put a pot on the stove to boil? You can no longer track how long it has been there just by looking at a clock since the length of a minute now changes based on the time of year.
Really the easy solution is to just fix the way things are scheduled. Adopt different working hours based on the season. It's way easier than changing the actual definition of time based on the season.
Moving to less work hours is certainly a noble goal, but that's orthogonal to this discussion. You can change the change the standard work day from 8 to 5 to 10 to 3 or move the a 3 day workweek with a fixed or seasonal definition of an hour.
Public transit and commuting are one of those things that would require more careful adjustment. But public transit schedules could be programmed to automatically adjust with the seasons.
Commute-centric transit service is already an outdated model. Work only represents a portion of total transit trips taken. This is why world-class cities like Paris operate through-running trains with very high frequencies all-day, not just to center city destinations at peak commuting hours.
Timetable adjustments are inexpensive and easy to implement. The process is made easier in the modern day by computer programs that help eliminate conflicts while maintaining safe headways. The challenge is making the infrastructure upgrades necessary to accommodate effective transportation networks in general.
A computerized scheduling network would realistically require UTC for calculations, as the article says. For the end-user, it would have to "translate" that into longitudinal times. That's a head-scratcher for a person, but simple for an algorithm considering the curvature of the Earth is well-understood.
Exactly. The only real adjustment would be on an individual level. Maybe in the Winter your commute is an hour long and the Summer it's a half hour long. People already have to plan for seasonal variations in commuting length, due to changing weather conditions, changing levels of traffic, etc.
Can I ask how people tend to use the word "orthogonal"? What do you "mean" by it? Like seperate but mentionable? Im on somewhat of quest to consolidate how its appropriate to use this word...
Not sure how others use it, but I envision it in the geometric sense of the word. In geometry, two lines are orthogonal if they meet at right angles, they are perpendicular. A line can be perpendicular to a plane, etc.
But how does this work on ideas and discussions? Here's an example. Imagine two people are having a debate about tax policy. One wants higher taxes, one wants lower taxes. They're debating an issue along a certain axis. Then, one of them brings up something that has nothing to do with tax policy, say, prison reform. Prison reform is its own axis. Some might want harsher prison terms, some more lenient. There is an axis of opinions that people may lay along. But these two axes are orthogonal to each other. You can personally have any combination of beliefs about the appropriate levels of taxes or prison terms for various crimes. One does not strongly effect the other.
Saying a topic is orthogonal to the topic at hand does not mean that it is a foolish idea, it is in bad faith, or worthy of derision. It simply means that it's on an axis of debate unrelated to the one being considered. Tax policy and criminal sentencing are both topics worthy of discussion, but if a debate were being held about tax policy, it would be counterproductive to bring up criminal sentencing reform.
This has single-handedly clarified this for me! Thank you
The 90ø angle and the axis-of-argument really drives it home, thanks!
Orthogonal is unrelated. Like in this case, working more or less time during the day (as measured in absolute time) is unrelated to the separate question of how long an "hour" should be (when measured in absolute time). You can do either of those things separately with no effect on the other.
Thank you. I always felt dumber using this word when I wasn't 100% on it
Somewhere, an engineer who has sunk untold hours into rejiggering date-time code for countless time zone edge cases is reading this and shrieking.
I had to perform extensive hotfixing, testing and retesting on control system software because of DST being abolished where I lived. And even outside that, certificates "broke", systems had to be updated, it was absolute pandemonium. That was a minor change, comparatively.
Then, I worked alongside people developing part of a system involving shipping, and dealing with timezones as it is is already hard enough. Even whilst using libraries, there are so many edge cases and special conditions we need to take into account, we had to rethink a lot of things tens of times over.
I'm never going to willingly sign up for having to implement a clever system that takes into account latitude, longitude, time of year and so on when that makes it exponentially more difficult to apply this to critical systems, because even if I'm storing everything in UTC, I'll have to display it as "human time" eventually, and if I display everything as UTC (which makes sense, because at least where I work, we need to keep a logbook of events that is consistent throughout the year), I assume a lot of industries also will, meaning this proposal would be dead on arrival. Besides, it would drive me around a bend to have to think in microseconds when having to deal with timing on electronic circuits, but then I need to think in some abstract, ever-changing definition of hour when I want to do something else.
I already have to convert between metres and miles in my head, so I'm not too keen on having to do that when I need to be at the track at, say, "1600" four months from now, but my laptimes are measured in an unchanging unit of measurement.
This article also mentions that computers will also do a lot of the thinking for us, but I don't want to have to pull up a website to figure out what is the best time of day to call my relatives if it's the 26th day of winter, in Bristol... so on, so forth. I would very much like to look at my 1990s watch for a second and tell whether or not it's still too early for that. Said watch has barely enough processing power to keep the time, and naturally we would have to scrap a lot of existing material/hardware/software, but I tried to avoid this point because it feels a bit overdiscussed already.
I appreciate the initiative to create a discussion around how we could keep time better, but a lot of systems require stable timekeeping practices, which is rather easy to do with simple logic/circuits. This approach, however, would add great amounts of complexity which would require a lot more work. Also, Tom Scott has a video on him going mad over timezones, so I think that's a nice addendum to this whole situation
This is my obvious issue with the suggestion in the article. We'd just be adding another competing standard to the existing time paradigms (which thank God aren't too different at the moment). Not just that, but one that would need to be distinct from all scheduling, scientific timing, and other actually time sensitive operations. If any chunk of people adopted this as a means of living it would immediately create a class division and those living on the natural clock would be seen as a privileged class able to divorce themselves from practical concerns for the sake of minor mental health gains. They would also become more distant from the scientific world, and likely be a subset of the ruling class... So we'd have worse informed leaders.
Really sounds unwise to me.
Natural time is a neat idea. Thanks for sharing this article. It would be valuable to be more attuned to our circadian rhythms, even if our system of scientific time is still based on an electron. In addition to mental health benefits, paying more attention to the sun and less to artificial lights is a nice way to ground ourselves better in the real world which matters greatly.
I don't love the idea of relying exclusively on computers to determine natural time. You should be able to use an analog or non-internet-connected digital clock to schedule your life. This system would resolve all practical communication issues by computer offsets to UTC time. If you don't want your device in the IoT, you would be out of luck. I suppose you could bring a sundial everywhere you go, but that seems unreasonable.
You wouldn't have to necessarily use an internet connected device. Most modern wrist watches and wall clocks, whether equipped with a digital or analog display, do their actual timekeeping digitally. You could implement this in these devices in an variety of ways. You could have a device that you manually entered the date and latitude, and it would automatically vary the time. Or you could have some sort of seasonal slider mechanism. There would be many ways to implement it that wouldn't necessarily require a constant internet connection, but at the exchange of a little more work on the user's part. When you moved your wall clock to a new city, you might have to fiddle with the settings a bit to be in tune with local time.
That's not true according to evolutionary psychologists. People have evolved with different internal cycles. That's why some people do their best work at night, and others in the morning. This was a necessary trait for ancient man because it would be dangerous for an entire group of people to sleep at the same time. Someone would need to be awake at all times to protect the group.
Evo psych has a bad habit of making unfalsifiable claims/hypotheses. I'm not an expert on this topic but I do take what they say with a huge grain of salt. Himalayan mountain sized grains to be honest.
For example we may all indeed have different circadian rhythms but there's no evidence of why that genetic expression might have occurred, and no real way to test that.
Ducks/Geese are known to keep one eye open when on the outer edge of a sleeping group. Marine wildlife have been observed turning half their brains off at night to maintain constant movement in an ever-shifting ocean. It’s not unreasonable for humans to have also evolved differing sleep patterns as well (I’m still waiting on a decent theory behind our medieval habit of “two sleeps” because I still experience this nightly).
That being said, the evolution of civilization has certainly outpaced our biological evolution so I’m similarly skeptical of claims that we needed proto-humans awake at all hours of the night to defend against raiders (since most wild predators would also follow a mostly circadian rhythm).
My best guess is that genetics breeds randomness (literally!) and this gets distributed across a population. If a bell curve were centered around sunset it makes sense for there to be early-risers and night-owls. Sexuality, gender, ASD, and even hair color are all accepted/addressed as a spectrum within the mainstream at this point, why should sleep (an activity we do ~1/3 of our lives) not similarly have a spectrum? It’s precisely because these types of spectrums appear across multiple phenotypes that I believe it’s just a quirk of our genetic mutations (through genetic recombination and/or cosmic rays).
Disclaimer: I’m not a biologist, just a human piecing together disparate experiences in a way that makes sense to me.
Last I'd heard the "two sleeps" was debunked I thought, but I may have missed something. (Not that you don't experience this, I do occasionally but I don't feel more rested when it happens. I just struggle to get back to sleep when I wake up)
But that's the difficulty with Evo psych, it ascribes motivation to evolution and compares us (often poorly ) with other animals, and then just ... Assets the hypothesis as the conclusion.
I do generally agree that it's likely that there's some sort of distribution of circadian rhythms - at least in our modern society. Which is a heck of an extraneous factor. What would be different if we lived mostly with natural light and minimal light pollution. (And does it matter if we can't actually replicate that anymore )
Thanks!
That's fair. It is just a hypothesis, obviously. There's really no way of proving it definitively.
Which really makes it not a hypothesis scientifically speaking!
Not trying to harp on this, it's just a pet peeve.
It's either a theory or a hypothesis, depending upon who you talk to. I've heard different evolutionary psychologists refer to it differently. I doubt it's something that could objectively be proven either way, although some discovery in the future may lead to an answer.
If it can't be tested, it's not a hypothesis scientifically. A scientific theory would require even more evidence.
It's a guess.
Cool that this article gets posted a few hours after I resolve to live in accordance with sunset and sunrise and not even care what “time” it is.
The clock is the one thing that is globally accepted as a standard. It's so simple that children aged 5 can understand the concept. I really see 0 benefit in changing it.
Someone must have written a library for determining sunup and sundown based on date and lat/long, right? Assuming that exists, implementing a basic "natural time clock" would be trivial and maybe even fun!
Edit: with this SO answer I'm halfway there.
This seems like a perfect opportunity to share So You Want Continuous Timezones, which goes into pretty good detail about a number of reasons why proposals like this wouldn't work. To fend off a similar sentiment I've seen here on Tildes, he's also written So You Want to Abolish Timezones