Time For A Rant

It is scarce, non-renewable, and arguably the most valuable resource there is. So when will it be fixed?

Unit #

You know what's crazy? Americans and their imperial system. But what's crazier is that seconds is the only unit of measurement that both the metric and imperial systems agree on (Don't quote me on that. I'm not a scientist), and for obvious reasons. It's the only unit of measurement that accomodates both systems.

When you measure from the base unit down, it is in the base of 10. There are 1000 milliseconds in 1 second, 1000 microseconds in 1 millisecond, 1000 nanoseconds in 1 microsecond, and so on. This makes the metric council happy.

If you're on the imperial side, mald not. From the base unit up, it is in a weird, needlessly complicated dozenal system. There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, about 4 weeks in a month, and 12 months in a year.

Then, just like a twist in an M. Night Shyamalan film, it goes back to decimal system beyond. 10 years in a decade, 10 decades in a century, 10 centuries in a millenium, and so on.

It is good that we've standardized the measurement of a second, and by that I mean we've found an atom that jiggles exactly 9192631770 times every tick of an old clock. We can maybe work on standardizing how it increments next. The decimal time representation, while it has fallen out of fashion, is still a good consideration for a better system.

Timezones #

The world, as divided as it is now, actually once came together to forge a platinum rule of time, and anyone who dared defy it was stoned to death. That rule simply states:

It is Noon™️ when the sun is directly above you

A noble concept. Innovative thought. Easy to remember and hard to disagree with. All you have to do is to look up and ask yourself "Am I blind yet?" If the answer is yes, then you can accurately deduce that, at this very moment, it is Noon™️. Since the Sumerian scholars have divided night and day into 24 stages, Noon™️ would be 12 on the clock.

The obvious next step is to map the world into zones of when it will be Noon™️ at a given longitude. These zones shall help dictate what time it is where. We can call these... Time zones. Of course, we can't possibly cover every second that the sun is directly above a piece of land. We'd have tens of thousands of lines on our map! So the brilliant timelords have decided to cut the map into 24 zones, since there are 24 hours in a day.

But wait, there's more! Since people in the same state interact with each other on the daily, they have to operate on the same clock. It would be irresponsible for radio hosts to announce their own current time and not consider those within their coverage who are in a different time zone. So, on top of rounding the zones to the nearest hour, we also need draw the lines such that each zone covers territories and not the scientifically accurate zoning it was meant to be.

Just consider the international date line. The line in which the immediate land to its west is a day ahead of the immediate land to its east. Had it been a straight line that cut through land, people would take advantage of it. They would celebrate holidays on one side, only to move to the other the next day to celebrate again. Students would be biking a few blocks down the road just so they can extend their science project deadlines. That would cause a lot of chaos and no one wants that. The international date line, being jagged that it is, keeps peace among humankind.

Now, If I may offer a thought. Imagine we all, across the world, used one clock. Where conversions have no place in our discourse, and we all advance ahead at the same time. It would eliminate the need for an arbitrary line where time on both sides differ by as much as an entire day. When an event is scheduled, we need not ask the ethnicity of the organizer. And we can finally put an end to the stigma of working 9-5. All these benefits only at the expense of removing the essence of Noon™️. But don't think more of it. Just a silly thought. I certainly don't want to be stoned to death.

Daylight Saving Time #

Once upon a time, a troubled man seeks the moon for counsel. "Why, my dearest moon?," his voice trembles. "Why is it getting dark already? What happened to my sunshine? Has the sun come to hate me?" "No," the moon woefully responds. "I'm afraid you just missed an hour of it before you woke up. If you wake up earlier from now on, then you would find your missing sunshine." The man touches his mouth in realization, stroking his beard with his forehead tensed. "Oh!," he acclaims with a finger in the air. "Then the sun can just sleep in for an hour for the next six months!" The moon nods in agreement, and lo, daylight has been saved.

I totally did not write this entire blog post out of spite for losing an hour of sleep due to DST. A widely accepted practice that clearly shouldn't have existed to begin with.

Leaps #

There are things in life that are so important, it would be a crime not to celebrate it. One of those things is when Earth has successfully completed a revolution around the Sun without incident. When that happens, the whole world ought to make a noise; to be happy; and to pray for yet another successful roundtrip. It is so fundamental to our existence that every person marks their spot in the Earth's orbit when they are born, and each time the Earth passes their spot, they have to ask the people around them for gifts that they so deserve.

This complete revolution is what we call a year. However, the sloppy naturalists of the olden days spent an awful amount of time trying to fit the Earth's revolution around the sun with the Earth's rotation in its axis as well as the Moon's phases. All of which, unfortunately, do not align well. But if we just squint hard enough, these heavenly bodies dance in perfect harmony. If only we can find that missing mathematical thread to stitch these phenomena together nicely. If we can't, there's always the option of brute forcing our way into a solution. And we did.

When you negotiate with another person, both of you have to come to an agreement that meets each other's needs. One can't get all that he asked only to leave the other with nothing. To do that, compensations have to be made. Maybe you do get to use the PS5 every weeknight. To compensate, I get to kick you in the nutsack when it's full moon. It keeps all things balanced. A healthy give and take. The same is truer when we are negotiating with nature.

To bend nature to our will, a greater compensation is in order. That compensation comes in the form of leap days. Since a year comes to about a quarter of a day longer, that which we usually ignore, we accumulate those excess and insert them back in when they add up to a whole day. However, we have recently (roughly half a millenium ago) found out the excess per year is actually less than a quarter day. Instead of re-evaluating our formula, we simply patched it up with duct tape, adding and subtracting days as we please.

Calendar #

I don't have to reiterate how absurd it is that we are loosely basing one of our timekeeping systems on the Earth's revolution around the Sun. Instead, in this section, I will give in and take that as a given. A year is one Earth revolution around the Sun. Our year count increments by 1 each time it does so.

So... What year is it?

Ask that question to anyone and top answer will likely be 2022, at the time of writing this. It's the way of counting years that began about 500 Earth revolutions ago, where the count begins at a significant religious event. It has somehow penetrated through other religions and cultures that it has become the universal system.

Most people would be satisfied by that answer. Though, it makes it hard to put time itself into perspective. The origin is at a relatively recent event in history. All else before that are essentially in the negative values, which doesn't quite make sense. When one asks "What year was it when Julius Caesar died?" and the answer is 44 BC, a funny image comes to mind, of the ancient Romans counting down to something.

Happy new year, Augustus. The year is now 43 BC.

Surely, there has to be a better method of counting our years to the present time. What if the year zero is effectively the year that the Earth formed? After all, what we are counting is the Earth's revolution around the Sun. It would make sense that the first year corresponds to its first revolution. If the counterargument to that is that it doesn't eliminate the use of negative values when referring to events before the creation of Earth, maybe having year zero set at the big bang would solve that.

Those ideas are valid, but there is a major shortcoming on both. That's the fact that we haven't exactly pinpointed the time that those happened. Basing our years on any of those would leave us with a crude estimate of the current year, if not completely inaccurate.

The concept of the Holocene calendar counts the year since approximately the beginning of human civilization which is yet another reasonable suggestion. Humans, after all, are the ones who needs to keep time. While it is one of the most popular ideas to replace the current system, it suffers from both flaws of the aforementioned systems.

The year count aside, another important topics are the smaller increments of time within the year, namely dates. Since we often use dates as markers of notable events, also known as holidays, we must consider being consistent with when those dates fall on. The most common way of achieving that consistency is to restructure the weeks and months such that the same date fall on the same day of the week, and the same time of the year. Proposals such as the International Fixed Calendar or the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar are some of the many decent attempts at that.

Whether it's the years, the months, the weeks, the days, the hours, the minutes, or the seconds that we end up restructuring first, having at least one of these be consistent to what they represent would be quite a milestone to hit.

Solution #

There is none.

Let me make that clear before I go any further. None yet, at least. There are some suggestions floating around for consideration, some of which were mentioned above. Each tackling one or more of these issues, but only falling short of being elegant enough to be a strong candidate. I would still consider that as progress towards a better system.

Time, and timekeeping, is an essential part of our lives. I would be lying if I claim to know how to solve these issues, and it would be arrogant of me to demand a solution when I myself cannot offer one. Furthermore, I know that any suggestion to change the current system, which majority of the population have been accustomed to, will be met with great opposition. Still, I believe that it is worth acknowledging that there is a problem and that any discussion we have about it is valuable.

We can start by eradicating Daylight Saving Time altogether.