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Why do time zones and daylight savings jump by full hours? This is madness and it leads to unnecessary human suffering. With the power of mathematics and quadratic/sinusoidal regressions we shall heal this harm. Let time be a continuous function. Let timezones change by micro seconds as you move over the earth. Let us creep forward over weeks, no more “spring forward”! We shall seep back— never falling.
@futurebird There's this Tom Scott video where he spends ten minutes explaining all the weird edge cases that make writing code involving dates and times such a nightmare. If your idea came to pass and he wanted to update the video, it'd probably be ten full minutes of screaming in horror and despair at the camera
@bujold I’m kinda in to that tho.
@bujold @futurebird days are never exactly 24 hours, but they're also never far from 24 hours, maybe all the edge cases go away because it's over long curve...
You could say 'screw it' and get away with it more? Or never! Hmmm.
All units of measurement, when applied, should have a small random amount added, just to make code more consistently a little wrong, instead of rarely a lot wrong. Oh wait... That's floating point math.
@bujold @futurebird That's about the same effect as when I have to deal with dates and times in software right now. I'm game.
UTC is one of those egregious screw-ups that only an international committee can make.
The powdered wigs at the Greeenwich Observatory were adamant that "noon" should be when the sun crossed their petty little meridian. But once the second came to be defined by atomic clocks, the irregular rotation of the Earth made that event wander by several seconds away from atomic 12:00:00. So the wigs convinced the IAU to insert or remove "leap seconds" in some days >>
>> so as to keep UTC 12:00:00 close to their meridian crossing.
But those leap seconds are irregular and unpredictable. Computers must keep a table to know which days had "23:59:60" showing on the clock, and which days jumped from "23:59:58" straight to "00:00:00". A table that must be updated whenever the IAU decides to add another one of those crocks.
The leap seconds make it impossible to compute a date N seconds in the future.. >>
If Homo sapiens was an intelligent species, it would have long junked UTC for ATI -- which is the same date/time calendar, except for the leap seconds.
Good news? They agreed to continue the sheer stupidity until 2035 (presumably because stopping a stupid thing suddenly would be unsettling to some stupid people). And thereafter they will not stop doing it, but only MAYBE SOMEWHAT slow down the rate.
@bujold @futurebird
Oh, that is a really funny video, well worth watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY
@demerara @bujold @futurebird That video is amazing! Thanks for sharing!
@demerara @bujold @futurebird “despite having Greenwich” made me almost fall out of my chair