Time Bagel

Time is hard

   Key facts:

  • DST sucks
  • Everyone hates it
  • No one agrees how we should fix it.

THE SOLUTION IS THE TIME BAGEL

Time is not a flat circle, but an oblate spheroid on an elliptical orbit.

not unlike a slightly imperfect bagel

But first...

Time History

   • time was the key to the cosmos

   • measure the earth by observing shadows in wells at “noon”

   • everything was great on land, but oceans were a bitch.

   • navigation is hard

   • untold man hours spent making chronometers to determine longitude

   • and then the frickin railroads got pissy no one agreed when noon was and decided to fix time

   • and it sucked

… BECAUSE…

We are slightly complicated monkeys with monkey brains that are really good at things like “wake up when sun is coming up” and “go to sleep when dark”

We thought we could brute force it, but we can’t unless we want to require half of everyone take some combo of stimulants and depressants at the socially acceptable time of day to force the regimen.

HOWEVER it turns out this is bad for monkeys and it makes them sad.

  

and then dst happened to alleviate some monkey suffering

  

and that sucks harder

  

We learned:

  • time was the key to the cosmos
  •  measure the earth by observing shadows in wells at “noon”
  •  everything was great on land, but oceans were a bitch.
  •   navigation is hard
  •   untold man hours spent making chronometers to determine longitude
  •   and then the frickin railroads got pissy no one agreed when noon was and decided to fix time
  •   and it sucked

BUT WHY?

We can do better. Google already does it.

Turns out insisting on monotonic time and then abruptly insisting it is discontinuous is a terrible idea.

It’s simple – explain time smear (when managing a cloud of many systems spread across the globe, adjusting to adding or removing seconds due to orbital drift while keeping everything in sync is harder than just hacking all the system clocks to slowly drift over a few hours so timestamps are all technically wrong but are in the right order.)

Google’s implementation description is here: https://developers.google.com/time/smear

(Smear goes on bagels, is continuous and doesn’t care that it’s not a circle.) (Obvious allusions to the ‘TimeCube’ and food ‘Cube Rule’, but toroids are cooler)

BRYAN I NEED AN IMAGES OF TOROID BAGELS HERE

A COMPUTER CAN LIE

Things are always better when they do that as long as we know it is happening

BRYAN I NEED AN IMAGES OF TOROID BAGELS HERE THIS TIME WITHA SMEAR

We must pause and ask ourselves.

   >>>>>>>>WHAT do humans want out of time?

Consistency, to some degree. We really deal with many times already if we are in a position to have to worry about this, and let our computers lie about what time that is to us – it’s just discritized for “that worked for the railroads” purposes trust me

   >>>>>>>>WHAT concerns most humans?

  • change is hard. Worst day for car accidents is right after springing forward.
  • “my kid is at the bus stop when it’s dark”
  • need for local schedules is largely a local convention – people need to go shopping largely centered on daytime, with an introduced bias towards when kids have to be at school, but it does need to be consistent
  • my work hours are largely school derived

  >>>>>>>>WHY DO WE DO THIS TO OURSELVES?

  • all long range communication is already navigated via computers so west coast people don’t need to worry about what time the 10am//1pm meeting is for them
  • arguments about”permanent DST” vs “no DST” miss the point. People want their experience to match the sun, track local noon as much as possible, and usually are just biasing preference towards which consistent option is slightly better for them personally.
  • introduce some characters
    • schedule maximalists, can’t possibly imagine this because their schedule involves back to back meetings all day. E.g. all the f’in MBAs.
    • opportunistic schedulers, life dictated primarily by school schedules or external factors, but live a regimented life with a 15-30 minute buffer before and after meetings because that decreases variance
    • then the downtrodden.
    • wage workers with arbitrarily set “thou shalt show up at 6am else ye be fired” type rules
      • Classical appeal to “think of the children” who by no fault of their own get swept into all this nonsense and just have to suck it up because Mom gotta be at her 2nd job until the man says so, and that clock doesn’t care about people who don’t get to see daylight.

my dude what is the solution?

two time standards.






REAL TIME

Real time tracks “real” monotonic time, e.g. unix timestamp time.

we’re good at this.

been doing it for 45 years.

local time is based on real time with local offset based on location.

tracks solar noon. 

continuous as you travel east/west, then smeared to track as solar noon moves about due to axial tilt and elliptical orbit (+/- ~20ish minutes at our latitude, apparently).
  
some descretization is possible (e.g. is it continuous or changes by a n minutes every y weeks?), but should be well within the “5-10 minute” buffer we allow for per social convention because the noise of traffic delays and the rest of everything is way worse than that.

entire school district could set tardy bell to far west of district’s schedule and it probably wouldn’t move by a whole minute.		LOCAL TIME

the rest of society follows local time for anything local. McDonald’s shouldn’t care that all their locations aren’t opening at exactly the same time every day, just that they follow local time so they are available when people do their scheduled patterns following the rest of the rythem of the local community.

near-local navigation doesn’t need to be affected – map applications could shift to show arrival times in local time no problem, just annotate and allow for setting to “real time” if precision is needed

if you’re one of the super special people for whom this screws with interstate communication, congratulations you’re also smart enough to handle the concept of two time zones already, so you can suck it.

 Think of the children, they’re the ones who suffer at the bus stop in the winter and with disrupted schedules in the middle of the school year. Let them live the fiction, you can handle reality better because you’re a super special boy who can handle hard things.















it is brilliant in its simplicity





computers and business can tick along using real time, and the rest of us can live our comfortable, solar-based truth-lie or whatever. I don’t care what you call it, I just want as much of the day to be during the day, if you know what I mean.











but…





NO





“my appliances aren’t going to update properly” 





Welcome to reality. Dumb things not connected to NTP suck already and you already understand not to trust them for real time. The clock in my bedroom is 15 minutes off constantly. I could handle the mental computations to accept it being +/- 10 minutes (20 minutes swing) depending on time of year just as easily as I can accept it is perpetually 15 minutes ahead of real time.





“why can’t we just ‘perpetual DST’//’drop DST’?” 





This is a value judgement that favors your current life experiences over the other camp that has different priorities. Longer evenings in the summer come at a cost of cold bus stops in the winter, or sun at the bus stop in winter comes at the cost of the ideal evening conditions during the summer. Pinning to solar noon eliminates the variance from different sides of a given time zone, and provides a more consistent experience maximizing experienced daytime hours, all of which science says is good for us.







speed of solar noon change while traveling should be an order of magnitude out from any speed you are actually traveling (~17 miles per minute at the equator), stop losing your shit about how this affects your ability to travel to nearby areas. It will be fine. No one actually cares if you’re a minute late. If they do, maybe that says something about them. Just appreciate that you get a minute leeway the other direction, which you also have to drive.










BRYAN THIS NEEDS LIKE SPACE TOROID DARKNESS GALAXY BAGELS







IN CONCLUSION





we have everything we need





we have two continuous functions and we already have defined how to convert one to the other





all colculable





we have a gold standard monotonic time source distributed worldwide via consensus to define one function





we have a method to adjust as variability shows up and things change because orbits are weird





we have just inexplicably decided to adjust the gold standard to “real” for those micro-variations.





this will eventually have to be solved in a relativistic sense with additional variables if we ever make it into interstellar travel.





so why let railroads from 2 centuries ago define our lived experience? In the modern era, this is those with the most ability to handle complexity and schedule variation forcing the establishment view on the rest of society because it makes their lives slightly easier at the expense of lives and children’s suffering.





eat the rich.





this isn’t hard. We just need an ISO standard, a handful of software implementations in a variety of languages, and buy-in from a few governments that still care about their citizens. Anyone doing business across boarders already knows that is a factor and can adjust. Let’s just shift the burden to those that can handle that instead of making the kids stand at the bus stop in the dark in the dead of winter.





I am under the impression China already kinda does this with their massive authoritarian single time zone that is wildly inappropriate for those living in the west. That means the rest of us can accept our computers lying about when “now” is, as long as we can access when “now”is in global terms.





  • we already do all this in reverse and assume monkey brains that require thousands//millions of years to adapt can just handle mechanized time, but that’s not how it works. I want my good brain chemical feels for waking up with the daylight.





more than that, I deserve good brain chemical feels for waking up when the sun comes up. If monkeys could have a constitution I think that’d be on it.





fuck the haters, they can suck it. That also makes monkey brain happy and might compensate for sunlight-related-good-brain-happy-feels-chemicals to some degree.





viva le revolution.





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Time. Bagel. Embrace the Smear.