Whoa, imagine being on the line between day and night!
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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Is this gonna be on the test?
Round earth propaganda 🙄
We all know earth is a mobius strip.
Netherlands was pretty cool in the summer. We were chilling in Amsterdam night one and realized it was 1130PM and basically dusk.
That's also because the Netherlands are wildly in the wrong timezone. Especially during daylight savings.
Bah it's only natural they'd be in the timezone meant for Berlin. Next you'll say Seville shouldn't be in Belgrade's timezone…
holy shit Dublin doesn't even have nighttime from May 15 to July 30. it's astronomical twilight all night
Many people forget how far north Europe is because of the mild climate we have. Like countries like Ireland and Netherlands are as far north as Newfoundland. And these two countries rarely get heavy snowfall like Newfoundland. And Saint Tropez is on the same latitude as Vermont.
It's pretty scary when you think about it: Europe's mild climate seems to be extremely fragile, dependent on the aligning of a few major forces.
Those few major forces are slowly weakening. We'll have Canadian winters in Europe. Which, hey, I missed snow but also the gas prices in England will have me "wake" up frozen dead one morning
So the English went pretty far south to wind up in a frozen hellscape with what are basically hurricanes but with snow
Okay the city I live in has pretty much the same graph, and speaking from experience it's not as bad as you'd think at first glance. It's still dark at night, just for fewer hours.
Wait wtf‽
Chaps in Glasgow at 1am trying to sleep
LIMMEH
I only see 1 chap in Glasgow at 1 am trying to sleep. Where are the others?
Are they in the dark part of the picture?
Part of me wishes we didn't have timezones at all. Like normalizing the idea that some places have mornings at 22:00 and others have it at 07:00. Would definitely make my life easier not dealing with timezones anymore.
EDIT: I want to be clear, this is me pining for a world where any date or time is aligned without the need for conversion. It's impractical, skips the caveats that timezones help fix, and it's not really how we, as humans, think of or experience time in a day. Some of y'all really jumped on this, but it's not a serious suggestion. I do really appreciate the thought experiment and interesting discussion of it though!
Proposal: have a shorter way to write "global time" (or you could have, say, 4 quarter-global times), the same way we have C, F and K for temperature, then make that a more common way of communicating time.
Yeah UTC kinda does that but nobody uses it like that. Shorten it to U and it's much punchier. Also abolish daylight savings, too confusing.
If you don't wanna bias to europeans too much, use the international date line.
Without timezones, not only would the whole world live on the same time, but also on the same date. So, the sun comes up at 22:00, and then two hours later it's the next day. So, which part of the world will volunteer to have their date change in the middle of the day? I don't think the world would ever agree on anything like that.
if every communication is digital, you could have every time also displayed as hours remaining, you would be able to live with day rollover not when you sleep. It's not like the current 12AM day rollover makes that much sense anyways, it is neither sunset or sunrise.
I would love it if we de-associate time with daylight is so there's no more standard business hours, just have things open at all times and normal for people to be active at night. Every advantage of remembering timezone is easier only because we all just decided everyone should have the same schedule.
Not just one place but almost everywhere in the world will click over to the next day during regular sun-up or just after sun-down hours. Only a few places will be lucky enough to have the date change during regular sleeping hours.
I mean, that's already kind of an issue in the sense of determining what day something happened when using a timezone.
I think timezones help give a sense of shared "day" in the sense of when the sun is roughly meant to rise and set. I also think we're super used to them and I don't expect my opinion to change our relationship with time.
That said, timezones are wildly inconsistent and often difficult to track. This goes doubly for places that practice daylight savings of some kind. I like the simplicity of ideas like UTC and stuff.
I'm a software engineer, and we have a product that depends a lot on recording the time that something happened. In the past, one engineer coded the on-device agent using local time, and later on, a different engineer coded the ETL server code using UTC. It's a huge headache, made even worse by the fact that the infrastructure for that server is in local time for a different time zone.
With a more normalized UTC, I think my life would definitely be a lot easier.
This makes things way more complicated.
When are timezones relevant? When dealing with people far away, or when traveling for longer distances.
In the first case it is far more easier to remember that John is +3 ours from you and Julia is -2 hours, than to have to remember when John gets up and when Julia gets up, and when they go to sleep and so on. Remembering "about my shedule but +/-x" is far easier.
In terms of flights it might seem easier at first, however once you land and realize that 13:40 means the middle of the night and everything being closed, you will quickly wish differently. Imagine for every further away place you visit you have to learn how the UTC translates to local opening hours, instead of just rolling with local time.
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I have an opposite yet equally radical proposal. Time zones are subdivided into infinitesimally small segments of longitude, effectively making them continuous. They are assigned to individual persons based in their current location on the globe and are updated regularly through geolocalization services like GPS. When you move, your time zone changes as well. Have a meeting at 10am? No, you don't. Living in UTC-8:00? It's UTC-7:58:33.0371 in your living room now. Going to work on your bike? Prepare for time travel. No GPS connection? The exhilarating sensation of timelessness.
That's actually what it used to be like before time zones. Every town would have its own time. Wouldn't be much of a problem when you had to travel to the next town by foot, horse or cart.
But I think when trains started to become more common they had to synchronise times.
Great, that means I can sell this idea to conservatives (trains = bad).
You're basically advocating everyone switches to to UTC which is kind of already used when organizing online events
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I thought that too. The problem is that somewhere will have their day go through into tomorrow..... Which will cause so much confusion
You mean one timezone, not no timezones. Without timezones everyone uses their local time, just like in the 19th century when getting off a train meant setting your watch to the stations clock first thing
This only makes sense for robots without circadian rhythm and for that we set the system time on servers to UTC and just read the timezone in your browser for display you needy meatpuppet
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Timezones were necessary once trains became prevalent. Having a geographical region all in yhe same time allowed for actual schedules that could be kept.
This comment also seems to discount the seasonal short days due to axial tilt.
Timezones are only necessary if people demand that 12:00 be noon. This doesn’t have to be. Neither does the wall-clock time have anything to do with day length. Did you even read the comment you responded to?
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Especially in programming
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I've been in Ireland during this time of the year and boy you couldn't tell by the cloud cover.
Pretty sure the cloud cover is just to save processing power on the twilight rendering, much easier to just apply a static flat light source to everything
they did the same thing during the victorian era with the smoke stacks, to save on horizon rendering. Things were so much faster and elegant back then
holy fuck that is actually so fucking cool
I nearly dropped this in c/mildlyinteresting, but I also thought it was too cool.
Wait until you hear about the Arctic circle...
tomorrow is going to be the first sunset in kiruna since may.
here's an old photo taken sometime after midnight the 6th of june 2016:
Beautiful!
not mine, i stole it from flickr :P also i'm now not sure that it's actually midnight, because there's a photosphere of that exact place on google maps and the compass is confusing me. i think the wall is to the southwest, which would make the sun to the north-northwest but the compass shows the wall as being east-west. annoyingly the shed isn't visible on the satellite image.
...and now i've spent way too long looking at pictures of a place i haven't been to for almost 20 years.
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Almost as if the sun sets earlier in winter or something 🤔
Proof there is no god
But Africa is in the dark AF
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