Justin Graham, writing for the Evansville Courier Press, has a column explaining why, as a matter of geometry, it’s ridiculous for Indiana to be on Eastern Time. If you have 24 equal, one hour time zones and if the time zones use Greenwich England (for arbitrary historical reasons) as the starting point, then the boundary between Eastern and Central should be somewhere near Mansfield, Ohio.
But, I might suggest that we’re getting close to the time when it’s appropriate to do without time zones entirely. We’ve been adjusting our relationship to our clocks and the time of day as technology progresses. Before railroads and telegraphs, there was no need or ability to coordinate your efforts with any great precision with people who were very distant from you. Communications couldn’t travel much faster than the sun. With railroads and telegraphs, the ability and need increased a bit; but there was no need to coordinate much beyond the 750 mile width of a time zone.
But now, we are becoming increasingly connected with those around the world. It’s not at all unusual to work with people around the world. It might be time to put the world on a single standard time. The fact that Terre Haute is part of a time zone that should end at Mansfield shows we’re no longer too concerned with having 12:00 hours associated with the sun being directly overhead. In for a penny, in for a pound, maybe we should all go to Coordinated Universal Time.
While perusing international websites, I’ve noticed some Islamic websites use Makkah Time — it’s as arbitrary as Greenwich!
http://arabnews.com/saudiarabia/article99369.ece
I can still remember the horrible days back in the 1950s when different parts of Shelby County used different time zones. As a Hoosier, I simply really dislike all this mucking around with the clocks — I just wish they’d keep it all the same forever!
I already run on UTC (aka GMT or Zulu time). Since I’m a network engineer for a global company, I keep all of our gear on UTC. It is VERY painstaking to track a packet from Germany to LA when you have to keep adjusting for time zone & DST along the path, and it is also very easy to screw up one of those adjustments.
When I send out notices for downtime, I use UTC and let everyone do their own math for where they live. It is noticeably easier when I’m doing something at midnight EST to say to everyone “0500 UTC”, since what might be midnight on Thursday is still Wednesday night for some and early Thursday morning for others.
At the same time, I’ve noticed a trend with multinationals. Most seem to already have adopted a universal time. Not all go with UTC. The ones aligned with the military, travel, or logistics seem to, but the others will go by whatever time zone the CEO lives in. The other exception I’ve noticed is for financial companies to run on Eastern (for the NYSE), and TV networks also seem to base their clocks on Eastern since that is the first zone to go live on any given broadcast.
Based on that, couldn’t we make the argument that we need to switch to universal time so that we don’t fall behind on business deals? That’s what got Indiana to switch, after all!
Using UTC/GMT would be one way to get rid of DST.
More seriously, it is arguable that the real pressure to “coordinate” the populace at large came only in the 1950’s and 1960’s when the television networks decided they needed help from the federal government to deliver demographically predictable audiences to their advertising clients. Hence the pressure for the Uniform Time Act of 1966. In this regard it is interesting to read the amicus brief of the television networks in Time Life Broadcast vs. Boyd.
The railroads really didn’t care that much about what the public was observing once their networks were internally coordinated. By the 1950’s intercity passenger rail was disappearing anyway.
YES!!!! I’ve been saying this all along. In today’s modern world there is no need for time zones at all. But you try to explain how going to a single time t would work and people can’t comprehend it.
They think, depending on where they live, they’ll be going to work in the middle of the night…an assumption they make because they’re so tied to the hours of the clock. No…the times businesses are open will adjust for local sunlight hours. Instead we tweak the clock to adjust for sunlight. Makes no sense.
I’m all for going to Universal Time and think it’s a great idea. I’m afraid, though, that any attempt to implement it here in the USA would be about as successful as the attempt to bring about the use and acceptance of the Metric System.
Sorry, but I think that continuing “talk” about time zones is just like this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoOwyL0n-7k
Ugh, don’t get me started on the lack of use of the metric system. I’d go so far as require UTC, metric, and Esperanto if I were king.
I saw Esperanto mentioned the other day in some dark, conspiratorial, plot for a New World Order kind of way. I think it was related to Glenn Beck, but when he’s involved, it’s hard to remember if this was him or a parody of him. Oh, wait – it had to do with George Soros. O.k., now I’m a little irritated that my mind is polluted with this garbage.
Esperanto estas por froma?burgero kapoj!
lol