Of Dates and Time, cont.

I'm a bit embarrassed. I left my previous post with a cliffhanger. After several paragraphs of downcrying the calendar system used by virtually all of the Western World, I end with the question, "What should we do about it?"

In the harsh light of morning, I find that there's almost nothing that can be done about it. Many proposals have been laid down for how we could reform the timekeeping system, ranging from the quasi-practical to the inane.

The main problem distills to two things. The first is that the human body, for whatever reason, is used to an astronomical day for sleep purposes. This is not an insurmountable problem; look at the folks who live in the extreme Arctic and Antarctic with their 6 month periods of darkness and daylight. We are used to (on average) 8 hours of sleep and 16 hours of wakefulness. Again, there are also people who need more sleep and people who need less sleep. It's more likely that we'll abolish daylight's savings time (something else I'm in favor of) than instituting calendar reform.

The more significant problem and the real deal breaker is one of money. Our calendaring is so ingrained in the infrastructure of our lives that extricating it will be an unbelievably cost prohibitive thing to do. Think of the cost that was involved in merely solving the Y2K problem a few years ago, and raise that cost a few orders of magnitude, and you start to understand what I mean. Every clock will suddenly be obsolete. Every database record that stores a timestamp, every calendar, and almost every piece of software will have to be either patched or rewritten.

The computers themselves will largely be safe, although the operating systems will need to be patched. There's an excellent article called A Brief History of DateTime by Verity Stob detailing the various methods computers have used to keep track of the time over the years. These days, most of the methods include keeping track of an unsigned 64 bit number that counts the number of milliseconds that have passed since January 1, 1970.

Aside: There will be another Y2K-like emergency on January 19, 2038 at 3:14 AM. More about that later.

The thing that started me on this rant is the fact that, computationally, it is very expensive to find out the time of day given that information. Your computer can afford the ~10 milliseconds it takes every minute to write down the date and time in the lower right hand corner of your taskbar, but in other situations, this is an operation that is too costly to perform.

But what can we do about it? Not a thing.