Of Dates and Time III
Sorry, I couldn't leave this alone. This is the last one. Probably.
As I thought about it more, I came to 3 small things we could do that are feasible and practical to help make life easier and make talking about dates and time more precise. Here they are:
- Switch to the 24-hour clock. AM and PM are stupid, no two ways about it. I didn't even bother to research why and how they came into existence except that it had something to do with the Egyptians. Sample idiotry: This is the only system in which 1 falls after 12. 12 noon is really 12 PM, followed by 1 PM. Most legal documents that have time clauses (from what I understand; back me up, lawyer types) deal with 12:01 AM since it's still unclear to most people whether 12:00 AM belongs to the previous or the following day. This system is so full of oddities and ambiguities that it should be sacked immediately.
- Stop Daylight Savings Time. I've often said that the day you lose an hour of sleep for no good reason is the worst day of the year. Consider the practical implications of Daylight Savings Time. Say you record a transaction of some sort in a database at 0230 on the day we fall back. When did it really happen? The first 0230 or the second one that happened after it magically became 0200 again? The only compelling argument I've heard in support of Daylight Savings Time is that we don't want kids standing at school bus stops in the dark. This is not an insurmountable problem. Either light the bus stops, or move the school schedules ahead so that it will always be daylight an hour before school starts.
- Move to Greenwich Mean Time. This move, of course, depends on the implementation of the previous two suggestions. I live in the Eastern time zone, and my parents live in Central time. I hate having to ask, "Is that 6:00 your time or our time?" My in-laws live in Indiana, which makes time arrangements even wackier since they already don't honor Daylight Savings Time. If we all moved to GMT (take Eastern standard time and subtract 5 hours) then we would never need to ask it again. Plane schedules would be simpler, everything would be simpler. Let's get on this.
posted by jimbo @ 9:56 AM
2 Comments:
Wow! Jim what have you been coding at work that has caused such frustration and ire over dates and time? Clearly only weeks of trying to deal with the minute details of dealing with time could have cause such rants.
Not a day goes by when I don't have to code to dates or timestamps in some form or another. Lots of top-notch libraries are out there to help with this, so it's usually painless, but occasionally I find myself having to do something like sorting a set of data by date, and all the dates are strings in the form of "Thu Jan. 10, 2005, 8:00:23". Not hard to do, just time-consuming, both for me and for the machine.
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