Quit Screwing with Time

This was originally written for Medium.com and is available with pretty pictures at https://medium.com/p/b3fea0402607

Last month we got an extra day. Today where I am, we lost an hour. And Easter is in March this year? WTF!?!

Why do people make this so hard? Time, the real time, continues just the same...doesn't it?

Below, I'll illustrate some of the core problems with how we currently tell time, and propose a better way that actually makes logical sense and paves the way for a better future (and past).

Telling on Time

You probably learned to tell time in kindergarten.

Remember about the big hand and the little hand? Though it takes some initial getting used to, we all learn our way around clocks without too much Hickory Dickery.

But then after we get the rules figured out, we go on to the calendar and learn about weeks, months, and years. A calendar is an entirely different tool with entirely different rules than a clock. We have to use a calendar together with a clock (and a map?!?) to say where in time we are in relation to other people and events.

The more you look into these entirely different set of rules, the freakier it all gets.

Old joke: What time is it at the North Pole? It's all the times, all the time!

Why do we tell time based on our location? Why do we say we carve up times into 24 timezones, when there are actually 38 of them? Why do we use the celestial cycles of the Moon and Sun to count up all the bigger chunks of time after minutes and hours? And why can't all the months just be the same? Why are there 366 days in a year like this year, but only sometimes? That's all pretty bizarre, don't you think?

After all, we're all here on the same planet. A place where our clocks all work the same way. Even Einsteinian relativity and its time dilation doesn't make a detectible difference to anyone spinning at the same rate under the same planetary pull.

Planetary Perspective

On Earth, which is (roughly) a sphere, remember that is always daytime AND it is always nighttime. Half the planet is in shade, while the other half receives the ever-shining rays of the constant Sun. We spin around and call it night and day, but what does the spinning have to do with what time it is? I mean really? And if we've decided we're gonna tell time by spin, how come the time changes so much just going North or South on a line of longitude?

And while I do know how often we have Leap Years (I actually know why too!), I'll still insist we shouldn't. I mean, why we all do calendars so stupidly that we ever need to leap at all? That's dumb. Shouldn't every year should have the same number of hours, minutes, and seconds in it? The fact that it doesn't is crazy! Historically maybe it wasn't so crazy, but now it very much is.

Unlike in ancient times when our lives were subdivided by cycles of Sun & Moon, these days our days are quite different. I mean, our old way kinda mostly works, but if we don't move around on the Earth much, and we if don't need to teleport our voice or image across the planet very often.

Now many of us do this cross-planet travel & communications thing all the time! (Pun intended) And it's inevitably so much hassle that somebody somewhere messes it up. Especially around this time of year when the rules start to suddenly change in some places, but not others, and the opposite direction in still other places as we attempt to save Daylight differently from North to South.

Like how come we just skipped a beat in most of the USA on March 10th, but the EU isn't doing it until March 31st, and they change the other way but not until April 7th in Australia? And other places are giving their cl-clocks a st-stutter on the 17th, 24th, 29th, and 30th of March? That looks all kinds of broken, and it's downright embarrassing that we act like this is okay.

Tomorrow, someone you know will be late due to the time change. When we fall back, someone else will forget to hit snooze button on their clock and wind up being an hour early and all kinds of confused. It happens every year. So does a 6% increase in fatal traffic accidents. We're literally killing ourselves over this.

More confusing are the truly bizarre calendrical calculations we use to fudge celestial motions into some kind of approximation of Earthly sense. But if we look closely, there is no sense to it. Don't look to the heavens for answers, it's all fractional senselessness up there, and will be for all eternity. Which is why I propose that we should make our own human sense starting now.

We Can Do Better

I'd say it's time for a change, wouldn't you? An upgrade of the ages to the way we tell time.

Because when we want to call someone on the phone or meet up online, we don't want to fuss with timezones or daylight savings or which hemisphere you're in or I'm in, or what time it is if we happen to change our locations between when we make our agreement and what time the thing is? Let alone all the trillions of transactions computationally conducted between then and now, all of which need to reconcile down to a specific point in time or bad things happen.

We just want to know when the thing is! Like, what time do we show up? And when should they click? It doesn't matter that it's breakfast for you and dinner for me and somebody else's lunchtime. Let's just set the meeting already, alright? Alright. Here we go.

For starters, remember kindergarten:

• 1 Second x 60 = 1 Minute
• 1 Minute x 60 = 1 Hour

What they probably didn't teach you back then is that the ancient Sumerians created this base60 system. That's how we ended up with hours and minutes and seconds in sixty part divisions in the first place. The Mayans used Base60 for their time calculations as well. What if we just continued building on that for a few more places?

Same Logic, More Places

Though this is incredibly simple, it can look a little scary for a minute before it gets better. Stay with me here.

• 1 Hour x 60 = 2.5 days, but hey, let's name that cycle a Cyclet
• 1 Cyclet x 60 = 150 days, or about 5 months, but let's call this temporal duration a Tempora
• 1 Tempora x 60 = roughly 25 years, but let's just call it what it is -- a Generation

With this, we unite both calendar and clock into one unified thing that more than fills our human lifespans, and we can forget about the maps. One tool, and we're good for good. Here's what it could look like.

Example: High Noon

We commonly express "noon" as 12:00, or in the standard HH:MM:SS format of the computer age, that would be 12:00:00. Now we can add two more places to express noon 365 days from now as 02:26:18:00:00. And suddenly any event that you're planning to meet someone at, virtually or otherwise, very likely fits inside this simple five-part identifier. That's only one digit more than a Social Security Number, but much better organized and easier to remember in these five chunks of TT:CC:HH:MM:SS.

Example: Star Wars Day 2040

That would be "May the Fourth". Depending on where you're from, this would be expressed as 5/4/40 or 4/5/40, and come to think of it you never really know for sure which one people mean when they list dates that way, now do you? Let's fix that too. From midnight to midnight, it would be 39:19:12:00:00 down to the second.

Five numbers can tell all the times we need, for all practical appointmenting purposes. Pretty nifty, huh?

Best of all, this system is infinitely extensible. So if we're calculating a duration longer than that, we just add another place for it! Six numbers brings us to all the times we would ever need for much more than our entire lifespan with no more of our current temporal transactional troubles. This means no more Y2K style problems again, either.

Example: July 4th 1776

With this system, we can calculate the duration between any two events. So for the duration between March 10, 2024 and noon on July 4, 1776, we could say it is 10:03:05:12:00:00. That would be the GG:TT:CC:HH:MM:SS format.

Any amount of time backwards or forwards works very precisely this way, and for anyplace on earth it's the same. No algebraic calendrics or contortionist cartography is needed. Because temporal duration really does work the same way everywhere on the planet, regardless of how our archaic and outdated our representations of it may be. Time works the same way, so our way of telling it should work the same way too!

But, but, but...

You have questions, I know. Probably things like:

• "But what time do we start this new clock counting from?"
• "But what about fractions of a second? How does that work?"
• "But how many places can we go out into the future or back in time?"
• "But what about holidays? I'm not going to stop getting birthday presents, am I?"
• "But we can't even get the USA to convert to metric, how would this ever realistically happen?"

Good questions all, and I've thought many of them through already. Based on the questions & comments you add to this post, I'll gladly share a follow-up.

For now, I'll just ask: how well is the current time-telling system is actually working for you? Please place your answer on a scale of 1 to 365.