Becks, I applaud you. I was casting about for something, anything, to move us away from PORN AND TEH FEMINISM but all I could come up with involved Obama and FISA, and god knows where we would have ended up. Hey, I have an idea-- let's add some new posters to liven things up!

Damn, I hate when I repeat words like that.

UP WITH UTC!!!!!

DOWN WITH UTC!!!!!! (Note: extra exclamation point for added emphasis.)

UP WITH UTC!!!!! UP!!!!!!

The resulting gradual shift of the sun's movements relative to civil time is analogous to the shift of seasons relative to the yearly calendar that results from the calendar year not precisely matching the tropical year length.

For the record, this is profoundly stupid. First of all because the analogy is wrong - January remains winter - and second of all because resigning yourself to a world where noon happens around sundown is a complete abdication of your putative responsibilities. Stupid drift is what we have uptight, anal committees to prevent, not to enshrine.

Dumb time geeks.

I have been to meetings just like this. There exist many people who get deeply excited about getting to set up impersonal, far-reaching systems. I think that part of what gets them hot and bothered is that these systems exclude people. Then, to instantiate these ideas, which range from beautifully powerful to the baroque and grandiose, they have to meet and cooperate with other people. But it gets worse-- then the backstabbing drama queens and glib speakers who DO understand that other humans can't be dispensed with or rendered into abstractions seize control.

What a nice post.

iirc, Britain could have avoided this by not being cheap.

6 that's just the nature of committees and meetings. Effective intelligence is roughly the average intelligence divided by the number of people involved.

There is a proposal to redefine UTC and abolish leap seconds, such that sundials would slowly get further out of sync with civil time.

One of my friends is (no joke) a maker of high-end sundials. I shall have to warn him of this threat to his future revenue stream.

This resulted in the final compromise of using "UTC".

This reminds me of an amusing and AFAIK true anecdote about the negotiations surrounding the European Monetary Union. France wanted the new currency to be called the franc, but other countries found this flatly unacceptable. At one point, the French proposed that they adopt the neutral abbreviation ECU (for European Currency Unit). This proposal was adopted, and the ECU became the forerunner of the Euro. Turns out that this was a triumph of French subterfuge, as "écu" was the name of an archaic French coin.

There is no politics quite as vicious as academic timekeeping politics...

7 reminds me of occasional discussions with fellow architecture students.

iirc, Britain could have avoided this by not being cheap.

Why, was there some sort of financial sponsorship available? You know, "CUT, brought to you by the UK."

Or were they just too cheap to renew the worldwide rights to GMT?

Congratulations, Becks! I always did like you more than ogged.

For the head-to-head debates this fall, we should have no moderator, but a team of 15 members of this committee should be in charge of time for each candidate. Imagine the ruthlessness with which overtime responses would be cut short!

This is why we need to adopt the Islamic calendar. Dhimmis, submit!

13 is good.

14: Unfortunately, the committee's series of pre-debate meetings will turn nasty over the issue of whether to mark time from the end of the question or from the beginning of the answer, and the duties will fall to some dude with a stopwatch.

||

If you were suddenly in email contact with one of your high school teachers from over ten years ago, whom you had previously addressed as "Mrs. So-And-So", would you use her first name? She signed her email with initials, dammit.

(Assume that you've been friendly with this teacher in the past, and met for coffee a couple of times over the last decade.)

|>

Mersanger: Do you still want to sleep with her, or are you over that?

Timin' is the thing, it's true

My one data point on this question is that the one teacher from HS who told me I could call him by his first name after graduation ended up making an unsubtle pass at me.

19: I can see how you would make that assumption (for humor value or otherwise), but it's really not like that.

There exist many people who get deeply excited about getting to set up impersonal, far-reaching systems. I think that part of what gets them hot and bothered is that these systems exclude people.

Now you understand why people do metaphysics.

There are exactly *four* kinds of things in the universe! Four! (Plus three modes of things and one quasi thing.)

Surely, before the 25th century, we'll be able to easily adjust the rotation of the earth to lock the day to 86400 seconds.

assumption (for humor value or otherwise),

My motivations were otherwise, I swear. High school is very boring, and most people wind up with sexual fantasies about nearly everyone else trapped in that damn building.

I wonder if the person who proposed "UTC" was being facetious and then was shocked when it was actually adopted or if it was suggested in exhausted desperation after the end of a soul-crushing day.

UTC isn't that bad of a campus, though some of the buildings aren't maintained very well. I'd rather work there than at the Knoxville campus.

Metaphysics doesn't have to be impersonal. Just ask van Inwagen.

26: Some of us don't have a choice.

And maybe adjust our solar orbit to provide exactly-365-day years! 52 seven day weeks plus Holiday (which would be its own day of the week, not a Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday OR Sunday), and then dates will fall on the same DOW every year. On Holiday there will be a big celebration and we'll all come out to see the Emperor's Parade.

13: Yes this new Back's seems pretty good. Now we just need a new Ogged to quickly post on top of this one with some idle speculation about some physical characteristic of Jessica Alba (and then "apologize" about doing so in the comments) and the circle will be unbroken.

Short of orbital/rotational reengineering, couldn't we eventually just redifine what a second was so that it would be slightly longer: tiick, tiick, etc.

18: Have you been calling her Mrs. X when meeting over the past decade? If so, I don't see anything wrong with being a bit formal if that's what you're used to. And hopefully if she would prefer otherwise, calling her Mrs. X will prompt a pleasant "oh, please call me __," "oh ha ha not used to that" exchange.

Or were they just too cheap to renew the worldwide rights to GMT?

GMT was called GMT because of the atomic clock the built there. They were too cheap to replace it when it was end-of-life. So now the official time comes from an atomic clock in France ....

Merganser: I'd say first names only when there is any social familiarity, except perhaps with the elderly. Formalism is for people you don't know, and courtrooms or the like.

32: I think I just avoided using any form of address. (I'm all about avoidance.) But your thought seems like the right idea.

29: This assumes we have managed to écraser l'infâme by then.

I have a pocket sundial. Call me old-fashioned.

Uh oh. Soup biscuit is, of course, an expert on such matters...

Can't stretch the second because it's defined in terms of the frequency of light from (IIRC) a particular transition in a Cesium atom. When I tried to google the details I found this wackjobbery, which is just about the coolest stupid thing I've seen in something something. Just click the damn link already.

This area gets you the best job titles ever, though. Anything at the Directorate of Time or International Earth Rotation Service is awesome.

(I used to get the periodic emails from the IERS about leap seconds, so I've been following this controversy for a while)

31: There are a number of applications of time in which the precise duration of a "second" is critical. The geeks will cry if a 25th-century second is longer than a 21st-century second. Speeding up the earth's rotation would actually be simpler than resolving those conflicts. Nuking mankind back into the stone age would also work.

All of the time agreements (Time Zones, Daylight Savings etc.) have displayed the full monty of humans at their political best. One of my favorites from the Daylight Savings Time debate in England (during World War I).

There was a fair bit of opposition from the general public and from agricultural interests who wanted daylight in the morning, but Lord Balfour came forward with a unique concern: "Supposing some unfortunate lady was confined with twins and one child was born 10 minutes before 1 o'clock. ... the time of birth of the two children would be reversed. ... Such an alteration might conceivably affect the property and titles in that House."

It's like the cow on the roof of the tobacco shed at the end of O Brother Where Art Thou.

Zulu!!!!!!!

The world is divided into 25 time zones. It seems like we got a bonus zone.
</timenerd>

...and then dates will fall on the same DOW every year.

There could be some issues with this. It could suck if one's birthday was always on a Tuesday, never to fall on a weekend again. But on the other hand, ensuring that St. Patrick's Day was always on Friday would be nice.

38. bah, when I typed 34 I was thinking a `ymmv' at the end, but apparently didn't type it. Didn't mean to assert anything generally.

The War on Christmas gets more subtle every second.

44. Good point. Resume your normal day-of-week advancement.

Seems to me that the tides are at the root of the problem, what with their slowing down of the Earth's rotation. The obvious solution is to blow up the moon.

The rotational slowdown is happening a lot faster than I would have guessed.

49: The rotational slowdown is happening a lot faster than I would have guessed.

Me too, although I am know that I knew this some time in the past. Makes more intuitive sense when you find out the following: This geological record is consistent with these conditions 620 million years ago: the day was 21.9±0.4 hours, and there were 13.1±0.1 synodic months/year and 400±7 solar days/year. (The actual duration of the year has changed hardly at all, however.)

In the Unfogged lurker universe, there is at least one of everything, including time geeks. For those of us who use the bulletins of the International Earth Rotation Service for more than the leap second announcements, and who care deeply about the reasons that there are different time standards such as TAI (based on atomic oscillations) and UTC (based on the rotation of the Earth) and TDB (based on the motion of the planets around the Sun), the idea of abolishing leap seconds is just silly. Lazy computer programmers would like to redefine civil time as TAI, so they won't have to worry about all those leap seconds, and lazy politicians can't be bothered to change the laws that define civil time in terms of UT, thinking they'll just change the definition of UT instead. That makes about as much sense as redefining pi to be equal to three. If Universal Time is effectively defined out of existence, astronomers will just have to reinvent it under another name so we can keep pointing our telescopes in the right direction.

That makes about as much sense as redefining pi to be equal to three.

As Indiana has learned.

I wrote some code to convert between various calendrical systems for an astrolabe research project I was part of.

Systems for managing dates and times turn out to be pretty interesting even if you're not a time geek. The Hebrew lunisolar calendar is an absolute blinder.

From wikipedia:

Because of the roughly eleven-day difference between twelve lunar months and one solar year, the year lengths of the Hebrew calendar vary in a repeating 19-year Metonic cycle of 235 lunar months, with an intercalary lunar month added every two or three years, for a total of 7 times per 19 years.

Also, astrolabes are the coolest instruments, ever.

"intercalary" is both a great word and a great concept.

Intercalary days should, logically, all be feast days, or carnival-like days of disorder; an intercalary month would, then, be absolute chaos.

I would like to express my belated gratitude for 51. Other lurkers take note: With more front-page posters, we will need you to step up. Technical knowledge is appreciated; humor even more so.

Perhaps in the transhuman world we'll be able to fine-tune the orbits of the earth and the moon so that they have convenient rational relationships: exact 24-hr days, 12 28-day months, and a 12 month 336-day year.

I don't want to hear from the naysayers. Just shut up, OK?

In the transhuman world we will fine-tune orbits to match exotic irrational numbers, such as Chaitin's constant.

resigning yourself to a world where noon happens around sundown is a complete abdication of your putative responsibilities

Not sure if the above is a joke, but in case it isn't: once clock noon gets half an hour away from local solar noon we all shift time zones along by one hour. (Mucking about with time zones happens all the time as it is and is easier to handle than leap seconds.)

Reading between the lines, it's obvious that the international timekeeping community must be full of bitchy backstabbing doomsday drama queens.

More so than Wikipedia itself? Unpossible!!

Just another lurking astronomer. A timezone kludge won't work for several reasons. Just two: 1) This sacrifices the common worldwide civil time system - i.e., twin birth order is maintained during a daylight time shift precisely because there is an underlying UTC-based standard time. Remove the underlying standard and those quaint legal arguments become much less endearing. 2) We don't have leap seconds because of tides, but because the Earth has already spun down. Even in a "Space 1999" scenario, Earth would continue to need leap seconds indefinitely. Rather, the effect of continued tidal slowing is to accelerate leap seconds quadratically. Time zone adjustments would also accelerate quadratically.