Board 8 > Should we abolish civil time and go back to using true solar time?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Until a couple hundred years ago, people generally used true solar time. That is, the time at which the sun is highest in the sky on a day is defined as noon.

True solar time does not exactly conform to time as measured by a clock - at different times of the year, clocks will run slower or faster than the sun's motion across the sky. As clocks got better (and especially with sailing, for which mechanical clocks used to be essential in calculating longitude) people got to relying on their clocks. And thus we got mean solar time - we set clocks for a location based on the weighted average of true solar time across a year.

With the development of railroads and the decline of using clocks to calculate longitude at sea, we made a decision to construct standard time zones - so that the time in Boston and New York, for instance, would be the same rather than Boston being a few minutes ahead. But of course the result is that we are even further off of true solar time.

Should we go back to using true solar time? Vote away!

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lets go back to true solar time so i can move north and work for less time during the workday

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im honestly not sure what i was thinking of, but im man enough to leave my dumb post

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BTW the impetus of this topic was a post on some other board about an article that argued that "mechanical time" was a white/European thing. That got some backlash, but it's actually true - our common method of measuring time using time zones and mean solar time is not particularly natural and is trying to make objective (same for all people) what in reality is subjective (different for each person based on their location).

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I'd love to see the coding that makes true solar time work on a computer.

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SovietOmega posted...

I'd love to see the coding that makes true solar time work on a computer.

Yeah that sounds interesting.
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There are an awful lot of services that require coordinating activities. Unless you want to go back to a more agrarian society, then theres no reason to change back.

it wouldn't work, computers don't know where they're geographically located

they could certainly calculate the value for any given location, though

edit; specifically saying this re:

Lolo_Guru posted...

SovietOmega posted...

I'd love to see the coding that makes true solar time work on a computer.

Yeah that sounds interesting.

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