Scenario: I want to call a friend in Bulgaria. It’s 11:23AM GMT. What’s he likely to be doing right now? With timezones, I can quickly calculate that it’s 2:23PM local time, and intuitively know. Without, I’d have to look up a timetable of daily activities in Sofia.
I guess if I called regularly, I could memorize the timetable, or maybe roughly calculate an offset in hours to add or subtract from GMT to intuitively relate his schedule to mine. For example, my dinner time is about 11PM GMT, so his dinner time is about 7AM GMT.
But, I wonder, if I went there to visit, would it be easier to memorize the local timetable, or just do the math when I check the time?
Do you mean just the latter?
I want the former, I’ll take the latter
I’ve seen the sentiment expressed before. The logical conclusions of the former, seems, plainly put, terrible.
It would mean one global time, let’s say UTC. Everyone who travels anywhere need to adjust their entire relation to hours of the day.
We’ve very likely always had “time zones”, even before we had clocks and hours of the day. We said “at noon”, “at dawn”, etc.
Where we really fucked up was daylight savings time. But time zones? What’s the alternative?
What’s wrong with me getting up at 11 am in utc instead of 7 am est? It’s all relative anyway…
Scenario: I want to call a friend in Bulgaria. It’s 11:23AM GMT. What’s he likely to be doing right now? With timezones, I can quickly calculate that it’s 2:23PM local time, and intuitively know. Without, I’d have to look up a timetable of daily activities in Sofia.
I guess if I called regularly, I could memorize the timetable, or maybe roughly calculate an offset in hours to add or subtract from GMT to intuitively relate his schedule to mine. For example, my dinner time is about 11PM GMT, so his dinner time is about 7AM GMT.
But, I wonder, if I went there to visit, would it be easier to memorize the local timetable, or just do the math when I check the time?