The article: https://www.politico.eu/article/norway-arctic-region-asks-eu-commission-for-26-hour-day/
How would the new time zones work in practice? Wenche Pedersen, the mayor of Vadsø who authored the letter, is unsure.
“We haven’t thought a lot about that” she said. “The clock will go from 12 to 13… and we have to see how this will go. I don’t think they’re going to say yes so we haven’t thought about all the details.”
Huh. Great idea.
Make a proposal without a plan or a feasibility study is peak management. Starting to understand how I end up with projects with very firm deadlines that are only vaguely defined and no one is sure if we have the resources on hand.
In this case I suspect this mayor simply made this proposition to get their town some free publicity. I am more sympathetic to these performative actions if they're just for the media attention.
When every decision is made by people alienated from every material or functional concern by like ten layers of abstraction, all decisions smell of recent severe skull deforming head trauma.
If you're not using tz_database or equivalents for literally all date-time logic, if 24 or 60*60 are constants defined in your project... you're doing it fucking wrong. I don't know how many times we need to break out the idiot club, but date, time and timezones are extremely complicated - unless your business is primarily concerned with them you must use a library or service.
Do Not Reinvent This Wheel
What does tz_database do? Wikipedia makes it seem like it basically converts a pair (geocoordinatr, utc time) to local time
From my very basic understanding, yeah that's basically what it does. However it accounts for a whole lot more into adding or subtracting from UTC. Timezones aren't absolute, they're political. Timezones have weird rules, and history that needs to be somehow expressed in the code to get the right time. That's what's sets tz_database apart from just looking at a map and saying it's +7 UTC.
What is tz-database equivalent in batch language ?
Seems like these idiots have too much time on their hands already.
Excellent comment.
And when you have something, you want more and more of it
I'd start with a 13 month/28 day calendar and planetary time (all clocks set to UTC).
EDIT: And set the date format to YYYY.MM.DD for the entire world. Americans and Europeans can stop arguing. The Japanese got it right.
And the extra day is a special interstitial holiday in the "14th" month, right? And leap days go into that holiday month as well.
The symmetry calendars (Wikipedia) use a leap week each several years, which seems like a reasonable way of doing it
Apparently the author of those calendars thought that would bring on board the people who believe days following an unending sequence is important - those who think their holy day has to be an actual whatever-day not one out of sequence due to intercalary days
Ed. Linkified the calendar
Time for all the maintainers of datetime libraries to unionize and give a collective nope.
I leave the country for six goddamn months and they pull this shit while I'm away???
I wouldn't go back, if I were you.
Is the idea to have longers days or shorter hours? Eitherway: why?
Longer days. Which kind of works in an area where the sun doesn't rise all winter and doesn't set all summer. Until you have to consider having to work with anyone else. Not only do you have timezone offsets that change every day, you get date offsets. After less than a month, you're already two days off from the rest of the world.
Remindes me of Mars. Never been there but the researchers who controlled the rovers had Mars time which is slightly off but very slidely. And since there were several rovers ad once, each team, or rather each floor, had their own time zone.
Which kind of works
I guess... If they really don't care about time of day coinciding with the placement of the sun. Ever. Unless they're only running 26h days summer and winter but 24 hour days during spring and fall..? This would be FUN!
Thanks now I can visualize how that would work, it's actually pretty cool. And the reasons is good, i can see myself doing tourism in a place like that for this reason.
The funny part is 24 and 60 are already great numbers to base your time system on. They're both very divisible which means you can divide up the day or hour into halves, thirds, and quarters without dealing with fractional time periods. It would remove a practical aspect of time keeping to no benefit.
So maybe divide the 26h day into 24 time units or make the day not 26h but 60h
Link.
No, they don't really explain why that's better. The main reason given is to attract people, so in other words it's a stunt.
"By extending the length of the days, Pedersen hopes that more people will be inspired to move to the remote region. Ensuring that the area is populated is “more important than ever” in light of Russia’s war against Ukraine, Pedersen added."
Yup. Imagine the ads for this:
Move here and age slower (disclaimer: you might have to change your birthday because we needed to remove some days from OUR calendar.
You know, if I had an extra two hours two sleep every day, I might finally wake up ready to go in the morning.
Reminds me of DS9. This isn’t Bajor though.
