In "Time to Dump Time Zones", James Gleick argues that the enormous gains in consistency and simplicity would more than offset the initial confusion caused by abolishing time zones in favour of all of use using the standard time zone known as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which he would like to call "earth time" (2016).
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My response
Although Gleick makes a good case for his idea, I'm not sure that I'm convinced. He is certainly right that it would be a jolt to make such a change. In fact, I think it would be more than a jolt: we would lose something useful. It isn't just that it would seem odd to me to be starting work at 2:30 AM (9:30 - 7 hours), and that I would be having lunch at 6:00 AM with the sun bright in the sky: it might be convenient knowing that it was exactly the same time in Australia, but that would not be very useful for deciding whether to call my brother or not. I would still need to know at what time he went to bed and so on. At the moment, he goes to bed around 10:00 PM, a bit earlier than I usually do in Thailand, but under Gleick's proposed change, I would be in the habit of going to bed around ... 5:00 PM, while Matthew would be in the habit of retiring around 11:00 AM ( = 10:00 PM - 11 hours). If I called him at the hour of 3:00 PM at night, very convenient for me, he would probaly be pretty annoyed, unless I had some seriously awful news to justify waking him at 1:00 PM.
On the other hand, Glieck does offer one bit of evidence that I found a bit more persuasive: apparently China uses only one time zone for its entire longitudinal breadth, which means that Chinese must be going about their daily lives at very different times of day, so maybe we could get used to a world with a single time zone.
Our next topic in Skillful is design, and I do like the design of the image that The New York Times editor put over Glieck's article. It captures neatly the the current and proposed systems. But again, I kind of prefer the messy left-hand side with its swirling lines, varied shapes and range of colours to the admittedly neat and simple, but also boringly black, white and regular, right-hand side. Simplicity and regularity are great, but a bit of messiness isn't always a bad thing.
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Reference
- Gleick, J. (2016, November 5). Time to Dump Time Zones. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/opinion/sunday/time-to-dump-time-zones.html
According to Google Doc's word count tool, my summary paragraph here is only 55 words. That's probably not my personal best for summarizing an article, but it's pretty good.
ReplyDeleteIn case you were wondering: no, I do not count words by hand. I paste the text into a Google Doc and let Google count for me. I'm sure it's far more accurate than I would be. It's certainly much easier.
Due to globalization and improvement of communication, people try to make things universal such as universal currency, universal law and universal etiquette. For universal clock, it may help us to get rid of confusion from time differences. For instance, the US government, department of labor announces that they will report about unemployment claims at 11:30 (New York time) so that for those who live in other time zones and are interesting in this new, they have to calculate what time they will watch this new. In contrast, if the universal clock is used, they won't be confused with time differences. However, I think this idea is impractical because We all are familiar with the clocks that relates to our biological clock. It takes much time for adapting to new universal clock. Moreover, now we all have smartphones. if I want to know time in Japan, a smartphone will tell me. So, the universal time might not be necessary.
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