But… but… oh nevermind.
That’s fair.
I propose everywhere on Earth uses the same time zone. And every fifth Monday of a month and on February 29, we give ourselves an extra hour.
I know I’m jaded and pessimistic and unfit for human for human company, but the above summarises my sour view of an inordinate number of policy decisions precisely.
Agreed.
Although I might substitute “expect” for “hope”. Expectations are realistic. Hopes are often not.
And for sure every time a DST thread pops up around here (IOW 2x/year) I’m tempted to say something similar in hopes the whining dies down. It never works.
Basically, people are always trying to change reality to suit their preferences.
See the posts in the Daylight Savings thread about Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
I think the time zones should go top to bottom
We should switch to Venus time. A day lasts 2800 hours. Think how much you could get done in each day!
Or adjust them diagonally daily so local sunrise is the same local time every day of the year no matter your latitude or longitude.
So fun.
Am I the only one who noticed some wording changes since the comic went up? Explainxkcd doesn’t say anything about it, and it usually does mention when Randall goes back and fixes something. I regret not explaining what I thought I saw at the time, instead going for the “oh nevermind” joke, assuming everybody else would get it too.
As best I can tell, there have been no changes from when I first saw it about 8am on Thu Jul 16. @Princhester captured the hoverover text in his post from overnight Wed-Thu US time and that much at least is still the same now as then.
What specific changes do you think you see?
I confess I did not understand your “Oh nevermind” comment when it was fresh.
There might be separate caching issues. I read the comic as I saw it in dtique’s post 2 minutes or so before I posted. What I saw, or thought I saw, and I read it multiple times to try to make sense of it and make sure I wasn’t doing the wrong mental calculation, was “We all love springing forward but we hate falling back.” And in the second panel, “Therefore we are abolishing the fall time change only. We’ll gain an hour every year but never lose one.” And right there, before the final panel, that was a very obvious joke by itself. He was getting things backwards, and so my response was to make a joke about starting to explain how cueball got it backwards, but giving up in frustration, because of those issues mentioned in the alt-text we all know are true.
Thanks for the explanation. If that did change, either I saw it after the change or I totally overlooked the discrepancy you point out. Either of those possibilities make sense.
But yeah, I think it might’ve been even funnier if cueball did get wrong.
What I always find a bit contradictory about timezone discussions is the idea of “gaining” or “losing” an hour. You set the clock back, to a lower value, but somehow that’s called “gaining”. Nope. Gaining is when something gets bigger, not smaller. Or so my brain says every time I see it.
Of course I understand that the intent behind “gaining” is that we gain an extra hour of useable time until the clock once again reads the same number it used to. But to me that’s focusing on the wrong aspect of the problem. Sorta like “Do you turn your air conditioner up or down to make the room colder?” Is the focus on the room temperature, or how much more or less you’re making the machine work?
The gain or loss I usually associate with the DST change is sleep. That’s an objective thing, given how clocks rule our lives.
In a similar vein, the way I look at is that once a year we have a 25-hour day, and once a year we have a 23-hour day, which is also objectively “gaining” and “losing” an hour.
Tell me about it. When we first moved to Arizona – returned for my part – it was in the area with a lot of “Geezervilles” that were occupied only by the midwesterners in the winter months. We quickly learned that between Thanksgiving and Easter you do not go out to eat at 5pm because the restaurants will be chock-full and you won’t be seated until six. Go at 6pm and you’ll get your table at quarter after.
“NGS and IERS are complaining that they left CLEAR instructions to set the washing machine to WGS84 (G2296) instead of WGS84 (G730).”
Compressing the surface of oceans is breaking my brain. 
It works because of the surface tension of water. You have to be really careful not to spill a surfactant on it, or you could create tsunamis.