Short Stuff: Time Zones

Time zones are a pain. Let's get rid of them! Can we? Sure!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast, well the short stuff,
I should say, let me just start over, Hey and
welcome to the short Stuff. Nice work. Thanks. Do you
think we'll edit that first part out? Nope? Okay, I'm Josh.
There's Chuck the contrarian and always saying nope, and there's
Jerry over there who just kind of keeps quiet because

(00:24):
she knows that's how we like it. And like I said,
this is short stuff, let's go that's right. And we're
talking about time zones, um, and the sort of weirdness
of time zones in this modern age. It is very weird, um,
And they're kind of new. And it makes sense that
they're kind of new because before it was really difficult
to move from place to place in any sort of

(00:46):
quick manner. So it didn't really matter what time it
was in some town a hundred miles away from you. Yeah, Like,
there was no way of knowing really what time it was,
and by the time you walked over there to ask,
it was so much later than it had been when
you left it. Really, the whole thing just didn't matter.

(01:09):
But once we started to invent ways of locomoting more quickly, um,
the world got a lot smaller, And I really don't
like that term. For some reason, I just feel like
I need to confess this. The world got smaller, the
world shrank. I don't know why it really bothers me, Okay,

(01:29):
because right, well, you can make a flat circle smaller
and by the way, I am absolutely not flatter. What's
funny is that you have to like specify that in
this day and age, you know, so, um, as the
world got smaller, um, then suddenly it did kind of
matter what time it was in the town a hundred

(01:51):
miles away, because you might have a connecting train you
had to pick up there, and you needed to make
sure that that train was coordinating with the train that
you were getting there on so that you could reach
there by some designated time. And that didn't always happen
at first, no, I mean it was a real problem.
People were late for trains, they were missing their trains.

(02:11):
That was uh. There were circumstances where trains would be
close to colliding one to one another because of the
schedules and the times. Yeah, I mean, if everyone isn't
agreed on what time it is and you have an
interconnected train system, that's that can be extraordinarily problematic. Yeah,

(02:32):
I mean, and this this was happening in Europe. In
the US, it was a real mess because we had
local time zones. And I don't mean regional, I mean
like every city in the US. So we had three
hundred time zones in the United States. Uh. And then
eventually they said, all right, we need this is unwieldy.
Let's whittle it down to one hundred time zones, right.

(02:55):
And the reason why there were so many is because
up to this point, everybody basically set there or watch
or their sun dial or what have you to noon
when the sun was directly overhead. Everybody knew it was
noon in your town. But that doesn't mean it's noon
somewhere else. It means it's noon in your town. And
so everybody, every town basically had their own time zone, right. So, um,

(03:15):
when they whittled it down to a hundred, that was
a vast improvement, but it still wasn't quite where they
needed it to be because there were still a lot
of problems with it. And so a scientist his last
name was Fleming, he was Scottish, and his first name
was Sir Sandford. Well, the sir wasn't his first name.
That was an honor honorific but the Sandford was his

(03:35):
first name, Sanford, Sir Sandford and sun fleming. Uh. And
he missed a train in eighteen seventy six, as the
legend goes, because of the timetable and the this you know,
screwy time zone thing, and he said, I'm through. He
got mad and he said, you know what I'm gonna do.

(03:57):
I'm going to divide the world in time zones, which
makes sense, spaced at one degree intervals all across the planet.
And everyone said, groundskeeper Willie, that's brilliant. Yeah that was
you just made short stuff special officially because it was
a rare chucked Scottish accent. I know it's the rarest, Yeah,

(04:18):
it is the rarest. So that's pretty smart. Twenty four
time zones makes a lot of sense. Um, that's how
it is today. You would think that's not the case.
As a matter of fact, I believe there's thirty nine
time zones around the world. Yeah, that's what I saw.
Thirty nine time zones, not twenty four. And to to
make the badness even more complete, um, some of these

(04:41):
time zones are offset not by a single hour like
it should be some people offset their time zones by
thirty minutes or forty five minutes, which is just like
just drop out of the world. Basically if you do that,
you know, so it's it's it's what they call an
s word show these days. But um, even that was

(05:01):
still an improvement from that hundred or three hundred something
in the US. And in the United States, we've had
four time zones Eastern, Um, Central Mountain, and Pacific for
I guess since the nineteenth century. Actually, as a matter
of fact, exactly in the nineteenth century, on November eight,

(05:22):
eight three, those were officially instituted not by the country
necessarily itself, but by the railroad companies who all agreed
finally on a uniform um time where it was at
any given point in the country, that's right. And they
actually when all the railroads chuck um set time on

(05:43):
this one specific day, they all changed to noon when
it reached noon standard time in their their time zone,
which meant that each of those places had a noon
twice in one day. So it's very famously called the
day of two Noons. Amazing. I think so too. You
want to take a break, let's do it, okay, Alright,

(06:27):
so things are getting a little less unwieldy, are more wheeldy.
More we has that had a thing that's where I'm
casting my lot. Can something be wheeldy? I guess if
it can be unwieldy, surely it can be wheeldy too.
All right, So things are getting better. And then we
went off and invented planes, and then planes could get

(06:50):
places even quicker, and that just compresses the you know,
travel time even more. And then the Internet is invented,
and all of a sudden, it's pretty much like everyone's
running on a seven culture all over the world. And
some people in recent years have looked up and said,
why do we have time zones anyway? Why can't we

(07:12):
just all agree to set our clocks on the same time.
Take a little bit of getting used to, but you'll
all be okay once you wrap your head around the
fact that a number is just some random shape that
you designate for where the sun is in the sky. Yeah.
I mean, that's absolutely true, and it is arbitrary and

(07:33):
totally artificial. But it's going to take a little while
to not think like that if we follow these guys advice.
If you asked me, yeah, we're talking specifically about a
man named Hanka. I'd say Hanky Hanky. Yeah, let's say Hanka.
It depends on where he's from. If you wanted to

(07:54):
be wrong, you can say Honka. He's a John's Hopkins
University professor of physics. And there's another guy named Richard
con Henry uh and they what they propose is just
a universal time, like I said, where everyone in the
world agrees on one thing, and that's to just set
our clocks the same, which I am totally down for.

(08:17):
It does make sense. Um Honka and Heinry Um definitely
have a really good idea here, which is we all
set our clocks to UM Universal Time Coordinated UTC, which
used to be called Greenwich Mean time, which basically says
the prime meridian that goes through Greenwich, England is zero hours.
It's also called Zulu time because Z for zero in

(08:41):
UM air trucker or plane speak, UM is zulu, Z
is zulu, I thot I think he means zed z
depending on who you're talking to. That's why they all
just call it zulu. So because they couldn't agree on
zero or zed right, right, But this is already happening.
And you know, like the military has been doing this, Uh,
financial traders do the US because it's just clearly the

(09:02):
better way to go. It is. It is because if
it's if it's say, um, it's nine o'clock at and
on the prime meridian nine o'clock am, then it's it
would be nine o'clock all over the world. The whole
world is based on what time it is on the
prime meridian. But here's the thing, and this is why
it's hard to wrap your head around this kind of thing.

(09:23):
That means then that rather than it being nine o'clock
eventually associated with the morning in your land, wherever you are,
nine am might take on an entirely different meaning, just
a completely different meaning, because that nine am might be
at what's two am to you? Now, Yeah, you just

(09:45):
gotta give up those things, man, give it up. Right.
We would have to totally decouple and it would be
so difficult that I think, uh Hanka and hein right
say um that it would take about a generation for
us to get used to it. In basically, they're saying
we have to just some of those of us alive
today have to die off, and then the younger generation

(10:05):
have to be raised like this for it not to
be weird to eat breakfast at like PM or something
like that, depending on where you are. Yeah, and I
think I mean that's for a full like, hey, it's
a little weird for me to completely go away. I
think inside a few years everyone would just be like,
all right, that, you know whatever. I used to call

(10:27):
this nine am, but now it's you know, twelve pm, right, um,
And again, I mean, you know me, I've gone off
before about I don't necessarily think it's arbitrary, but just
the symbolic nature of a number is just you know,
something man has slapped on. Time is an artificial human
construct for sure, and clocks like keeping time is even

(10:47):
more artificial. But there's some like real upsides to this,
to this idea, it's all upside so well, I think
the getting used to it part would be really weird.
Although it could be like such a distraction for the
entire world that we might just forget about all this
the bs quagmire. A lot of us find ourselves and
just be like this is cool. You know, who knows

(11:09):
but them. Some of the upsides are that if you
live on the western edge of a time zone, you
got to keep up with the eastern edge, and you
typically suffer from sleep deprivation chronically as a result of
living on the western edge of the time zone. That
would be gone, I think solely for business purposes and
travel purposes. The benefits are just so outrageously strong that

(11:36):
it just doesn't make any sense to do anything otherwise.
So can you explain something to me? How do how
does it get rid of something like jet lag? If
we're still traveling to some other part of the world
and the sun is still up or it's not up
and it should be for our our biological clocks. How
does having the time be the same help that? Do

(11:57):
you understand that? I don't think it does at all? Okay,
well then makes sense. Yeah, I mean I think you
would just you would still be going to bed super
early if you traveled to l A from the east coast. Uh,
it would just whatever symbol on your watch would be different. Yeah. Um,
but just booking travel, booking conference calls, like anything would

(12:18):
be a nice have to be like, well, this is
ten o'clock your time and nine o'clock my time. Just
it's just ten o'clock, right, It's just ten o'clock means
different things. To different people. Yes, exactly, you'd have to
there would be no more shootouts at high noon or
you know, we party till two in the morning, we
party till seven at night, right exactly all around the
world on where you are. Uh, it would it would

(12:40):
totally take some getting used to. But I just think
it's like, why not explore this well, because it would
it would be a significant undertaking. But yeah, it could
be kind yeah, to get the whole world to throw
away all this stuff and just start over on UTC.
It would be It would take some we can't even
agree on the metric system for PiZZ says good point,

(13:02):
But I agree with you. I think it's neat and
interesting and I think it could probably over time be
very beneficial or or the rest of the world would
do it. In the United States wouldn't, right, right, which
is kind of sort of what's going on. I mean,
Europe's on its twenty four o'clock right, Uh, yeah, I
believe so, and I know the military in the United States,
so it is kind of like metric, like we do

(13:23):
kind of secretly do metric on the download here or there. So, um,
you got anything else or got anything else? Okay, Well,
If you want to know more about this, go find
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(13:44):
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