The Year X problem
March 7th, 02008 by Alexander Rose
Due to the infinite wisdom of the US Legislators and President of 02005 we will again be experiencing “daylight savings” time a few weeks earlier this year. While I am pretty ambivalent about the daylight savings time concept, I do think the only thing sillier than changing our clocks twice a year, is randomly legislating new times to do so.
As most of us remember, changing time bases and calendrics caused all kinds (of mostly unneeded) fuss around the turn of the last millennium. And while it seems this new change was important enough to generate lobbying efforts from important cultural institutions such as the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, the National Association of Convenience Stores, and the National Retinitis Pigmentosa Foundation Fighting Blindness, I am still pretty confused as to why we are again wreaking havoc on the all pre-programmed EPROMs of the world. This has been dubbed “The Year 2007 Problem.”
So this month all our pre-programmed digital watches, timed light switches and sprinkler systems will be running an hour off schedule. Hopefully no life critical medical device will actually go too awry, and we can all settle in and wait for the Y10k mayhem.
March 7th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
It’s interesting how a perfectly well-adopted topic like “daylight savings” still sparks controversy. Why do we use daylight savings ? Because it saves money. Why do we set back to the old time, because it becomes costly after the summer.
With DST people use less energy in their homes, thus energy plants produce less CO2 emissions, hence it’s ecological.
Since the benefit of DST is mainly economical, we might expect it to change for economical reasons as well. Here in Brazil, DST improves profit with tourism cause people have more time to go to the beach, it may be extended to cover Carnival (Mardi-Gras); in election years it may be postponed because it’s hard to reprogram the EPROMs of the ballot machines.
As a system engineer, we all brawl when some external tweak is required, but that’s part of creating machines to serve humans. Not all changes can be anticipated.
BTW, when projecting the 10KY clock, Longnow took for granted that time telling will be the same 10KY from now. But that may not be true. 2000 years ago the day started at dawn, not at midnight. 200 years ago with the French revolution the Metric System included a new time keeping method. The metric hour was much better for calculations, we could be used by now, as we are with the rest of the system - I don’t understand how brittish and americans can learn math with imperial units- How many FlOz of milk fits on a 3 cubic inches box ! - but you guys don’t seem to mind that.
We now have at least 3 civilizations using different calendars (Western, Islamic and Israeli), not to mention the balinese that according to the “1000 years in Bali” seminar, has it’s own and special calendar.
IMHO the 10KY Clock is a beautifull project, but since it’s being made of metal and stone, you should also think on how to upgrade it with new dials and plug-ins, etc.
March 10th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
All good points. Just so that it is understood, we did not marry the Clock to any one system of telling time or calendar. In fact it is designed specifically to be able to forward migrate to new systems as society needs them. The prototype that you are looking at is just that, a prototype, but even that one has the ability to reprogrammed (by moving the bit pins) for different calendaring systems. This is also why we included the human constructs of time on the outer rings, this way they are easiest to change.