Daylight Saving Is Temporal Time Zones

  • offset applied to UTC to get to local time
  • that depends on your position {on Earth, in orbit around the sun}
  • approximating a natural difference in available sunlight
  • rules have changed in the past and probably will in the future
  • for political reasons

Once

To reference an event
you must use coordinates in both space and time
But how do we measure “now”?
If I change your clock, is it tomorrow?
Should constellations shift—following standard expectations—no years have passed.
Were our universe stopping
.
.
.
then restarting,
over millennia or eye-blinks,
would that be noticed?

A stateful world can manifest as functions on objects, plus “t”
“At 1:00 today, he was eating lunch”
What tells us “when”?
My watch?
Some…sundial?
Star positions?

The current configuration of each atom, everywhere
This encodes “present”.

For all things happen only once, from single start.
Within…

Time Zones

Yesterday my grandma and I had a conversation about time zones, which started when it came up that China spans several time zones but only uses one (UTC+8). We started talking about how that was unusual, and I put forth the idea that things would be less confusing without time zones, i.e. if everyone used UTC.

With the current system, 8:00 in California is three hours after 8:00 in New York. You can be talking to someone, live, who is “already in tomorrow”. How does this make sense?

On the flip side, 8:00 local time tells you something…

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