What are Clocks for?

I need an “advocate for change” topic for a Toastmasters speech. I’m contemplating narrower time-zones and 24 hour UTC time. Yes, it’s silly, but I don’t have an actual change that I want to advocate for and our current time system is annoying. These are my initial thoughts on the subject. This would normally be a Notepad file, but I haven’t posted here in a while, so why not?

I posit that clocks are for coordination. As an individual alone on an island, one has no need for a clock (assuming one is not timing “help me” fires with satellite overpasses). In order for coordination to work, there must be a common understanding of what any particular clock display means. That is, if my clock reads 12,100,000 that must be translatable into what your clock reads. Note that “translatable” does not mean “the same”.

There is a quaint concept called “meridian”, which is the time at which the sun is at the highest point in the sky. This is where “ante meridian” and “post meridian”, better known as “am” and “pm”, come from. Theoretically, time-zones exist so that my local 12:00 is near my local meridian. For this to come even close to working, time-zones need to be uniformly wide and uniformly distributed at 15-degrees of longitude intervals. This is obviously not the way time-zones work, for mostly legitimate reasons. Simply creating the things in the first place was a failure. Then there was Daylight Saving Time, the premise of which is “who cares about meridians? Politicians are smarter than nature and will just decree the time.”

On a personal note, this is why I avoid using 12-hour time while Daylight Saving Time is active.

These two things contradict each other: The purpose of clocks is to coordinate time amongst people. The purpose of time zones is to create a local time aligned with the sun. A purpose they do not actually fulfill.

My proposal is to decouple the two. All clocks use the same time. It doesn’t matter what time, so we may as well pick UTC.

Note that this is not about the lunacy of the base-12 system of time and circle division that we have inherited from the mutant, six-fingered, ancient Babylonian astronomers. While there is no rational justification for 360 degree circles and 24 hour days, changing either has vast repercussions and simply does not seem feasible. Those dudes have achieved astounding “vendor lock-in” and it’s not worth fighting.

However, the “clocks coordinate” and “time-zones create uncoordinated time” issues are at least theoretically fixable because we have already abandoned the concept of meridian.

That line of thought is not jelling into a speech. Time for another.