Rants
I’m not going to ease into my discussion. We should just use 24 Hour time instead of 12 Hour time with am/pm.24 Hour time, aka, “Military Time”. What is it? Simply put, there are 24 hours in a day, so we number them as such. The first hour is 0 and the last hour is 23. The start of the day, Midnight, is 00:00. 6am is 06:00. Noon is 12:00. 1pm is 13:00. 11pm is 23:00. 11:59pm is 23:59. There is no 24:00. The second following 23:59 is 00:00.

I understand that some people can’t do military time quickly. When some people hear 18:00, they have to count on their fingers to figure out that it’s 6:00pm. That’s fine. But it irritates me when people look at my watch and see 13:25 and can’t, for the life of them, figure out what time it is. When someone has NOO00oooo idea what 13:25 could possibly be, I am screaming inside.

I recently purchased a new phone from Verizon Wireless. When I got home and began to play with it and personalize it the way I like it, I discovered that it can’t do 24 hour time. Shocked and appalled, I went back to the Verizon booth and expressed that I wanted a phone that can do 24 hour time. Turns out that Verizon doesn’t make such a phone. NONE of their phones, save for the $300 Smart Phones, can do 24 hours time. The Verizon guy, instead of understanding my frustration, was baffled that I would want 24 hour time. He instead tried to convince me to use 12 hour time with statements like “Well, what’s so hard about am & pm? See…look [demonstrates on my phone] before noon the time is am, and after noon the time is pm. That’s not so hard. Why would you want 24 hour time?”

I replied “So, I’m just one random weird dude who wants 24 hour time. I understand that it might be impractical for Verizon to build a phone for 1 guy. But the Military uses 24 hour time. And so do hospitals. Is it inconceivable that a member of the military or a doctor or nurse might want a Verizon phone? By not making a phone with 24 hour time, Verizon has alienated all those military and health care personnel”. The Verizon salesman was slightly confused, but told me that he was sorry, but there was nothing that he could do for me (shy of selling me a $300 Smart Phone).

Further Discussion
Most of the world actually already uses a 24 Hour clock. The US is one of the weird countries that doesn’t. The 24 Hour clock is an international standard defined in ISO 8601.

Solution
Let’s all make the switch to 24 Hour time. This idea ties into my idea in the solution of the previous post – let’s also all use GMT time!

Update
I also want to add that it’s also great that the hours in the day start at 0 instead of 1. Counting starting at Zero is the Correct way to count. This thought just came to me as I’m trying to program in MATLAB. It’s infuriating me that array indicies in MATLAB start at 1 instead of 0. It’s making things so irritating for me. So I thought that I’d just add a footnote to this post about how it’s right to start at 0 and not 1. :-)

Rants
As my first musing, I shall vent my frustrations about Daylight Savings Time.

DST, it irritates me. It does so most frequently when trying to calculate times in other parts of the world. I know that I am -7 hours from GMT. But I know that changes by 1 hour during DST. So then, during GMT, am I -8 or -6 hours? I always have to look it up and I can never remember. Of course, I understand that England also uses DST, so I could just add 7 hours to my current time. So what happens if the US changes their DST date by a few weeks, as they did this year? Should I expect England to follow suite? So, great, if I want to know what time it is for my friend in Scotland, do I add 6, 7, or 8 hours to my current time?

Another time when DST causes problems; When congress decides to bump it a couple weeks. Many of the electronic/computer devices out there never got that memo. According to Wikipedia, the DST07 change cost $0.5 – $1 Billion

Areas That Observe DST
Areas That Once Observed DST
Areas That Never Observed DST

Futher Discussion
So, I thought before ranting uncontrollably, I read up on DST online. As usual, my main source was Wikipedia. To see what I’m reproducing in the following, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Daylight_saving_time

Not everywhere even observes DST.

Early DST.
In some ancient civilizations, such as with the Romans, there always remained 12 hours in the day. However, depending on the time of season, the length of each hour changed. For example, during winter Rome’s third hour from sunrise started in 9:02 and lasted 44 minutes, while during the summer it started at 6:58 and lasted 75 minutes.

Modern DST
Although equal hours eventually came to persist over unequal, the 18th century did not require very precise schedules. As technology progressed with the rail and communication networks, it became obvious that a, previously unknown, level of standardization and synchronization was needed.

DST was first conceived in 1905, though it wasn’t actually adopted until Germany (& Allies) jumped on-board on 30 April 1916.The US did not get on the bandwagon until 1918.

Evaluation
From what I’ve read, there seems to be mixed statistics regarding DST in energy conservation, economic effects, public safety, and politics. There seems to me to be no REAL GOOD reason to observe DST.

Solution
Further, I wouldn’t mind abandoning time zones altogether. The whole idea of getting up at 6,7 or 8 am and being to work by 8, 9, or 10 am is completely arbitrary. Why can’t we just all run off GMT time?

So instead of

• getting up at 6am
• work by 8am
• off work by 5pm
• and bed at 9pm

Why not just

• get up at 1pm
• work by 2pm
• off work by 12am
• bed by 4am

(You’re still really getting up at the same time – i.e. the sun now comes up at 1pm instead of 6am) Of course, this would all work even more smoothly if we used a 24 hour clock. Ahh…. I think I know what I might write for my next post.

Sometimes I can get rather opinionated about formats and such.

Things like:

• 24 Hour time vs 12 Hour time
• US Standard vs Metric
• The observance of Daylight Savings Time

That sorta stuff. So I created Black Kahveh as a place to put my musings and organize my thoughts.