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in reply to Re: Daylight saving time in my region should be...
in thread Daylight saving time in my region should be...

While the minimalist, neat freak, wishing-I-lived-in-a-Shinto-shrine part of me agrees completely with anonymous and jdporter, the reality is that most humans aren't like me. Therefore, it is my belief, that even when we have space-based nations, and these space-based nations become economically dominant, the common rustic person on Earth will still use time zones. And, of course, there will be some American-descended space-based nation that refuses to convert to metric time like the rest of the solar system.

What bothers me now however, is why does a new "day" start in the middle of the night? Shouldn't 00:00 be the time when the sun rises during the Spring/Fall equinox?

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Re^3: Daylight saving time in my region should be...
by DStaal (Chaplain) on Dec 12, 2011 at 16:35 UTC

    Midnight or Noon are easy to track when they happen, and are measurable any time of the year. Sunrise varies, so you'd have to accurately track when the equinoxes are, and then accurately measure when sunrise happens, and then have an accurate clock to keep that time for the other 363 days of the year. We've only reliably been able to do that for a couple of hundred years. The definition of 'day' predates that by centuries.

    (By the way: In tropical areas, it's not uncommon for the historic 'day' to start at sunrise. Of course, sunrise varies by at most an hour over the course of a year for many of them.)

Re^3: Daylight saving time in my region should be...
by pileofrogs (Priest) on Dec 21, 2011 at 22:40 UTC

    Curse you! I come here to ask a work-related question about perl and I spend 3 centidays reading about metric time!