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Short Stuff: Time Zones · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the podcast, well the short stuff,
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: I should say, let me just start over, Hey and
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: welcome to the short Stuff. Nice work. Thanks. Do you
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: think we'll edit that first part out? Nope? Okay, I'm Josh.
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: There's Chuck the contrarian and always saying nope, and there's
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: Jerry over there who just kind of keeps quiet because
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: she knows that's how we like it. And like I said,
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: this is short stuff, let's go that's right. And we're
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: talking about time zones, um, and the sort of weirdness
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: of time zones in this modern age. It is very weird, um,
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: And they're kind of new. And it makes sense that
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: they're kind of new because before it was really difficult
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: to move from place to place in any sort of
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: quick manner. So it didn't really matter what time it
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: was in some town a hundred miles away from you. Yeah, Like,
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: there was no way of knowing really what time it was,
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: and by the time you walked over there to ask,
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: it was so much later than it had been when
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: you left it. Really, the whole thing just didn't matter.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: But once we started to invent ways of locomoting more quickly, um,
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: the world got a lot smaller, And I really don't
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: like that term. For some reason, I just feel like
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: I need to confess this. The world got smaller, the
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: world shrank. I don't know why it really bothers me, Okay,
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: because right, well, you can make a flat circle smaller
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: and by the way, I am absolutely not flatter. What's
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: funny is that you have to like specify that in
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: this day and age, you know, so, um, as the
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: world got smaller, um, then suddenly it did kind of
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: matter what time it was in the town a hundred
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: miles away, because you might have a connecting train you
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: had to pick up there, and you needed to make
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: sure that that train was coordinating with the train that
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: you were getting there on so that you could reach
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: there by some designated time. And that didn't always happen
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: at first, no, I mean it was a real problem.
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: People were late for trains, they were missing their trains.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: That was uh. There were circumstances where trains would be
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: close to colliding one to one another because of the
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: schedules and the times. Yeah, I mean, if everyone isn't
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: agreed on what time it is and you have an
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: interconnected train system, that's that can be extraordinarily problematic. Yeah,
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: I mean, and this this was happening in Europe. In
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: the US, it was a real mess because we had
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: local time zones. And I don't mean regional, I mean
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: like every city in the US. So we had three
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: hundred time zones in the United States. Uh. And then
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: eventually they said, all right, we need this is unwieldy.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: Let's whittle it down to one hundred time zones, right.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: And the reason why there were so many is because
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: up to this point, everybody basically set there or watch
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: or their sun dial or what have you to noon
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: when the sun was directly overhead. Everybody knew it was
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: noon in your town. But that doesn't mean it's noon
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: somewhere else. It means it's noon in your town. And
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: so everybody, every town basically had their own time zone, right. So, um,
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: when they whittled it down to a hundred, that was
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: a vast improvement, but it still wasn't quite where they
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: needed it to be because there were still a lot
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: of problems with it. And so a scientist his last
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: name was Fleming, he was Scottish, and his first name
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: was Sir Sandford. Well, the sir wasn't his first name.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: That was an honor honorific but the Sandford was his
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: first name, Sanford, Sir Sandford and sun fleming. Uh. And
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: he missed a train in eighteen seventy six, as the
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: legend goes, because of the timetable and the this you know,
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: screwy time zone thing, and he said, I'm through. He
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: got mad and he said, you know what I'm gonna do.
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: I'm going to divide the world in time zones, which
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: makes sense, spaced at one degree intervals all across the planet.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: And everyone said, groundskeeper Willie, that's brilliant. Yeah that was
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: you just made short stuff special officially because it was
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: a rare chucked Scottish accent. I know it's the rarest, Yeah,
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: it is the rarest. So that's pretty smart. Twenty four
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: time zones makes a lot of sense. Um, that's how
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: it is today. You would think that's not the case.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: As a matter of fact, I believe there's thirty nine
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: time zones around the world. Yeah, that's what I saw.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: Thirty nine time zones, not twenty four. And to to
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: make the badness even more complete, um, some of these
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: time zones are offset not by a single hour like
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: it should be some people offset their time zones by
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: thirty minutes or forty five minutes, which is just like
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: just drop out of the world. Basically if you do that,
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: you know, so it's it's it's what they call an
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: s word show these days. But um, even that was
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: still an improvement from that hundred or three hundred something
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: in the US. And in the United States, we've had
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: four time zones Eastern, Um, Central Mountain, and Pacific for
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: I guess since the nineteenth century. Actually, as a matter
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: of fact, exactly in the nineteenth century, on November eight,
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: eight three, those were officially instituted not by the country
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: necessarily itself, but by the railroad companies who all agreed
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: finally on a uniform um time where it was at
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: any given point in the country, that's right. And they
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: actually when all the railroads chuck um set time on
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: this one specific day, they all changed to noon when
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: it reached noon standard time in their their time zone,
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: which meant that each of those places had a noon
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: twice in one day. So it's very famously called the
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: day of two Noons. Amazing. I think so too. You
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: want to take a break, let's do it, okay, Alright,
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: so things are getting a little less unwieldy, are more wheeldy.
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: More we has that had a thing that's where I'm
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: casting my lot. Can something be wheeldy? I guess if
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: it can be unwieldy, surely it can be wheeldy too.
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: All right, So things are getting better. And then we
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: went off and invented planes, and then planes could get
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: places even quicker, and that just compresses the you know,
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: travel time even more. And then the Internet is invented,
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, it's pretty much like everyone's
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: running on a seven culture all over the world. And
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: some people in recent years have looked up and said,
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: why do we have time zones anyway? Why can't we
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: just all agree to set our clocks on the same time.
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: Take a little bit of getting used to, but you'll
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: all be okay once you wrap your head around the
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: fact that a number is just some random shape that
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: you designate for where the sun is in the sky. Yeah.
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: I mean, that's absolutely true, and it is arbitrary and
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: totally artificial. But it's going to take a little while
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: to not think like that if we follow these guys advice.
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: If you asked me, yeah, we're talking specifically about a
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: man named Hanka. I'd say Hanky Hanky. Yeah, let's say Hanka.
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: It depends on where he's from. If you wanted to
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: be wrong, you can say Honka. He's a John's Hopkins
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: University professor of physics. And there's another guy named Richard
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: con Henry uh and they what they propose is just
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: a universal time, like I said, where everyone in the
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: world agrees on one thing, and that's to just set
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: our clocks the same, which I am totally down for.
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: It does make sense. Um Honka and Heinry Um definitely
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: have a really good idea here, which is we all
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: set our clocks to UM Universal Time Coordinated UTC, which
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: used to be called Greenwich Mean time, which basically says
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: the prime meridian that goes through Greenwich, England is zero hours.
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: It's also called Zulu time because Z for zero in
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: UM air trucker or plane speak, UM is zulu, Z
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: is zulu, I thot I think he means zed z
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: depending on who you're talking to. That's why they all
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: just call it zulu. So because they couldn't agree on
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: zero or zed right, right, But this is already happening.
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: And you know, like the military has been doing this, Uh,
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: financial traders do the US because it's just clearly the
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: better way to go. It is. It is because if
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: it's if it's say, um, it's nine o'clock at and
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: on the prime meridian nine o'clock am, then it's it
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: would be nine o'clock all over the world. The whole
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: world is based on what time it is on the
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: prime meridian. But here's the thing, and this is why
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: it's hard to wrap your head around this kind of thing.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: That means then that rather than it being nine o'clock
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: eventually associated with the morning in your land, wherever you are,
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: nine am might take on an entirely different meaning, just
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: a completely different meaning, because that nine am might be
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: at what's two am to you? Now, Yeah, you just
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: gotta give up those things, man, give it up. Right.
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: We would have to totally decouple and it would be
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: so difficult that I think, uh Hanka and hein right
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: say um that it would take about a generation for
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: us to get used to it. In basically, they're saying
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: we have to just some of those of us alive
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: today have to die off, and then the younger generation
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: have to be raised like this for it not to
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: be weird to eat breakfast at like PM or something
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: like that, depending on where you are. Yeah, and I
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: think I mean that's for a full like, hey, it's
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: a little weird for me to completely go away. I
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: think inside a few years everyone would just be like,
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: all right, that, you know whatever. I used to call
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: this nine am, but now it's you know, twelve pm, right, um,
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: And again, I mean, you know me, I've gone off
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: before about I don't necessarily think it's arbitrary, but just
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: the symbolic nature of a number is just you know,
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: something man has slapped on. Time is an artificial human
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: construct for sure, and clocks like keeping time is even
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: more artificial. But there's some like real upsides to this,
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: to this idea, it's all upside so well, I think
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: the getting used to it part would be really weird.
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: Although it could be like such a distraction for the
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: entire world that we might just forget about all this
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: the bs quagmire. A lot of us find ourselves and
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: just be like this is cool. You know, who knows
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: but them. Some of the upsides are that if you
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: live on the western edge of a time zone, you
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: got to keep up with the eastern edge, and you
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: typically suffer from sleep deprivation chronically as a result of
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: living on the western edge of the time zone. That
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: would be gone, I think solely for business purposes and
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: travel purposes. The benefits are just so outrageously strong that
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: it just doesn't make any sense to do anything otherwise.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: So can you explain something to me? How do how
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: does it get rid of something like jet lag? If
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: we're still traveling to some other part of the world
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: and the sun is still up or it's not up
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: and it should be for our our biological clocks. How
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: does having the time be the same help that? Do
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: you understand that? I don't think it does at all? Okay,
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: well then makes sense. Yeah, I mean I think you
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: would just you would still be going to bed super
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: early if you traveled to l A from the east coast. Uh,
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: it would just whatever symbol on your watch would be different. Yeah. Um,
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: but just booking travel, booking conference calls, like anything would
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: be a nice have to be like, well, this is
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: ten o'clock your time and nine o'clock my time. Just
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: it's just ten o'clock, right, It's just ten o'clock means
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: different things. To different people. Yes, exactly, you'd have to
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: there would be no more shootouts at high noon or
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: you know, we party till two in the morning, we
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: party till seven at night, right exactly all around the
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: world on where you are. Uh, it would it would
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: totally take some getting used to. But I just think
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: it's like, why not explore this well, because it would
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: it would be a significant undertaking. But yeah, it could
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: be kind yeah, to get the whole world to throw
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: away all this stuff and just start over on UTC.
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: It would be It would take some we can't even
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: agree on the metric system for PiZZ says good point,
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: But I agree with you. I think it's neat and
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: interesting and I think it could probably over time be
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: very beneficial or or the rest of the world would
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: do it. In the United States wouldn't, right, right, which
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: is kind of sort of what's going on. I mean,
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: Europe's on its twenty four o'clock right, Uh, yeah, I
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: believe so, and I know the military in the United States,
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: so it is kind of like metric, like we do
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: kind of secretly do metric on the download here or there. So, um,
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: you got anything else or got anything else? Okay, Well,
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: If you want to know more about this, go find
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: out about it yourself, because your stuff is done. Stuff
• 13:39
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• 13:41
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