I’m not going to do it anymore. I’m not going to cross the 73rd day of this year, change my clocks ahead one hour, and give myself an artificial mini-jetlag on purpose. Nor am I going to just sit around and wish that someone would finally give the axe to DST. I am going to axe it myself.

You see, DST is really a shift in timezone. In Ontario, where I live, we are normally on EST, UTC-5. Then, 8% of the way through the second Sunday in March, everyone jumps ahead 41 millidays to EDT, UTC-4. Time in EST doesn’t change, but the people of the region choose to live as though they are in a different timezone.

Well, I deal with people from other timezones all the time. On the Internet I communicate with people from Africa, India, the UK, California, and more. When I talk about the time I either convert to their timezone, or qualify my statement (“6 my time” or “6 EST”). When they talk about the time, I convert to my local time before writing it down or adding it to my schedule.

So, for this summer twenty-ten, I will be living in a different timezone than many of those physically around me, but so what? I live in a different timezone than over half of the people I interact with anyway, but that’s never been a problem.

Would you consider also ditching DST? Of all the Calendar/Time reforms I’m a fan of, it seems the most popular. If enough people just stop respecting it, people will realise just how useless it is.

Lawrence Lessig, “Free Culture“

Wars of prohibition are nothing new in America. This one is just something more extreme than anything we’ve seen before. We experimented with alcohol prohibition, at a time when the per capita consumption of alcohol was 1.5 gallons per capita per year. The war against drinking initially reduced that consumption to just 30 percent of its preprohibition levels, but by the end of prohibition, consumption was up to 70 percent of the preprohibition level. Americans were drinking just about as much, but now, a vast number were criminals. We have launched a war on drugs aimed at reducing the consumption of regulated narcotics that 7 percent (or 16 million) Americans now use. That is a drop from the high (so to speak) in 1979 of 14 percent of the population. We regulate automobiles to the point where the vast majority of Americans violate the law every day. We run such a complex tax system that a majority of cash businesses regularly cheat. We pride ourselves on our “free society,” but an endless array of ordinary behavior is regulated within our society. And as a result, a huge proportion of Americans regularly violate at least some law.

This state of affairs is not without consequence. It is a particularly salient issue for teachers like me, whose job it is to teach law students about the importance of “ethics.” As my colleague Charlie Nesson told a class at Stanford, each year law schools admit thousands of students who have illegally downloaded music, illegally consumed alcohol and sometimes drugs, illegally worked without paying taxes, illegally driven cars. These are kids for whom behaving illegally is increasingly the norm. And then we, as law professors, are supposed to teach them how to behave ethically–how to say no to bribes, or keep client funds separate, or honor a demand to disclose a document that will mean that your case is over. Generations of Americans–more significantly in some parts of America than in others, but still, everywhere in America today–can’t live their lives both normally and legally, since “normally” entails a certain degree of illegality.

The response to this general illegality is either to enforce the law more severely or to change the law. We, as a society, have to learn how to make that choice more rationally. Whether a law makes sense depends, in part, at least, upon whether the costs of the law, both intended and collateral, outweigh the benefits. If the costs, intended and collateral, do outweigh the benefits, then the law ought to be changed. Alternatively, if the costs of the existing system are much greater than the costs of an alternative, then we have a good reason to consider the alternative.

I have been interested in calendar and time reform for some time. Each proposal has its own advantages and disadvantages. One of the largest disadvantages is that breaking compatibility with established systems and norms is hard.

So, any system should do as much as it can to improve matters, while still keeping existing norms where possible. Of course, to find out what norms are important, one must ask people.

In all my discussions with people about time, something has become apparent: people like days. They like going to bed at the same time every day, waking up every morning, and generally having a measurable system that follows the rotational cycle.

Conclusion: days should form the basis for any system of time.

People are way less attached to months. Months are icky, of non-uniform length, and are the focus of most attempts at calendar reform.

Instead of proposing a new sort of month (many have done that before me, and there are some good proposals out there) I propose something much less radical. Something that has sat well with the handful of people I’ve run this by privately so far (some geeks, some not). I propose we stop including months in our datestamp expressions.

What format will we use, then? Thankfully, ISO8601 (from whence we get the YYYY-MM-DD format) defines a nice format for use to use: YYYY-DDD. All major software libraries support this format (for example: the strftime string for it is %Y-%j).

Getting a bit more radical

What about time? Hours and minutes really suck. They really do. 24 in a day? What kind of “halfway” is 12? or 30?

Since I’ve already established that days should be the basis for time, why not just keep using them? What is time trying to convey? It is trying to convey how far one is into the day.

Right now I am 70.7% through my day. How do I know that? I just read it off my clock! My clock looks like this:

2009-209.708

That . is not just a separator: the whole bit after the – is a real number! (Some locales may prefer , as their decimal separator).

Halfway through your day becomes “.5” or “.500” instead of “12” or “1200”. That just makes sense!

Other benefits:

• Math. 209.710 + .40 = 210.110 Simple!
• If you take just up to millidays (three digits of time) and express in UTC+1 you get Swatch Internet Time

You’ll note that I am using this format on blog posts on this site.

Timezones

I would just like to also advocate a minimalist expression of timezones. UTC timestamps should end in ‘Z’. Other zones can use their offset in hours (which is really a name, so keeping it in hours for compatibility is fine).

YYYY-DDD.TTTZ
or
YYYY-DDD.TTT+00

Internet activities, publications of international interest, etc, should be expressed in UTC with the ‘Z’ terminator.

Today I received a threat from Facebook about an old F8 app of mine called “The Wall” because it was designed to look identical to the Facebook wall (back when that was a separate area of one’s profile) but actually tie data back to a datastore on one’s own website. (Only Chris Shiels ever used it).

They claim to have a trademark on the word “wall”. I wonder what the superwall people (or anyone with the Unix command “wall” installed, which is where Facebook got the name from in the first place) are going to do.

The email is below:

To the developer of The Wall (6506538869):

During an automated check, our system found that your application name contains a variation on the disallowed term “wall.” Application names may not contain Facebook trademarks without the express prior written permission of Facebook.

Please change your application name within two weeks of receiving this email. Failure to comply will result in our system automatically changing your application name to “Unnamed Application #6506538869”

If you believe your application name has been selected in error, please contact us through the Developer Help form at http://www.facebook.com/dev-help?category=Name+Appeal&app_id=6506538869&issue_location=Developer+App&title=Appeal+to+use+%22The+Wall%22+%286506538869%29 .

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

It’s an age-old practise in computing: limiting text files to a maximum of 80 characters per line (sometimes as little as 72 is suggested). Problems have previously been identified with this practise, but the prevelance of full-sized computer terminals has limited people’s exposure to the problem outside of email quoting.

I have been reading Cory Doctorow‘s short stories and novels on my Google Ion (Android-based phone) for a while now using auduaReader, which is so far the best ebook program I’ve found for the platform. Doctorow distributes his books as text files folded to 80 columns. This has never been a problem on my laptop (where it simply means I do not have to call fold before less), but on my phone it is atrocious. The abuse of newlines in places with no real semantics means the reader is unable to reflow the text in a suitable way for the small screen, and as a result every “line” becomes two and a half lines, like so:

This would have originally been
one long line of text. It will
get folded funny.

You can imagine how atrocious that gets when reading a whole book!

All text viewers and editors can wrap and reflow text themselves these days. Lets promise to use newlines to mean “new line” and not “word wrap”.

EDIT: I have written a perl one-liner that easily reflows wiki-style text where double line-breaks are paragraphs and single line breaks can be ignored. This 80% works on Doctorow files, but munges some sections:

perl -0e '$_=<>; s/(?<!\n)\r?\n(?!\r?\n)/ /g; print'