Until relatively recently, I thought that timezones were logically laid out. Most maps perpetuate this stereotype having timezones evenly drawn across the bottom with lines going up and down. I knew that they followed regional boundaries for convenience, but thought that if you wanted to find out what time zone a place was in, it was a simple process of taking degrees in a circle, dividing by the number of hours in a day, follow the the closest political boundary and voila; Standard Timezones in 15 degree increments +12 and -12 all the way around from Greenwich except for that Internataional date line nastiness. I always had a problem with the international date line. Gain a day loose a day stepping over a line. It’s a silly abstraction. You obviously haven’t gained or lost a day. There is no time warp. Just a convention defined for accounting.

The international date line is just the beginning of the problems.
Tongo is actually 13 hours off, go north and it’s same hour, different day.
China should span 3 timezones but it’s only one in the name of unity.
Australia spans three but the people in the middle show their preference for Sydney by half an hour and revulsion at Perth with and hour and half.
Russia spans 9 going from +3 in Moscow to +12 in the very east and are sequential aside from having nothing to do with that +6 character.
Nepal is singularly independent enough to split themselves off from India by 15 minutes.
Finally there’s Kiribati which until 1995 had the distinction of owning the only dry land that the international date line passes through. Now they they are even worse than Tonga with a +14 timezone.

It’s these idiosyncrasies that lead to me being able to walk along the Seine and watch the sun rise over over Notre Dame at 8am. It’s these idiosyncrasies that lead the fact that I missed my extra of sleep from daylight savings time flying over the Atlantic.

The first time accounting problem was created by Magellen who in his circumnavigation of the globe. But for the common man, trains are really what gave us this standardization problem. Until the coming of the train, Every village was an island of time unto itself. Every village had the right time. But with no standardization, it was impossible to create a time table. Without synchronization, planning a journey was impossible because who was to decide whether a time was early or late, who would decide when it would leave. Without a standard, It was impossible to create a time table, this led to the rise of the quest for increasing accuracy. Now there is no truly accurate clock in the world, only ones with decreasing deviation.

We measure time as a basis for value. A long vacation is better than a short one. A 40 hour work week is worth less money to an employer than 45. It certainly makes it easier to coordinate things, but maybe at the expense of sanity. Time measurement is a bad metric for performance. In the morning it might take me an hour and a half to get done as much done as I can do in the 15 minutes before I leave work. Clocks have created Sleeping disorders, arbitrary designations, and increasingly frenetic lifestyles as we strive to account for our day in meaningful ways.

If I asked you if time is linear you’d probably say yes. But we don’t even think about time in a linear fashion, sure things generally happen sequentially but it goes faster when we’re having fun and slower when we’re bored. When we talk about time, the present gets distorted to have a larger scale than say things 10 years ago. History also records more significant events that happen on a greater frequency the closer to the present we get. On the flip side, think about how long it used to be between birthdays, and how they go whooshing by now.

Thomas Kinkade painted man’s time on earth as a river. That’s probably a much better metaphor than the sterile mechanical one from clocks. It flows faster or slower based on how deep and wide the river is, there’s an average flow rate but your never actually are traveling at that average rate except when you pass it speeding up or slowing down.

The faster we go the more problems we have with time. Trains were bad enough but now we have planes. Planes give us jet lag. So what about the next faster form of transportation? What problems will it bring? Well according to Einstin, we’re going to to have different aging rates due to relativity, not only the journey go faster, but those around you will age without you. For short distances that might be acceptable but what about a journey of 30 years. How would the human psyche handle a child who has aged to be 20 years older than the parent.