Last week, I wrote about why programmers don’t necessarily like to work with times and dates. But there is something worse: time zones.

For most of humanity’s life, you were mostly concerned with what the time was where you were. Noon is around when the sun is the highest, and as clocks got more accurate, it became easier to schedule your life. Until trains were invented.

Trains themselves, of course, don’t depend on or care about time. Train companies, however, would like to schedule trains — and suddenly, basing your time on when the sun is highest in the day doesn’t work anymore. Depending on where you are on the globe, the sun is at its highest point at different times. It was especially bad in the US, where Railway companies recognized this problem, and introduced their own time systems, with each company having their own one.

This, of course, was even more confusing, since you had to potentially deal with multiple time conversions. So eventually, the concept of standard time zones arose, segmenting the earth into slices that all used the same frame of reference, and allowing for easy conversion between them, culminating with the introduction of modern Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) in 1970 (which isn’t actually a time zone), upon which all time zone offsets are based.

Problem solved, right? Well, no. First of all, the offsets are usually, but not always, 1 hour steps. Some zones have half-hour steps, and some have quarter hour steps. Nepal Standard Time, for example, has an offset of +05:45. Second, many countries still observe daylight saving times — and yes, most countries switch at different days of the year, because why make this any easier?

Then, if you’re dealing with time zones, you also have to deal with changing time zones (North Korea, for example, has changed its time zone twice in since 2015), so if you’re dealing with dates from that span of years, you have to take a different time zone into account.

You also have to deal with things like the International Date Line, an imaginary border that lies somewhere in the Pacific ocean, where you gain or lose a day if you cross it¹ — and also causing modern F-22 Raptor air superiority fighter’s software to crash because it didn’t account for this possibility.

You also have to deal with things like Samoa deciding that they would like to skip an entire day (YouTube).

Even Mailchimp, what I use to send these newsletters, doesn’t handle its timezones correctly. Depending on wether DST is in effect or not, I have to use different times to schedule this newsletter. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In other words, dealing with time and time zones is an unholy mess, since everything is basically made of edge cases you have to account for. It does not make for fun programming.

Elements of a Gadget

Do you know what your electronic gadgets are made out of? There are obvious things, like aluminium and plastic, and whatever stuff batteries are made of, plus you’ve probably heard about there being some gold in there, and the electronic circuits are made of silicone, right? But that’s only a small sampling of what allows your gadgets to exist, and it doesn’t account for their dependence on various services, like the Internet.  So two professors created a beautiful map that shows everything that powers an Amazon Echo, from data mines to lakes of lithium.

10k!

You’ve probably heard of the 10.000 daily steps as a good goal for improving your fitness, especially if you have a fitness tracker equipped. But who came up with that number, and is it actually any good? Watch your step: why the 10,000 daily goal is built on bad science. (To be clear, the issue is with the number of 10.000 steps specifically, and wether that’s actually sufficient, not that daily exercise is bad for your health)

Perfect vs. Better

There’s an entire industry built on becoming the best version of yourself, by ensuring you know everything that is wrong with yourself. Not enough productivity, not enough time, not enough exercise, you name it, you could stand to improve it. But there’s a big difference between who you are and who you want to be — and that the truth is a bit more complicated than the self-help industry would like you to know.

Other interesting links from around the web:

• The Tyranny of Convenience — How convenience rules everything around us, to our detriment
• Android Sucks 10x More Data Than iPhone — Why? (YouTube)

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