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A couple thoughts
First, if relatively friendly questioning about her husband claiming to be a member of a bigoted organization is going to be so hard on Mrs. Alito that it causes her emotional distress, it behooves Sam Alito to remove his name from consideration for the Supreme Court. Because what he's going through now is NOTHING compared to how people talk about people who already ARE on the Supreme Court. If she can't deal with THIS, she won't be able to deal with what is going to be said about her husband constantly for the rest of their lives. That's just part of being a very public judge.
Lis, if, G-d forbid, I ever end up in public hearings for some position like Supreme Court justice, and it gets difficult to hear people savage me, please fake checking your watch or something, and leave BEFORE you lose your composure. You don't have to listen to it, but don't ever let 'em see ya sweat.
Second, you know what would be my ideal way to deal with Daylight Saving Time, time zones, and all that malarkey?
It would be if everybody who needed a standard time to work with just used GMT, universally, across the globe. As 24 hour military time.
So Lis would start work at like 0330 and get off at about 1200, House would be on at something like 1600 or something like that (I'm probably off by an hour or two one way or the other). Television schedules, work schedules, train schedules, and the like would all use 24-hour GMT.
Everything else would use local noon. So, for instance, right now, for me, would be 0643, but would also be, um, (lesse, right now, our local noon is about seven minutes before EST noon, so we're about seven minutes later in general), "ten minutes of 12 o'clock".
I could call that 11:50 to distinguish it from 1150, for instance. Or just use "o'clock", "half past", and all those other terms like that.
Digital clocks would generally use 24 hour GMT, and not have colons in them. Analogue clocks would generally be set such that 12 o'clock was local noon, and would use AM and PM.
I think that would allow both the universal time that you need for worldwide commerce, and yet still have a sense that "time" was in some sense tied to the real, physical world.
Plus, it'd be cool.
Lis, if, G-d forbid, I ever end up in public hearings for some position like Supreme Court justice, and it gets difficult to hear people savage me, please fake checking your watch or something, and leave BEFORE you lose your composure. You don't have to listen to it, but don't ever let 'em see ya sweat.
Second, you know what would be my ideal way to deal with Daylight Saving Time, time zones, and all that malarkey?
It would be if everybody who needed a standard time to work with just used GMT, universally, across the globe. As 24 hour military time.
So Lis would start work at like 0330 and get off at about 1200, House would be on at something like 1600 or something like that (I'm probably off by an hour or two one way or the other). Television schedules, work schedules, train schedules, and the like would all use 24-hour GMT.
Everything else would use local noon. So, for instance, right now, for me, would be 0643, but would also be, um, (lesse, right now, our local noon is about seven minutes before EST noon, so we're about seven minutes later in general), "ten minutes of 12 o'clock".
I could call that 11:50 to distinguish it from 1150, for instance. Or just use "o'clock", "half past", and all those other terms like that.
Digital clocks would generally use 24 hour GMT, and not have colons in them. Analogue clocks would generally be set such that 12 o'clock was local noon, and would use AM and PM.
I think that would allow both the universal time that you need for worldwide commerce, and yet still have a sense that "time" was in some sense tied to the real, physical world.
Plus, it'd be cool.
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It might be less confusing, though, to use degrees instead of hours.
"I'll meet you in the park at around two-hundred." "Sorry I'm late; I was out drinking until thirty."
If everyone had watches that displayed this sun-based time, train and airplane schedules could just use GMT internally and use the sun-based time when issuing schedules for customers. Of course, that means that the same route would depart and arrive at different times every day of the year, but they do that now anyway, right?
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I've been saying that about time for years -- in fact ever since time zones were explained to me in school. It doesn't matter what you call it, except dawn, dusk, and time for dinner.
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Aw hell, I'd either be daydreaming and tune out the blowhards or purposely absent myself since I probably wouldn't be able to keep a poker face.
If it's important I'm there to demonstrate support, I'd probably bring along my notepad to take notes (or daydream) to avoid giving away signals...
Realized the problem with yer local-time proposal after you dropped me off. Make plans with anyone outside your city and you'll run into synchronization errors.
I couldn't find a table of relative local noons, but according to American Heritage: "Local noon at the latitude of New York City comes one minute later for about every 13.5 miles you move westward."
Wayland is 14 miles west of Melrose. My workplace is about 26 miles west of your parents.
Right now, we can be fairly confident coordinating schedules with anybody in our time zone. If I call my relatives in Florida, it's the same time there as here.
This throws everything wide open. And the calculations necessary for figuring out when anything happens gets much more complex once you need longitudes for everything. Even something as geographically limited as an SF con, attendees will need to coordinate their schedule with the airlines.
So why would anybody bother using local time at all, given its so inconvenient?
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I pray for a filibuster. Whether or not it's successful, it's the right thing to do.
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My solution to daylight saving time is to have a world-wide referendum in which we choose whether to use daylight saving time permanently or never to use it again. Whichever got the most votes would be it. No more springing forward or falling back. We get the same number of hours of daylight no matter when we start counting, so let's just pick a time and stick with it.
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