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Day 23: All the Calendars Are Just Made Up
You probably haven’t thought about this much before, but the calendar on your wall is, as a piece of civic infrastructure, bizarre. It’s the result of two and a half millennia of duct tape and wood glue. The current global standard, the …
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Day 22: "Permanent Standard Time vs Permanent DST"
Yesterday’s post we saw most people want DST abolished, that the data is one-sided, and yet we’re still doing it. The reason, the whole reason, is the question I want to spend today on. If you abolish the biannual switch, which time do you …
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Day 21: "DST is Dumb"
Most people think daylight saving time has something to do with farmers. It doesn’t. It never did. The farmers, in fact, hated it. DST shifts the workday by an hour, but it doesn’t shift the cows or the dew, and farmers fought against it …
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Day 20: The Leap Second Is No More, Huzzah!
I know yesterday’s post was a real cliffhanger. Talking about leap seconds. I hate to burst your bubble, but today there’s going to be more of that when we cover the exciting and well-documented, internationally renowned meeting in November …
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Day 19: Leap Seconds or When a Minute Has 61
It’s week four and this week we’re talking about the inconsistencies, the problems, the strange things about time and how we measure it. If week three was mostly about software and computer systems, week four is more about the properties or …
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Day 18: DST and The Related Software Bugs
This is one of two or three DST posts in the 30 Days of Time series. Today’s angle: the software bugs. Twice a year, in most of the developed world, the clocks jump forward in spring and back in fall. The hour that doesn’t exist in spring …
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Day 17 — Time Zones Are a Nightmare
Yesterday I wrote about how 2026-05-24T14:30:00Z won the format wars. That Z at the end, it turns out, is quite important. It says Zulu, it says UTC, it says: I am refusing to participate in the nightmare that is Timezones. However, today …
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Day 16: How the World Agreed on a Date Format (Except the US)
There is a war that has been quietly raging for about a century, and it is fought over six little characters. 05/06/26 In the United States, that is May 6, 2026. In most of Europe, it is June 5, 2026. In Japan, which uses a year-month-day …
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Day 15: The Man Who Synchronized the World
David Mills, the father of internet time, wrote the protocol that synchronizes every computer on Earth. He did it as a professor at the University of Delaware, on a project he started in the early 1980s and never stopped working on. The …
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Day 14: The Bug That Didn't End the World, and the One That Still Might
On December 31, 1999, a measurable percentage of the developed world stockpiled bottled water, withdrew cash from ATMs, and stayed up to see if the lights would go out at midnight. They didn’t. Planes did not fall from the sky. Power grids …