I want there to be a way of telling time that is the same no matter where you are. Of course, there’s UTC, but it uses the same names as the traditional locality-dependent clocks, so it can only be used unambiguously if you explicitly state you’re using UTC, or you’re in a context where it’s understood that times are always given in UTC (in the military, “Zulu” is a codeword indicating UTC time; I wouldn’t mind if people got in the habit of saying “twenty-two thirty Zulu” to refer to times, though I do worry it might seem a little weird to non-familiar people… though maybe actually less weird than my original proposal, which follows)
There are both Western and Chinese Zodiacs, which are traditionally used to split time into 12 chunks (12 months in the Western, 12 years in the Oriental). Together, there are 24 zodiac names, enough to give each UTC hour a zodiac name. The zodiac hours are the same for all people at any given moment, regardless of location:
So you might say “Let’s meet at a quarter past aquarius” to say 20:15 UTC, or 2:15 PM in Pacific Summer Time. Maybe I should just encourage people to use Zulu time more often, though.
Telling time by specifying the timezone (3:12pm Pacific Time) or ISO8601 is pretty much usable anywhere, and as precise as you need. It’s going to be more universal to get competent at timezone handling than to (try to) convince everyone to use UTC.
I want there to be a way of telling time that is the same no matter where you are. Of course, there’s UTC, but it uses the same names as the traditional locality-dependent clocks, so it can only be used unambiguously if you explicitly state you’re using UTC, or you’re in a context where it’s understood that times are always given in UTC (in the military, “Zulu” is a codeword indicating UTC time; I wouldn’t mind if people got in the habit of saying “twenty-two thirty Zulu” to refer to times, though I do worry it might seem a little weird to non-familiar people… though maybe actually less weird than my original proposal, which follows)
There are both Western and Chinese Zodiacs, which are traditionally used to split time into 12 chunks (12 months in the Western, 12 years in the Oriental). Together, there are 24 zodiac names, enough to give each UTC hour a zodiac name. The zodiac hours are the same for all people at any given moment, regardless of location:
00:00 - Aries 01:00 - Rat 02:00 - Taurus 03:00 - Ox 04:00 - Gemini 05:00 - Tiger 06:00 - Cancer 07:00 - Rabbit 08:00 - Leo 09:00 - Dragon 10:00 - Virgo 11:00 - Snake 12:00 - Libro 13:00 - Horse 14:00 - Scorpio 15:00 - Goat 16:00 - Sagittarius 17:00 - Monkey 18:00 - Capricorn 19:00 - Rooster 20:00 - Aquarius 21:00 - Dog 22:00 - Pisces 23:00 - Pig
So you might say “Let’s meet at a quarter past aquarius” to say 20:15 UTC, or 2:15 PM in Pacific Summer Time. Maybe I should just encourage people to use Zulu time more often, though.
https://xkcd.com/927/
Telling time by specifying the timezone (3:12pm Pacific Time) or ISO8601 is pretty much usable anywhere, and as precise as you need. It’s going to be more universal to get competent at timezone handling than to (try to) convince everyone to use UTC.