[LEAPSECS] Tripping over the International Date Line

[Rob Seaman]

On Mar 6, 2007, at 6:44 PM, John Cowan wrote:


> Rob Seaman scripsit:

>

>> Once Mean Solar Time is safely eradicated, perhaps we can move on to

>> stamping out the dastardly International Date Line :?)

>

> The Phileas Foggs of the world will thank you, I suppose.


The class "Phileas Fogg" likely contains only Michael Palin (and  
entourage) in addition to Fogg (and Paspartou, of course) himself.

Recall that it was the IDL that saved the wager.  By traveling  
eastward, each day was a few minutes shorter, but Fogg gained an  
extra day as compensation.  On average, he deposited 24 hours/80  
days, or 18 minutes/day into a temporal "bank account", and then  
withdrew the savings of one day when he returned to England.  If he'd  
noticed, he could have withdrawn the full extra day halfway through  
the trip, but this would have dampened the drama quite a bit.

Alternately, he could have traveled westward.  Each individual day  
would be longer at the cost of losing a full day halfway through.   
The question is whether Fogg could have made productive use of the  
extra 18 minutes per day.

If the assertion is that excursions of up to an hour are invisible,  
how about redefining the day to have 23 hours?  Seven billion people  
would then each pick up more than an entire extra day per month, for  
an aggregate benefit of 291 million FTEs annually.  Now there's an  
economic justification for a timekeeping change!

Anybody know if there are similar estimates of the economic benefit  
of Daylight Saving Time?

Rob