[tz] Vadsø, Norway mayor wants 26-hour days

[Arthur David Olson]

 I'd go with variable-length hours: 24 hours of 55 minutes and two (13 a.m.
and 13 p.m.) of 60.

    @dashdashado

On Sat, Apr 13, 2024 at 6:42 PM Paul Eggert via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:

> On March 20 Wenche Pedersen, the mayor of Vadsø municipality, Norway,
> asked[1] the European Commission to issue a directive allowing Norway to
> create a separate time zone for the northern part of Norway. Days in the
> new time zone would contain 26 hours instead of the usual 24.
>
> This request is part of the "MOREtime" project. Mayor Pedersen wrote:
>
> > ... we aim to celebrate and promote this unique way of life, offering
> individuals the opportunity to enjoy more quality time engaging in
> activities such as fishing, hunting, learning new languages, or simply
> being with loved ones. By having our own certified time zone within the EU,
> we hope to attract more young people, not only from Norway but also from
> around the world, to discover and settle in this adventurous area.
>
> Recently the mayor's proposal has been covered by several major news
> organizations. When asked how the 26-hour day would actually work, the
> mayor replied "We haven't thought a lot about that. The clock will go
> from 12 to 13 ... and we have to see how this will go. I don't think
> they're going to say yes so we haven't thought about all the details."[2]
>
> Longtime readers of the time zone mailing list might remember that in
> 2019 a resident of Sommarøy, Norway petitioned his parliamentarian to
> abolish civil time in his town, something that also made the news.[3]
> However, the Sommarøy proposal was by a private individual and was
> easily implementable via tzdata by creating a new UTC or LMT zone with
> abbreviation "-00" or "LMT", whereas the Vadsø proposal is by the mayor,
> and would require changes to tzcode and would therefore be considerably
> harder to support.
>
> Although it's unlikely that the Vadsø proposal will go anywhere, it's
> helpful to think of how timekeeping changes like this might be
> accommodated by the TZDB project, as similar proposals might happen in
> the future. I see several ways to implement 26-hour days, falling into
> two major categories.
>
>
> Category I: Shorten civil-time hours so that there are 26 civil-time
> hours in a standard-length (SI) day. Four possible ways to do this are:
>
> A. Civil-time seconds are 12/13 s (i.e., 12/13 of an SI second, or about
> 0.923 s), so that civil-time minutes and hours are both 12/13 of their
> SI counterparts.
>
> B. Civil-time seconds are the same as before, but civil-time minutes are
> 60 * 12/13 s (i.e., about 55.38 s).
>
> C. Civil-time seconds and minutes are the same as before, but civil-time
> hours are 60 * 12/13 min (i.e., about 55.38 SI minutes).
>
> D. Civil-time minutes are 60 * sqrt(12/13) s (about 57.65 s), and
> civil-time hours are 60 * sqrt(12/13) civil-time minutes (i.e., about
> 57.65 civil-time minutes).
>
>
> Category II: Adjust day lengths so that all or most days contain 26 SI
> hours. Three possibilities here are:
>
> E. Civil-time days are 26 SI hours, and the calendar gradually falls
> further and further behind the Gregorian calendar.
>
> F. Civil-time days are 26 SI hours, but skip every 13th day so that days
> stay roughly synchronized with the Gregorian calendar.
>
> G. At the end of every day, move clocks backward two hours, from 24:00
> to 22:00, so that timestamps from 22:00:00 through 23:59:59 repeat. Do
> this consistently for eleven days, thus moving clocks backward a total
> of 22 hours. On the twelfth day move clocks forward 22 hours instead,
> from 24:00 to 22:00 the next day. Repeat this cycle indefinitely. This
> way, eleven days out of thirteen contain 26 hours, and the next two days
> combined also contain 26 hours - 24 hours in the twelfth day and 2 hours
> in the thirteenth.
>
>
> Of these methods something like (G) would be the most compatible with
> computerized timekeeping, as (G) conforms to POSIX-1.202x Draft 4.1[4]
> whereas (A) through (F) do not. (G) avoids timestamps like 25:30; G's
> hours, minutes or seconds are all of the usual lengths; and (G) contains
> only transitions that are like daylight-saving transitions that
> computerized timekeeping can already deal with.
>
> Although a downside of (G) is that at times the sun will be at its
> zenith at midnight, I assume Vadsø residents are already accustomed to
> midnight suns so this disadvantage is relatively minor for them. Another
> downside of (G) is that clocks will never go "from 12 to 13" as the
> mayor requested, but given the major technical difficulties of (A)
> through (F) I hope the mayor would appreciate that (G) may be the best
> we can practically hope for in today's standardized and computerized world.
>
> Unfortunately even (G) would require some changes to tzcode and tzdata
> to become practical, and it would take many years for these changes to
> propagate to devices in common use in Vadsø. So, unless Vadsø residents
> are prepared to change their clocks by hand every day for the next
> several years, it does not appear that the mayor's proposal will be
> practical any time soon.
>
> I am sending this email to the time zone mailing list, as perhaps
> someone on the list can think of even better ways to implement the
> mayor's request. I am also cc'ing this email to Mayor Pedersen to give
> her a heads-up about this analysis, should it ever be needed in Vadsø.
>
> [1]: https://kommunikasjon.ntb.no/files/17848798/18066114/57109/no
> [2]:
>
> https://www.politico.eu/article/norway-arctic-region-asks-eu-commission-for-26-hour-day/
> [3]: https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2019-June/028154.html
> [4]: https://www.opengroup.org/austin/
>
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