I feel like placing the median point for 1 hour slightly to the left of 1 is one of those hilarious details that are just slightly outside my range of knowledge.
If it is a real results of a monte carlo simulation, then this kind of slight deviation is very likely. If you flip a bunch of coins in a row, then it is likely that heads will come up about as often as tails if the coin is fair. But it becomes decreasingly likely that the number of heads will be EXACTLY the same as the number of tails. And being at exactly 1 would be that scenario in a sense.
Sure, but that's two conditions with roughly equal odds. Compare with, say, shark attacks relative to hours of swimming. One would think it's impossible for the mean for swimmers to be lower than for those who have never entered water in their life. So, suggesting the opposite is inherently comical... but at the same time, I feel like that's not a tidy enough explanation, given Randall's history of specificity.
I've always thought the best idea is to just eliminate time zones entirely and go to a single world time. Every locality and business can set its schedule as it sees fit relative to the standard time, and no complicated time zone or DST conversions. But I do see how that would be radical for some people.
Exactly! Why do I care if I wake up at 3 AM, if my work schedule is 5 to 13? It's all arbitrary anyway: we have to check business and office hours. The sun doesn't rise at the same time in Atlanta (7:46 today) and Boston (6:54), even though they're in the same time zone. Stop pretending that 00:00 has to happen sometime near the middle of the night, and a lot of things get simpler.
How does that help? I mean, currently we have lookup tables where you can see that New York is 5 hrs behind London, so 9am in London is 4am in New York. You're proposing we move to a system where 9am is 9am everywhere, but you need a lookup table to know that while the London workday starts at 9:00, the New York workday starts at 14:00. How does that make things any easier?
yes - it doesn't remove the need to look things up - so equal there. But if something says it happens at 11:00 then it happens at 11:00 for everyone. All our clocks have the same time all the time. So after you look something up you don't have to do math to convert to your own time zone. Example: airplane departs at 2pm (1400) and lands at 8pm (2000) - you don't need to look up whether that is 8pm local time or 6 hours after takeoff. It is 6 hours after takeoff.
See also: Farm animals and dinosaurs. I am so confident that there exists children's media that involves dinosaurs driving trucks on a farm that I'm writing this without even Googling to check.