My first watch was a Timex. It looked like this: It was crap, to be honest. If I remembered to wind it and set it in the morning when I got up, it would generally be no more than a minute or two wrong by the end of the day. A few years later, watching Tomorrow’s World on TV, I heard about a new technology: quartz crystal watches. In a quartz clock, electrical current is applied to a crystal of quartz.
I got a new watch. Again. I bought my last watch in 2001. There was nothing wrong with it. However, Casio brought out a new version that drops the moon phase and tide graph, and instead has 5-band radio atomic clock synchronization. As you can see, it’s not a major departure, visually speaking. The function of the buttons is slightly rearranged, the actual time is larger and easier to read, the time zones don’t have editable names, and the alarm now has a snooze function.
From the Wall St Journal: Up until two years ago, only 15 of Indiana’s 92 counties set their clocks an hour ahead in the spring and an hour back in the fall. The rest stayed on standard time all year, in part because farmers resisted the prospect of having to work an extra hour in the morning dark. But many residents came to hate falling in and out of sync with businesses and residents in neighboring states and prevailed upon the Indiana Legislature to put the entire state on daylight-saving time beginning in the spring of 2006.
Once I succeed in becoming supreme dictator, the following rules will be enforced on pain of imprisonment: All measurements will be in SI units or derived metric quantities. All dates and times will be written in ISO8601 formats, and measured in UTC. A special exemption will be made for astronomers, who will be allowed to continue to use Astronomical Time. All times will be in UTC, and hence “daylight savings” will be illegal.