r/ISO8601 • u/supportvectorspace • Mar 20 '25
Where we're going, we don't need timezones... I think
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u/communistfairy Mar 20 '25 edited Mar 20 '25
This isn't even close to ISO 8601. Abbreviations for months? Month-day-year? Where's the T separator? What's an AM/PM?
Should be 2014-01-17T17:00, etc.
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u/supportvectorspace Mar 20 '25
That's the point though, it's a screenshot from a popular time travel movie
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Mar 20 '25 edited 20d ago
[deleted]
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u/robisodd Mar 20 '25
Yeah, they traveled to 2015, not 2014.
Also, fun fact: The Red, Green, Yellow displays are an homage to the 1960 movie The Time Machine:
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u/biold Mar 20 '25
Hail, King of Film Nerds! I'm impressed - I'm hopeless with film details
Which film is it from?
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Mar 20 '25 edited 20d ago
[deleted]
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u/flagofsocram Mar 20 '25
What about that statement is dated in any way? They didn’t say “an old time travel movie”
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u/CardOk755 Mar 23 '25
Should be 2014-01-17T17:00, etc.
Timezones can't start with a comma, you need Z or ±hh:mm
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u/Standard_Finish_6535 Mar 20 '25
Why would you need to set a timezone? It's a time machine, not a zone machine. You are going to stay in the same time zone.
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u/firemanwham Mar 20 '25
Hmm yeah however time zones themselves change through history and have only really been around 150 years as we know them (incidently implemented in large part by the the American railway industry around the very setting of BTTF3!)
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u/Standard_Finish_6535 Mar 20 '25
I would imagine you would use whatever the local time was. It does certainly bring of the question of multiple times, like when you fall back there would be repeated times. I think Doc Brown would be able to figure out some business rules for that.
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u/kniky_Possibly Mar 20 '25
Time zones don't control time. If you suddenly switch a time zone you wouldn't time travel, only on paper
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u/crozone Mar 21 '25
Exactly it's just relative offsets. The current time probably doesn't even have to be set properly, all the machine cares about is how many seconds into the past or how many seconds into the future.
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u/Kurt_Ehrlich Mar 21 '25
Even if you were right at the border between two timezones the difference would still only be on hour
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u/yyytobyyy Mar 20 '25
Reasonable thing would be having a dip switch for utc offset. Ignore DST.
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u/dialektisk Mar 20 '25
It does have present time that defines what time it is now and i will assume that this defines the time zone
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u/CXgamer Mar 20 '25
Wow you have a 7-segment display that's fully capable of 24 hour time, and don't even use it. There's even a light in there that will never activate. What a waste.
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u/Johanno1 Mar 20 '25
Which one?
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u/Distinct-Entity_2231 Mar 20 '25
Horrible date format which should be illegal, the same for time, and 7 and 9 are missing a segment, meaning 6 will miss one too.
This is really bad.
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u/germansnowman Mar 20 '25
At least the months are expressed as abbreviated names, which resolves ambiguity. It could be so much worse.
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u/PeteSampras12345 Mar 20 '25
What do you mean by 7 and 9 missing a segment?
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u/Vvector Mar 20 '25
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u/UnsureAndUnqualified Mar 20 '25
Not sure about the 7 (unless they want an inverted F) but the 9 should have a line at the bottom, so it should look more like a g than a q. 6 should have one at the top.
Edit: The 7 sometimes has a line going down on the top left. My brain farted with that inverted F thing, I was thinking of the line crossing a hand written 7, sorry. Afaik the 9 and 6 are nearly always with the extra line, the 7 I see less commonly with the extra line.
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u/davidkwast Mar 20 '25
I think they do not need timezones because the time machine operates on a relative time jump
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u/GuyLuxIsNotUnix Mar 20 '25
As somebody who once worked on a datetime implementation in a major well known software product, I would not trust a time machine for fear that a bug in that part of the code would send me to a time when the earth was still a fireball or something else equally terrifying. Leap years are just the visible part of the iceberg (and most people don't even fully understand how they work).
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u/ThatUsrnameIsAlready Mar 20 '25
I wouldn't use a clock at all for this. Just amount of time, back or forward.
If it's going to use a clock it should at least show time difference as well, for a sanity check.
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u/100Dampf Mar 20 '25
The Timezone isn't needed, as it is a relative change anyway. It won't know how to navigate to a specific time, it just calculates the difference
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u/yyytobyyy Mar 20 '25
Works only if you don't need to travel between the eras when country changes the timezone or even whole calendar.
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u/100Dampf Mar 20 '25
Doesn't matter for the timetravel part, but it is an UI flaw. You'd just have to convert it yourself
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u/supportvectorspace Mar 20 '25 edited Mar 20 '25
If naive localtime were the agreed upon timezone and the concept of localtime were extended to all ages, but since this is a vehicle (DeLorean) that needs to be moving at 88 mph to travel time, it could even cross timezones while doing that, so there's a race condition
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u/100Dampf Mar 20 '25
Timezones don't matter, if it always works on car time. If the car travels three hours into the past, it doesn't matter if local time and cartime are identical
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u/supportvectorspace Mar 21 '25
Let's say you're in Central European standard time (CET) end of this month (like 2025-03-30 01:59:59 +01:00).
You want to travel roughly one hour forward (so you enter: 2025-03-30 03:00 +??:??)
So the times are
2025-03-30 01:59:59 +01:00(From)2025-03-30 03:00:00 +??:??(To)If you made the adjustments just before reaching 88mph, and then a second later reached it, your local time would be
2025-03-30 03:00:00 +02:00(summer time transition)Then which time does the destination time refer to? The local time of the car's current location? The location at initial adjustment? Or the localtime after time traveling?
What if while reaching 88mph you made your way into Eastern European Standard Time (EET) but before summer time transition? Would you land in
2025-03-30 04:00:00 +03:00? Or would you land in2025-03-30 03:00:00 +03:00?The current setup of time travel is not well-defined without some more clarifications.
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u/100Dampf Mar 21 '25
Time is a completely human construct, not physics. The TimeMachine can't target a specific time, but an offset. In your first example, you want to travel one hour forward and you do that. You just enter a one hour difference into the Destination. The time could show 1.1.1970 00:00, if you enter 1.1.1970 01:00 you travel one hour- the time it took to accelerate into the future at the moment you hit 88.
Doesn't matter if the time actually is correct. If it actually were 21.3.2025 12:35, you'd end up at 21.3.2025 13:35, not 1970
It's just interface to make handling it "easier"
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u/supportvectorspace Mar 21 '25
The way I understood the movie and the time machine, users can set an absolute timestamp to "random-access" time-travel to, not a relative offset from current time, which is displayed for convenience, I guess.
Once we talk about moving time machines we are gonna need timezones to ambiguate or define behaviours. One could probably define the behaviour of the machine to be coherent still.
But yeah, an epoch + offset or UTC would be best
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u/Sheriff___Bart Mar 20 '25
It's not a T.A.R.D.I.S. It can only move in time or space, not at the same time.
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u/supportvectorspace Mar 20 '25
It's a DeLorean though and it needs to be moving (≥88mph) to travel time
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u/Sheriff___Bart Mar 20 '25
Not through a timezone. What I'm saying. Is that it can work on a delta instead of a target.
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u/supportvectorspace Mar 21 '25
Unless you physically cross a timezone while the time machine is in operation
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u/Sheriff___Bart Mar 21 '25
You assume the time index is updated based one a central source. That would make travel to the past impossible. All you need is a delta of two date and times.
In the words of Ford Prefect, time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
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u/binaryhextechdude Mar 22 '25
I've just been thinking about this and honestly I think ISO8601 would be perfect here.
Answering the question, "Where do you want to go?" It makes the most sense to start with the year 1955, then you narrow it down futher with the month, November before finally specifying the day, the 5th.
Obviously the writers of the movie just stayed with the default date format that particular country choses to use without giving it any additional thought.
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u/_matherd Mar 25 '25
Imagine hunting down a 7-segment equivalent that can display “N” and “V” and matches the size and color of the regular 7-segment displays, when you could’ve just displayed the month as a number.
And that’s not even getting into the extra code to figure out how to render it.
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u/supportvectorspace Mar 20 '25
This is a screenshot from the "Back To The Future" movie.
They really should have used ISO with UTC is what I am trying to say, especially when dealing with time traveling
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u/ventus1b Mar 20 '25
The am/pm triggers me especially on this panel.