idea of the day for the freelance market – daylight schmavings time
a personalized alarm clock that asks the user to answer two questions:
- 1. Sunrise should occur at: _______
- 2. I want to wake up __________ (hours/minutes) after sunrise.
so for example, one might answer:
- 1. Sunrise should occur at: 6:30 am
- 2. I want to wake up 1.5 hours after sunrise.
and then the alarm would go off based on whenever sunrise was set to happen each day, but it would always tell you it was 8:00.
the sun would therefore set at different times throughout the year (silly sun), but you would always wake up at the same time lightwise, and probably automatically get more sleep in the winter, which you arguably need.
the clock would probably need another feature where it automatically translates for you between your time and “sucker” time. so you can go: “jim wants to meet for drinks at what he says is 7:00 pm. what time is that for sane people?”
it says: about 5:45. (today in portland, sunrise was 7:51, so the offset for my example would be -1:21. i think the clock should round a bit to avoid making people think of time as complex math, but there could be an anal adjustment setting.)
you go: ok, i guess i can be there by 6 or so. set an alarm for 5.
and then you call jim like “hey, i’ll be there, but i might be 15 or 20 minutes late, k? see you then.”
i think that would be hella fun.
yesterday tif and i were talking about how the bitch of DST is adjusting to a new schedule, but then this morning i was like “yeah, but at least it reminds me that time is totally arbitrary so i should just decide on my OWN when i think the day starts and be like ‘ok! it’s 9 now! go to work!’ ”
and that’s oneathose things that makes you go “hmmm….”
i also recently had an idea for an alarm clock that is just a timer.
like, you set it for 8 hours, and when you go to bed, you hit it to start the countdown.
this allows you to self-enforce “enough sleep”, and creates an incentive to go to bed on time if you want to get up on time that isn’t there otherwise.
so maybe i’m going into the alarm clock business. :)
note to self and all those who are so far able to interpret such babble: clocks are pockets for time.
November 8th, 2007 at 3:59 am
Hey, I really like both of these ideas. I was thinking, though, that you shouldn’t have to put in the sunrise time. I mean, ephemeris are hard to calculate, but computers are good at calculating things, and nowadays, clocks are very stupid computers.
Since the most natural way to implement this (without selling a special-purpose device) is as a Java applet on a web phone, you can have your phone ask its cell tower for its latitude and longitude (best not to assume people have GPS, and the nearest cell tower is almost certainly ‘close enough’) and then just calculate the ephemeris information.
I would love to have this.
Actually, to get really good ephemeris info, you usually want to do multibody calculations – the more the better. You could have options to set alarms based on sunset, moonrise, moonset, the presence of Jupiter aligned with Mars, or whatever. But maybe that would be overly complicated.
November 8th, 2007 at 6:11 am
I guess you really only need to calculate sunrise and sunset times. This looks easy:
http://users.electromagnetic.net/bu/astro/sunrise-set.php