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-... [3]: https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2019-June/028154.html [4]: https://www.opengroup.org/austin/