Here's to UTC

Marking the passing of yet another crazed session of clock adjustment, the empirical research is starting to stack up against the institution of daylight saving time.  The New York Times has a nice resource page on the institution (frankly preferable to the Wikipedia version), while the naysayers started last spring in analyzing the 2007 extension  of DST in the United States (Ars Technica) and have picked up steam in the days leading up to today's "spring forward" (TreeHugger, Gizmodo).

Here's a more radical approach, born of my once-upon-a-time engineer's heart: why not abolish time zones entirely and switch to a single world clock?  The British established Greenwich Mean Time as a de facto world standard back when the sun never set on the British Empire, while today we've got UTC (Universal Time, Coordinated) which conveniently bolts atomic standards onto the Greenwich system.  The time zone I've inhabited most of my life, in the eastern United States, is variously UTC-5 (during standard time) or UTC-4 (during daylight savings).  As the world becomes flatter and more interconnected, it seems far easier to schedule and plan in UTC, rather than playing the whole "how many hours ahead/behind are you" game. 

Maybe I'm just reacting to the pain of scheduling cross-country conference calls in my day job, but I'm not all that attached to the "9 to 5" work-a-day convention.  Would it really be that difficult to switch gears to just designate all scheduled actions in UTC?  Or am I imagining some Star Trek dreamworld where time is even more arbitrary than it seems today?

Here's a brief musical interlude while I contemplate "ticking away the moments that make up a dull day" ...

Scrawl -- "Clock Song" (from Bloodsucker, Feel Good All Over, 1991 / Simple Machines, 1993)