448: Good Morning

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Good Morning
As my standard, I use going to sleep at midnight and waking up at 8 AM.
Title text: As my standard, I use going to sleep at midnight and waking up at 8 AM.

Explanation[edit]

Both characters have irregular sleeping schedules (possibly because they are programmers). As such, their circadian rhythms have become out of sync with one another, and probably out of sync with everyone else in their own timezone. They therefore experience something similar to the "jet lag" experience by travelers going from one timezone to another.

The title text clarifies that they are using "going to sleep at midnight and waking up at 8 AM" as their standard of measurement. If the drowsy man was "in Honolulu" yesterday and has woken up "in Taipei," it means he has gone to sleep 6 hours later than yesterday, and is now also waking up 6 hours later than yesterday (if you don't take the International Date Line into consideration).

This comic may (like in 320: 28-Hour Day) be a commentary of the 28 hour day where a person shift their sleep patterns to 6 x 28 hours a week instead of the usual 7 x 24 hours.

Transcript[edit]

[A drowsy Hairy walks over to Cueball on a computer.]
Hairy: *Yawn* Good morning from Taipei.
Cueball: You're drifting west. You were in Honolulu just yesterday.
Our sleep schedules are so messed up that's it's easiest to just refer to where our internal clocks seem to be.


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Discussion

If you try to take the IDL into account, would he have time-traveled in his sleep? Gained 18 hrs? Or lost a day? Saibot84 (talk) 14:50, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

If you use sleeping as the only separation of days then for them time would probably go slower since due to pulling all-nighters they will probably sleep less often than normal. Meaning that from an outside observer he has traveled back in time. Tharkon (talk) 19:09, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

If someone would make a website to compute this, just based on the time of waking, I would definitely use it before getting up each morning. 108.162.219.7 00:58, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

Randall has made just such a site! Xkcd.com/now Bbruzzo (talk) 13:20, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

A few tiny scratches hint at what may be (one of?) the only instances of human eyes being drawn. --172.68.35.71 22:56, 14 July 2016 (UTC)