The standard trope when talking about timezones is to rattle off falsehoods programmers believe about them. These lists are only somewhat enlightening – it’s really hard to figure out what truth is just from the contours of falsehood.
So here’s an alternative approach. I’m gonna show you some weird timezones. In fact, the weirdest timezones. They’re each about as weird as timezones are allowed to get in some way.
↫ Ulysse Carion
The reason why timezones are often weird is not only things like the shape of countries dictating where the actual timezones begin and end, but also because of politics. A lot of politics. The entirety of China runs on Beijing time, even though it covers five geographical timezones. Several islands in the Pacific were forced by their colonisers to run on insanely offset timezones because it made exploiting them easier. Time in Europe is political, too – countries like The Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Spain should really be in the same time zone as the UK, but adopted UTC+1 because it aligns better with the rest of mainland Europe.
Although anything is better than whatever the hell Dutch Time was.
Then there is, of course, daylight savings, which is a whole pointless nightmare in and of itself that should be abolished. Daylight savings rules and exceptions alone cover a ton of the oddities and difficulties with timezones, which is reason enough to get rid of it, aside from all the other possible issues, but a proposal to abolish it in the EU has sadly stalled.
We should ditch it all and switch to metric time.
https://metric-time.com/
I have no idea what’s going on there either. It seems like a good idea though. lol
Flatland_Spider,
Yeah, I always found it really weird that metric went in and fixed so many legacy units, except for time.
Not going to happen now though.
It would also mess up some other SI units built around it. For example, one watt is the amount of power developed by 1 joule of energy in 1 second.
daedalus,
Yes, but all of those units are secondary derivative ones. Had metric supplied the units for time, the derivative units could also be defined accordingly.
I’m thankful metric replaced so many arbitrary unit ratios, but leaving time on the table was a missed opportunity. We can’t really fix it now, but conceivably at the beginning we could have. And while we’re at it, I would go further and stop using 360 degree circles too. One full circle == 1.00. half circle == 0.50 (or 1/2 naturally), two circles = 2.00, etc. Instead of learning everything in terms of degrees, students would learn angles in terms of the fractions of a circle they actually represent, eliminating the need to learn and use a conversion factor.
Also, the base unit pi should have been defined in terms of a full circle rather than half of one, which is weird and unintuitive when you think about it. Of course students everywhere use and learn pi just because convention says so, but defining pi in terms of a whole circle would have made a lot more sense for a base unit.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/let-s-use-tau-it-s-easier-than-pi/
So instead of saying 5.5 rotations == 11*pi, we could say 5.5 rotations == 5.5*tau. It also cleans up the 2*pi factors in a lot of math & physics. It’s a shame we didn’t do it like this from the start.
These gripes carry over into modern software like blender. Expressing things in terms of whole rotations is the most obvious and intuitive way to represent angles, but due to legacy units, we’ve become reliant on interfaces that force us to use weird multipliers 🙁
I don’t think Flatland_Spider was expecting this conversation to come out of his post, haha.
I think it’s just that 360 degrees and time are related.
Some used 360 days in a year.
Lennie Silver Supporter,
Well yes I appreciate your insight into it’s origin. However I’d still say that doesn’t make it a good unit. The values don’t even match with any serious level of accuracy. There’s ~1.5% error between the day of year and rotation, so we still end up having to convert between them. This completely nullifies the scientific benefit of defining an angle as the number of days into the year. If that’s not enough, planetary orbits have eccentricities that physically imply the relationship between time and angle is fundamentally nonlinear. Earth’s eccentricity is 0.0167086…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_orbit
While not the biggest deal in the world, it does suggest that the 360 scale doesn’t even have scientific merit when used to measure the very orbit that inspired its use. Using unit value of 1 is more intuitive and cleaner. It would also have the benefit of being a universal unit that doesn’t require a civilization to have lived on earth to appreciate it.
Not saying it’s a good thing, just was trying to point out the origin.
My gut feeling is metric time makes a lot of sense.
But it might depend on implementation.
Lennie,
I don’t have the impression that things are going to change. Society wouldn’t accept it. It’s just observations, but it’s too late to change already established norms. That english units are still prevalent in the US speaks to just how regressive we are and how hard it is to change even when it’s clearly beneficial to do so.
DST is causing health problems twice a year due to sleep pattern disruption in the working class. There has been lots of studies on the subject, a short web search gives loads of examples.
Agreed. And due to being trading partners, Canada won’t do it until the USA does. Wish everyone would just have the political will to make it happen.
And speaking of weird time zones – our little buddy Newfoundland sitting 30 mins ahead of Atlantic. And Atlantic time is much to the bewilderment of USA vendors I sometimes work with. So when I tell them about Newfoundland, they are totally astounded.
Which, is amazing to visit and marry into. And if you haven’t seen, watch “You Are Here: A Come From Away Story”.
Why add the bizarre anti-colonisation rant? The original article said nothing like that, seems like it was added just for clickbait purposes.
Colonisation was the reason behind the weird timezones, and it was set up that way to make exploiting the colonies and its people easier. Those are just facts. Not my problem if that offends your delicate sensibilities.
Well not really…
Standardised time was a consequence of Trains.
Great Western Railway in England was the first to standardise time in November 1840 because it stopped trains arriving before they set off and helped ensure you could have a consistent schedule where time passed the same on the train as the place you got on and got off.
So as other nations (colonial or not) started to implement railways, they too standardised. Later that then got applied to nautical timezones. Various nations have fiddled with the system for various reasons since, but the reason for introduction was almost universal.
“but adopted UTC+1 because it aligns better with the rest of mainland Europe”
No, it was because of Nazi occupation, to be on the same timezone as Berlin :
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-Britain-and-France-differ-in-time-zones
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bpjgfz/why_was_france_given_a_zone_of_occupation_in/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_European_Time#History
I don’t know… the strangest ones, imho, are the ones that literally can not be encoded in the tzinfo. Why? because they are the result of a yearly decision on what to do with leap year. Should we do it or nah? Some Caribbean countries for years would do this. It would just randomly announce the day of the US daylight savings switch that it was or was not going along. It seemed to be random, no one really knew what was going to happen, most people didn’t know. Oh and sometimes they would wait a period of time after the US switch date like a week or two to retroactively declare the time switch happened. And since it was via radio, sometimes the radio stations disagreed on what had happened and some would report a time change and others would say there was no time change. Fun fun fun.
I verbally said: WTF.
That’s crazy.
Lennie,
Yeah. The utility of time stems from it being consistent, otherwise it really mucks things up. I don’t even like the idea of having different time zones, but if we’re going to have them they should at least be consistent. Making time so malleable that nobody is able to write up a schedule for future times it is crazy. It creates chaos in databases that need time for record keeping purposes.
Spain switched away from the same timezone as the UK & Portugal because Franco wanted Spain to be in the same timezone as Nazi Germany. Occasionally, there has been discussion to switch back – the argument for is that it aligns better with Spain’s geographical position. The most compelling argument against is that it keeps Spain within the core EU time. Typically, there are some people who want to keep things as they are because they are Francoists or Nazis.
Dutch time:
>The exact time zone was GMT +0h 19m 32.13s until 1 July 1937, when it was simplified to GMT +0h 20m. When Germany occupied the Netherlands in World War II, Berlin Time was adopted, and this has been retained ever since.
You’re welcome.