https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandringham_time was a crazy one
Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone
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Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone
#22Nah, the weirdest time zone is Africa/Addis_Ababa, which nobody in Ethiopia follows. Instead the locals offset the time by 6 hours. So the AM cycle starts at dawn (i.e. 6am), and the PM cycle starts at dusk (i.e. 6pm). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Ethiopia
Sounds like it could be a candidate. Any system which can't be expressed in standard software is stranger than every system that can be.
Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone
#23In my opinion, the best way to see it is not to pretend their are weird timezones. It is not because most of the world do summer time and that when they do they have a 1h transitions that we should take it for granted. This article do not mention the Chatham Standard Time Zone from Chatham Islands archipelago in NZ which is 45 minutes ahead of New Zealand Daylight Time, nor the Central Western Standard Time (Australi…
> I wonder if other trains have a dedicated timezone?
They used to, railway time is how our timezone system came to be.
Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone
#24What I like about the tz database is that's it's technically a diff of a diff. It stores the difference across history, of the difference of each timezone with UTC. Right? So it's a diff^2. But! The tz database gets updates! So those commits are diffs of diffs of diffs, or diff^3.
Can we go further? You bet! It has a changelog, and that changelog is stored in git, so commits to the tz changelog are diff^4: they are changes to the list of changes to the list of changes to the list of changes to UTC.
Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone
#25Oh wow, what a coincidence, I was just looking at Lord Howe Island on a map of species conservation.
For anyone who doesn't know: Lord Howe Island is the last true paradise on Earth.
I went there on holidays a few years back based on two travel review recommendations. Both were by professional travellers that had been to pretty much everywhere, and both said it's the best place they've ever been. The reasoning was that every other tropical island has "something" wrong with it. Pushy locals trying to sell you stuff, sharks in the water, malaria, pollution, crime, poverty, or something.
Lord Howe is about as safe as it's possible to get, civilised beyond belief, pristine, unpolluted, etc...
It's one of the last places in the world with undamaged, unbleached coral reefs in protected waters. The diving there is just unbelievable, more beautiful than any Planet Earth documentary you've seen.
Birds nest on the beach, and you have to step over them gently because there's thousands of them and the juveniles can't fly yet.
I met the police officer of the island and pointedly asked him when was the last time he had to deal with crime.
"Crime... crime... let's see." he said, counting on his fingers slowly "Umm... seven years ago there was a domestic violence report because a tourist slapped his wife in an argument."
The hotel doors have no locks. There's $500 in cash in a tin next to a shack full of equipment on the beach with a "honesty system" rental price list sign next to it. The bloke selling you coke cans at the milk bar bought it with the $20 million he made in the stock market. Half the tourists go there by private plane. Ballmer's son took his super yacht there with a harem of models. And on, and on.
If you ever get the opportunity to visit: GO!
Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone
#26I kind of thing a half hour daylight savings difference instead of an hour is a pretty low bar for the weirdest timezone. Almost any of the others are weirder: Antarctica/Troll definitely sounds weirder. The Moroccan and Gazan timezones that can't be expressed by the system as it was written because at least that means that they have some different kind of a rule, even if lunar time is well known. Same with the ones…
> But I do agree with leap seconds: it's absolute trivia, not a useful thing for a programmer to know.
By and large, I agree with this.
But I've always found it a bit funny when a large organisation [1] says "our servers have sub-millisecond timing accuracy, thanks to GPS synchronization and these PCIe rubidium atomic clock cards we've developed" while at the same time saying [2] "we smear leapseconds over the course of a day, in practice it doesn't matter if a server's time is off by ±0.5 seconds"
[1] https://engineering.fb.com/2021/08/11/open-source/time-appli... [2] https://engineering.fb.com/2020/03/18/production-engineering...
Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone
#27I wonder why the dst transition hours are encoded in local time. Wouldn't it be easier to do it in UTC? There is no need to differentiate between the same hour before and after change then.
Perhaps to decouple DST transition rules from other time-zone changes. So if the time-zone offset is adjusted for some other reason then the DST rule does not also need to be changed.
Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone
#28I wonder why the dst transition hours are encoded in local time. Wouldn't it be easier to do it in UTC? There is no need to differentiate between the same hour before and after change then.
Suppose in local time (which is, say, UTC+3) the DST transition is on something like "last Sunday of 10th month at 02:00", which might then in UTC become "last Saturday of 10th month at 23:00, except if that Saturday is the last day of the month, then the second to last Saturday". In effect, if conversion to UTC causes the transition to move to a different day, it might also be on a different week or month, causing headache.
(Or did you ask something else entirely? It wouldn't be the first time I misunderstood things about time zones.)
Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone
#29Oddly was just reading something yesterday and it mentioned that in the UK there were years during the war where we had double DST for energy saving reasons. (although we went between 1 hour and 2 hours, so it was only really a change compared to the norm)
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-extreme-daylight-s...
Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone
#30Along with Kathmandu for weird offsets is Australian Central Western Standard Time (UTC +8:45), used in a tiny area of Australia with the largest town being Eucla (population 37). Being mainly within Western Australia (which doesn't use daylight savings) but partially within South Australia (which does use daylight savings) there has also been informal use of UTC+9:45
Historically there was also Dublin mean time (UTC -00:25.21) and Warsaw mean time (UTC+1:24)