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Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

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Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#261

Post by chgs »

wakahiu wrote: post #180
guidedlight wrote: post #18

Nah, 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

This is common across East Africa, including Kenya where I’m from. The night ends at 6:00AM, with 7:00AM being saa moja (first hour) of the day. Similarly, the day ends at 6:00PM (thenashara). Intuitively, this clock makes much more sense than the English clock. There’s rarely confusion between times because it’s embedded in the language.

Everyone I work with in Kenya uses standard dates and times. It’s a requirement when you work internationally.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#262

Post by jandrese »

grishka wrote: post #204

Another fun fact about timezones: if the government abolishes DST one year, and then moves some timezones an hour the next year, it creates a wild mess. Especially when you're building an Android app. Especially when it's the early 2010s so the timezone database is built into the system image but most devices that run your app don't receive system updates at all. Instead of picking the timezone with the correct offse…

I worked with a group of people once who just didn't care about timezones. All (ok, most) clocks were set to local time, but with some random timezone, about half of the time it was GMT, and 2/3 of the remainder were our actual timezone, but the rest were totally random. I had to write a "figure out what the time actually is" routine in my code because it was such a pervasive problem.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#263

Post by jerska »

Buttons840 wrote: post #191
PopAlongKid wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it's all just an automated and finite offset, there's no reason for daylight savings policies to hew to 60 minutes adjustments. For as long as clock sync for electronic devices has been common, I have suggested to anyone who would listen that we should adjust forward 10 minutes on the first Sunday of each month for six months, and then back 10 minutes on the first Sunday of the other six months. A ten minute cha…

Moving up and down at a linear rate would result in a saw-tooth-like wave, but the length of days change in a sine wave. Why not have the clocks sync themselves to sunrise time based on their timezone and latitude? I don't think this would be much different, in practice, than changing times at a linear rate.

Adding to my sibling comment, time is also mostly used as a coordination system. Being offset by a few minutes would make aligning meetings with your remote coworker an even bigger nightmare than it is now.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#264

Post by ak217 »

At some point the correct solution is for engineers to collectively agree to refuse to model government-prescribed deviations from convention. Or, put more obliquely, provide more feedback to make it more obvious who is bearing the cost of the complexity of these requirements.

It's a social problem and it calls for a social solution.

I know, there's a lot of disagreement around where the point in question is, but it would serve us well if more engineers were more assertive about stating their opinion on where it is.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#265

Post by lxgr »

grishka wrote: post #204

Another fun fact about timezones: if the government abolishes DST one year, and then moves some timezones an hour the next year, it creates a wild mess. Especially when you're building an Android app. Especially when it's the early 2010s so the timezone database is built into the system image but most devices that run your app don't receive system updates at all. Instead of picking the timezone with the correct offse…

This makes me wonder: Should NTP servers broadcast the tz database...? (And should the tz database support a stable but turing-complete scripting/bytecode language?)

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#266

Post by dpassens »

lazide wrote: post #199
dpassens wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But that's completely different from saying it's strange because software doesn't accommodate it.

Is it?

Yes, it is, because in your phrasing the fact that nobody else keeps time that way is the cause and lack of support in software the effect. The comment that I originally responded to is phrased as though lack of software support is the cause of weirdness.

I object to the latter since software is not the source of truth, the social practices it aims to encode are. It is perfectly reasonable to say that this particular practice is so rare that it is out of scope, but this makes tzdb a not quite correct approximation of reality, rather than reality an approximation of tzdb.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#268

Post by layer8 »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #253
guidedlight wrote: post #18

Nah, 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

Thats almost as confusing as the Nautical Day. Where a day on ship started at noon the "previous" day - with PM proceeding AM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautical_time#Nautical_day

That’s also how Julian days work, they go from noon to noon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#269

Post by an-allen »

Obligatory - David Olsen and Paul Eggert - thank you for your service. The world literally works because of your efforts and I don’t feel people really appreciate the ridiculous man made problem that you spent your labours to help resolve.

If there was a Hall of Fame of OSS contributors - you would be in it sitting on top of a mountain. The Time Zone problem is a unique problem in that its not just a problem of whats the time in this location - its what was the time in this location 20, 50, 100 years ago. The level of scholarship and historical research you put into this library is really quite unmatched. Amazing folks you two. The whole world quite literally sits on the shoulders of you two giants.

“Daylight Saving Time was first suggested as a joke by Benjamin Franklin in his whimsical essay “An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light” published in the Journal de Paris (1784-04-26). Not everyone is happy with the results.” - Paul Eggert

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#270

Post by booleandilemma »

ak217 wrote: post #264

At some point the correct solution is for engineers to collectively agree to refuse to model government-prescribed deviations from convention. Or, put more obliquely, provide more feedback to make it more obvious who is bearing the cost of the complexity of these requirements. It's a social problem and it calls for a social solution. I know, there's a lot of disagreement around where the point in question is, but it…

This sounds good until you realize that half or more of the software engineers are people working in 3rd world countries who just need a job, or they're H-1B's working in the US who can't afford to make waves.

We would need to form some kind of global union and push back together.

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