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Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

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Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#221

Post by libraryofbabel »

brodo wrote: post #123
hprotagonist wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethiopian time keeping is peculiar all over. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_calendar The Ethiopian calendar has twelve months, all thirty days long, and five or six epagomenal days, which form a thirteenth month.

That's similar to the Shire calendar system[1]. It has twelve months of 30 days, but the missing days are not in any month. 1: https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Shire_Calendar

And also similar to the French Revolutionary calendar (1793 to 1805) which had twelve 30-day months and 5 or 6 jours complémentaires.

I like that Tolkien’s legendarium got the first mention here though.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#222

Post by toast0 »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #140
dmd wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why it's part of the greater universe, not the regular one.

Like how Spider-Man actually belongs to Sony, not Marvel, and it gets loaned back to Marvel? Or more like how Blade isn't part of the MCU, but totally belongs to Marvel?

Spider-Man belongs to Marvel, but is on conditional perpetual loan to Sony, who can optionaly loan it back to Marvel/Disney.

Sony has to release a Spider-Man movie every N months, or they lose the license, and will probably never get it again, since Marvel started making their own films and now they're part of Disney. This is why Sony keeps making reboot trilogies. Better to shovel something out than to lose the license forever. It does make a nice backstory for the Spider-Verse though.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#223

Post by iggldiggl »

crazygringo wrote: post #164
Gormo wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The logical conclusion of going down that route would be to dispense with the concept of time zones altogether, and just revert to using local solar time.

Which would make scheduling Zoom meetings or even just phone calls hell. Especially when everyone's half-hour blocks are misaligned with each other's so you can't even stack meetings efficiently.

And public transport timetables, which were the original reason timezones were introduced in the first place.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#225

Post by VyseofArcadia »

gausswho wrote: post #121

Excellent read around the acrobatics of timezone software. It really is quite flexible. It leads me to wonder. If it's all just an automated and finite offset, there's no reason for daylight savings policies to hew to 60 minutes adjustments. Couldn't a nation decide to have a continuously changing offset throughout the year? It might make their offset lookup table substantially longer, but this could 'solve' daylight…

> but this could 'solve' daylight savings time

This ignores the easiest solution to daylight savings time.

Stop doing daylight savings time.

My preferred solution would be permanent standard time rather than permanent DST, but I'll take what I can get as long as we stop changing the clocks twice a year.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#226

Post by xvedejas »

TremendousJudge wrote: post #205
wakahiu wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Since it's pretty much on the Equator it makes a lot of sense to keep time like that -- days and nights have the same duration all year long. Such a system doesn't make sense for places that have wide variations between seasons, unless you also alter the length of the hours to match (which I think was done at some point somewhere in Europe, but I can't find any references)

Even on the equator, sunrise and sunset times will vary by +/-15 minutes, because solar days are not of equal length. But yeah, close enough for imprecise use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_time

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#227

Post by kstrauser »

apelapan wrote: post #132
hocuspocus wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The naive way to do so would be via a static mapping of state to time zone but there are a few edge cases that preclude doing this More than a few, state is really the wrong resolution here, US timezones follow counties and native reservations borders. ZIP codes should probably be good enough but I'd be careful too. If your volume of addresses isn't too crazy, the robust way is to reverse geocode them and use a lib…

There used to be at least one airport in a tribal area in the US, that had the timezone of the reservation (not same as state) but the DST of the surrounding state (not same as reservation). Can't remember the code for it now, had a lot of interesting timezone issues in a previous job.

IIRC you crossed 6 time borders in 30 miles if you flew the right straight line across it.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#228

Post by School-Cotton »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #219
School-Cotton wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite a moon base, but for Muslims on the ISS: > the Malaysian government called a gathering of 150 Islamic legal scholars, scientists, and astronauts to create guidelines for Dr. Shukor. The scholars produced a fatwa, or non-binding Islamic legal opinion, intended to help future Muslim astronauts, which they translated into both Arabic and English. They wrote that in order to pray, Muslims in space should face M…

Prayer and pointing to Mecca seems pretty simple on the moon - but if Ramadan is based on when you can see the moon, it seems that Ramadan would start as soon as the person in charge walks by a window.

Yep! I think for that case the "follow the time zone of some particular place on Earth" rule would apply.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#229

Post by RegnisGnaw »

azernik wrote: post #73

The "Asia/Jerusalem" weirdness is because Daylight Savings Time is a big church-and-state issue. Religious people want the workday to be convenient for holidays that start at sunset. This led to decades (up to the mid-'00s) where Daylight Savings was the result of annual negotiations between religious and secular parties. It often caused problems when the decision wasn't made until juuuust before the transition date.…

There is no more exceptions, IDT got extended to last Sunday of October in 2013.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#230

Post by bena »

maratc wrote: post #124
rob74 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading this, and considering the limited advantages of DST (especially for a country that is relatively far to the south), I wonder why they didn't decide to scrap DST completely? Maybe they will if the EU eventually manages to do it?

I would argue that DST actually makes most sense in 30-40 degrees of latitude. With about 13 hours of sunlight in the summer, split evenly around the mid-day, it comes down to 05h30 to 18h30 under light. There are many more people who would be out there to enjoy the sunlight between 18h30 and 19h30 than there are between 05h30 and 06h30.

I really dislike this argument of "I'd rather enjoy the sun in the evening than in the morning" ignoring all of the other problems it causes.

Sunlight in the morning is useful. It's better for your sleep rhythms. It's safer for school children, etc.

And to be completely fair, I don't see that many more people "enjoying the sunlight" during the weekend when they have the entire day to do so. Like, what is the sun going down at 6 really preventing you from doing that you couldn't do otherwise?

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