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Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

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Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#251

Post by kergonath »

ochrist wrote: post #127

The article says that "Nuuk is in Greenland, and is part of the greater EU cinematic universe." It is correct that Greenland is part of Denmark, and Denmark is a member of EU. But Greenland voted several years ago to stay out of the EU.

> It is correct that Greenland is part of Denmark, and Denmark is a member of EU. But Greenland voted several years ago to stay out of the EU.

Greenland is still part of the EU’s overseas countries and territories. It’s not like it’s in a different universe.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#252

Post by vikingerik »

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.

Moon-dwelling Muslims would go by the phases of Earth, if they wanted to match Earth timing but not rely on communication with Earth. The Earth as seen from the Moon exhibits the opposite phase as the reverse. Ramadan would begin when the Moon-dweller sees the Earth as being just past full. If you wanted, you could synch it with a particular timezone on Earth, by watching for when that location on Earth (Mecca or whatever) just rotated past the terminator so it experienced sundown. (Of course none of this can be directly observed if you're on the far side.) (And I get your joke about seeing the moon when you're on it; this is the practical alternative.)

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#253

Post by helsinkiandrew »

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

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#254

Post by IggleSniggle »

ta1243 wrote: post #172
IggleSniggle wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Except Blade is part of the MCu now since Deadpool 3 But I think the analogy may be being stretched

Ahh, figures. As soon as I said it I thought it likely that Marvel had roped it in at some point.

Nothing is safe! Just wait til we get Star-Lord (Guardians of the Galaxy) accidentally facing off against some Jedi just so a writer can make some "Hans shot first" "inside" joke in some "way overshot the time travel to long ago in a galaxy far far away" plot...basically a movie to set up the joke in a trailer.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#255

Post by gorgoiler »

kccqzy wrote: post #195
gorgoiler wrote: post #166

It seems like it would be so much easier to ship the tzdb algorithm as a single C library that could do arbitrary computation. Instead, the authors prefer to use their own domain language — source files with a compiler to a binary format with a reference parser implementation. The thrust of this article is that’s mostly good enough but their domain language doesn’t include lunar information. The downside would be siz…

A lot of people appreciate the fact that whenever some random government decides to change of rule of their timezone (such as announcing DST changes), they only get a file update where the file is not powerful enough to be Turing complete instead of a C library update.

That’s a great point. For me though, these updates come via the same OS vendor channels that provided updated binaries too, so it’s not like I’m dodging a recompile.

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#256

Post by pc86 »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #147
hhdhdbdb wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That no odder than Gregorian

It's not odd as in a more unusual system, but odd in that it is widely incompatible with the calendar of most of the world, but still official calendar. Kinda like the Kodak calendar (which was instead 13 28-day months (364 days), and iirc does the off-day adjustments over the corporate winter holiday...actually pretty reasonable)

Merry Corporate Winter Holiday!

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#257

Post by alserio »

nine_k wrote: post #202
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.

This is indeed a more logical clock, as it follows the natural cycle of activity. Equally, calendars that put the end of the year at the time after harvest ("autumn"), or at the start of agricultural work ("spring") are also more logical. Positioning the beginning of a new day at noon, and a new year t a solstice, is just a technical convenience, because these are easy to detect with very simple astronomy tools.

didn't the julian/gregorian calendar started that way and drifted?

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#258

Post by sundarurfriend »

dfc wrote: post #97

Does anyone understand what was meant by "This is because almost every standard (except ISO8601, whatever) is just a file, and you can read it." Initially I thought it was because the PDF of ISO-8601 is not a file commonly distributed with operating system. But that's not unique to ISO8601, you won't find IEEE 1588-2019 or NMEA 0183 v4.11 on your computer either. For ~20$ I think I can buy a PDF of the standard from…

I believe the IEEE and others also would come under the exceptions to the "almost" - anything you'd have to make a special effort to seek out and purchase.

> Don’t let people bully you into thinking that just because something is complicated, it’s impossible. > This is because almost every standard (except ISO8601, whatever) is just a file, and you can read it.

In context, (my interpretation is that) "standard" includes things like The Time Zone Information Format [1], the GNU docs about TZ [2], etc. I think the idea is to say "the documents laying out the details of complicated things are still just documents, you can read them if you're interested and don't have to just see them as meant of domain experts. Some of them have barriers to access like the ISO documents, but even excepting those you have direct access to most everything you might want to understand, don't let the idea of standards intimidate you."

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8536.html [2] https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/TZ-Variab...

Re: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

#260

Post by karel-3d »

entuno wrote: post #80

The time zone in Palestine is a bit weird as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_the_State_of_Palestine They have DST, but it's not on fixed dates, the government just announces each year when it's going to start and end. Sometimes with less that a week's notice, which must cause all kinds of interesting problems for people.

It's in the actual article. It's tied to Ramadan.
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