Oh 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…
> Half the tourists go there by private plane. Ballmer's son took his super yacht there with a harem of models.
I’ve found the best way to deal with TZ conversions, is to use UTC as a common fulcrum. I convert the target TZ to UTC, using my local utility, then use my local TZ utility to convert from UTC to local. But I write iOS software, so I have very solid local tools at hand. It might be more problematic, on, say, a webserver. On a related note, I wrote this utility[0], some time ago. It uses the TZ map from the TZ Boundar…
You need to be careful with some circumstances. I recently had to fix up a case where someone had tried this with a recurring local date. Something needed to happen at 4am local time every day. They had converted 4am local time to UTC based on the timezone offset on the day the config was saved. This then restored incorrectly when the timezone offset changed because e.g. a DST transition.
Well, I guess I should have written in the OP, that I do both conversions at the time of the query. It's useless to try storing the UTC. It needs to be JIT.
> it feels like the year is born in the spring Then shouldn't the start of the year be when the year is "born"? Or alternatively, the end of the year when the year "dies"? January 1 is neither.
January 1 is so close to December 25 (when Jesus is believed to have been born) so if we wanted to count years since that -- and call it AD for "Anno Domini" (the Year of Our Lord) -- we could declare the year to begin on January 1st. Which is exactly what we did.
> December 25 (when Jesus is believed to have been born)
I don't think anyone actually believes Jesus was born on Dec 25.
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…
> 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…
Why don't we take it to the extreme then? Just make the time the Sun rises 6am always. And make seconds longer or shorter to adjust.
What makes it more logical? The wheel turns all the same no matter where you mark the beginning. In the Northern hemisphere, there's actually something nice about starting the year in the dead of winter: it feels like the year is born in the spring and then dies away the following winter, not unlike a lifetime.
If the year is “born in the spring” then surely you would want the year to start in the spring (if not the spring equinox, then March) and not winter?
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 goi…
Yeah. DST really boils down to tricking people to wake up earlier. But you can get all that sunshine by waking up earlier yourself at 5am. No need to force an awkward schedule change on everyone.
Only if everyone is a peasant farmer with the same crops in the same place. My activities are barely related to the height of the sun in the sky, and like the other residents of my city I don't take a ton of notice of harvest time. Bus timetables and cultural festivals are a much bigger deal (of which one in particular is indeed historically related to a harvest).
This "Day is 12 hours long" thing just doesn't work anywhere else. I live far from the equator - "Dawn" is sometimes after breakfast, and "Dusk" can happen before I get off work.
My first thought as well as a swede. And coincidentally one of the things my old Kenyan classmate found the most strange about Sweden was the fact that the length of day was not even close to constant. That and when I explained to him that the sun being up doesn’t necessarily mean warmer weather, in the winter it’s practically takes the temperature further from zero as sun means no warming clouds…
didn't the julian/gregorian calendar started that way and drifted?
Of course not. Gregorian Calendar didn't drift, it just fixed drift in Julian calendar, which was like a couple of weeks by 1582. And "new year" in Julian calendar was 1st of January, same as now. It was inherited from previous Roman tradition, because Romans already had the custom to mark 1st of January as a new year, because since 153 BCE it was the date when consuls were inaugurated. So it's an entirely political…
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.
Traditional Japanese timekeeping kind of did both. The "am" and "pm" time periods started at midnight and noon, but the clocks themselves started at dawn. The hours counted down from hour 9 to hour 4 (they did not use 3-1). Each of the hours was approximately two modern hours, but their individual lengths changed every two weeks to keep the periods aligned with the sun. The twelve hours on the linear clock dials ran: 6,5,4,9,8,7,6,5,4,9,8,7 (and then a final 6 to match the first six, since it was a linear instead of circular dial).
Oh 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…
> Half the tourists go there by private plane. Ballmer's son took his super yacht there with a harem of models. Sounds great apart from that bit.