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The surprising whimsy of the Time Zone Database

muddy.jprs.me

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Re: The surprising whimsy of the Time Zone Database

#41

Post by kgwgk »

pezezin wrote: post #40

> I’ve perused the tz repository before, and I always learn something interesting. For example, during WWII Britain adopted double summer time, adding two hours to the clock in the summer and one hour in the winter. My country, Spain, did the same but never fixed it, so we are still in this "double summer time". It is one of the main reasons why Spanish people seemingly do everything later (breakfast, lunch, dinner)…

Other Western European countries like France also switched to German time during the war and kept it afterwards.

Re: The surprising whimsy of the Time Zone Database

#42

Post by ghaff »

charcircuit wrote: post #23
toast0 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here Eggert is ostensibly trying to get a sovereign government to participate in the "TZDB's requirements" and since he can't has to invent a hack to make things appear to work. Which is completely backwards and highlights precisely why I think this whole centralized database concept for this problem is flawed. Eggert is petitioning the government for a redress of greivances on behalf of more or less the entire com…

>he world has come to agreement No, it hasn't. I commonly use PT myself which doesn't fit that format. It's the timezone that the west coast of America uses which makes it very convenient if you live there instead of having to remember if the day your meeting on is with or without daylight savings. The three timezones we use here are: PT: The time of the day that all of our clocks are going to be set to. PST: The tim…

It's very common for conferences and the like to use shorthand like PT or ET. The reality is that once you start specifying standard time or daylight savings time, the people writing the announcement regularly mess up. I don't remember what the house style was at my prior company but I regularly saw people putting EST or EDT at times of the year when it wasn't correct.

Re: The surprising whimsy of the Time Zone Database

#43

Post by ithkuil »

russellbeattie wrote: post #27

Just last night some friends brought up the time change tonight and the news from British Columbia, and what the California government has or hasn't done about it currently and in the past and why we haven't just gotten rid of the system already to save us the trouble of adjusting clocks twice a year. And of course, there was instantly a heated debate about whether to permanently choose Standard Time or Daylight Savi…

What is "team DST"? Those who want permanent DST or those who want to do things as they are where DST is on for half of the year?

Re: The surprising whimsy of the Time Zone Database

#45

Post by jprs »

NewJazz wrote: post #14

Is this article finished? There are mentions of excerpts from the database, but the excerpts are not reproduced or linked to, as far as I can tell.

Below the link to the North America file, you should see a few examples:

> A spirited attack on daylight savings from Canadian intellectual Roberton Davies in 1947: [full quote]

> A story of a public clock in Nashville in the 1950s with “dueling faces”—one time for conservatives and another for liberals.

> An account of the “day of two noons” in New York City in 1883, when standardized time zones were adopted and “local time” was abandoned forever.

> A detective story about ascertaining the proper chronology of time zones in Resolute Bay, a tiny community north of the Arctic circle.

Re: The surprising whimsy of the Time Zone Database

#46

Post by poizan42 »

tempestn wrote: post #28

The comment actually has it backwards. It says BC is moving from daylight to standard time, but should be the opposite. It's got the offset right though.

Hmm the comment was a bit difficult to parse, but I think they got it correct. Remember that we have arbitrarily defined the time during local winter as the "standard" time. If we want to keep to that then "permanent daylight savings" is a contradictory term. So what is actually meant is abolishing DST while at the same time changing the standard time to be at the offset of DST before the change. So what I think they are saying is that DST is being abolished, but the actual effective offset at the time when it's abolished is unchanged.

Re: The surprising whimsy of the Time Zone Database

#47

Post by michaelt »

globular-toast wrote: post #32
russellbeattie wrote: post #27

Just last night some friends brought up the time change tonight and the news from British Columbia, and what the California government has or hasn't done about it currently and in the past and why we haven't just gotten rid of the system already to save us the trouble of adjusting clocks twice a year. And of course, there was instantly a heated debate about whether to permanently choose Standard Time or Daylight Savi…

The thing is, it doesn't matter. Everyone with an argument is wrong. All you're arguing about is when you start/finish work/school. But it it doesn't matter and you have to arbitrarily label the hours of the day with numbers, you'd obviously pick standard time and not randomly offset everything by an hour.

> you'd obviously pick standard time and not randomly offset everything by an hour

Isn't Pacific Daylight Time = Mountain Standard Time?

You can offset everything by an hour and still have 'standard' in the name of the timezone.

Re: The surprising whimsy of the Time Zone Database

#48

Post by Ekaros »

russellbeattie wrote: post #37
globular-toast wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, it doesn't matter. Everyone with an argument is wrong. All you're arguing about is when you start/finish work/school. But it it doesn't matter and you have to arbitrarily label the hours of the day with numbers, you'd obviously pick standard time and not randomly offset everything by an hour.

Agreed. The problem is that so much of our culture is tied to specific hours on the clock (e.g. "9 to 5"), even though it doesn't need to be that way. China has one time zone and it works fine. Most of Spain is west of Greenwich, yet remains on European time. People there just adjust and don't insist that certain times of day have universal meanings. Standard Time vs Daylight Saving Time is exactly the same as Big En…

I can say that it will take surprisingly little time for everyone to adjust for any new times. And often the times are already very fluid. Flexible work hours with set core hours are common enough in some places.

Re: The surprising whimsy of the Time Zone Database

#49

Post by vintagedave »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #36
fzeindl wrote: post #20

I once digged into this database out of curiosity and found incredibly detailed research on many edge cases. Like time zones in Germany being temporarily aligned to Moscow during soviet occupancy after World War Two. One particular commenter stood out to me, so I looked him up because I was interested which kind of people spend so much time correcting timezone information. Turns out he was an astrologer and wanted hi…

On the other hand, it was also astrologers that made copyright claims on the database and caused it to become unavailable to the world for a short period of time.

I didn’t see that in the blog post!

I was curious and found more info here: https://www.computerworld.com/article/1548822/astrolabe-with...

Re: The surprising whimsy of the Time Zone Database

#50

Post by macintux »

poizan42 wrote: post #46
tempestn wrote: post #28

The comment actually has it backwards. It says BC is moving from daylight to standard time, but should be the opposite. It's got the offset right though.

Hmm the comment was a bit difficult to parse, but I think they got it correct. Remember that we have arbitrarily defined the time during local winter as the "standard" time. If we want to keep to that then "permanent daylight savings" is a contradictory term. So what is actually meant is abolishing DST while at the same time changing the standard time to be at the offset of DST before the change. So what I think they…

That semantic confusion between daylight saving the switch, and daylight saving the offset, makes it perpetually confusing to argue about whether we should preserve daylight saving at all.
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