Transcription
A map of the world with vertical lines marking the time zones from UTC-12 to UTC+12. It has a legend:
Wrong Time
“Natural time zones” are 15° in longitude. Land in red observes a time other than the zone it lies within. Smaller islands depict their 12 nautical mile territorial sea, for visual effect. In some cases this includes a state’s archipelagic waters.
Plate Carrée projection, WGS-84 datum. December 2018 © International Mapping, all rights reserved.
Russia looks funny
This map really brings home how awful this projection is for this map’s purpose and how awful most projections really are near the poles. Greenland isn’t that big. I know this map is Plate Carree, not Mercator, but the size issue of an equirectangular projection is really similar when comparing longitude and size for the entire globe from pole to equator. 15 degrees of longitude for a timezone stops making sense that close to the poles. Greenland would mostly fit in the central time zone of the United States for example. Given its sparse population, dividing it up into 3 timezones seems unnecessary.
15 degrees of longitude for a timezone stops making sense that close to the poles
Yeah exactly. The concept of time zones themselves really starts to break down at those latitudes, and I don’t think it matters what map projection you show it on (though something like Robinson or Winkel-Tripel, with curved time zones, would definitely make things clearer), it’s a fundamental aspect of the way in which light is hitting the Earth’s surface.
Wrong title, it should be:
A Map of the world showing where the local time zone is wrong more than half hours
An hour is a human concept, we just divided the day to 24 parts, we could use whatever else division. Local time is correct only on the center longitude, which is a line with zero thickness.
Also it’s clearly visible that France and Spain are in the wrong time zone, and it was changed by the Nazis. Before WW2 France and Spain was in the same zone as Britain. France changed because of the German occupation, and they forgot to change back after the war.
Correction: Spain time zone was not changed by the Nazis, It was changed by the Fascists. Franco changed it to have the same time as Germany.
Fun fact: Have you seen videos of dogs begging for food the day after the time change, having to wait an extra hour? Spaniards were the same, and after the time change, they continued eating lunch and dinner according to their biological clock. That’s why Spaniards have lunch and dinner at later hours.
Nazi time Nazi time
It’s nazi o clock somewhere
technically correct
Time zones are fundamentally wrong and immoral. Only the Time Cube is correct.
Absolute classic.
I would have voted for the TimeCube guy over Trump.
even Caves of Qud celebrates this legacy
Oh man, I did not know that Qud had a TimeCube reference…
If you want a real trip click through the different archive dates on this site. Dude goes through a whole progression of who he’s pissed off at month to month.
It’s great. He adds them randomly in the middle of rants too.
should I read it?
You are not authorized to discuss Time Cube!
gene?
There are four simultaneous 24 hour days! It’s bellybutton math.
Does anyone have a source link with a high resolution version?
This one here should be pretty high res. I only scaled it down to 4000 px wide. If you’re not seeing that, it may be something funky with your instance’s proxy—check my instance.
But the original was 9600 wide iirc. If you want that, it cake from signing up to a mailing list that was linked by someone else in my earlier post in this community.
Beehaw is on a quite old Lemmy version, the picture is fine for the recent ones
https://aussie.zone/pictrs/image/7479fde6-4477-47dc-9bf4-339dde2b4cb8.png?format=webp
Oh dang! They’re still on 0.18‽ Holys hit that’s old! Is the head admin/whoever’s responsible for deploying updates absent?
From what I understand, Beehaw has some differences of opinion with how Lemmy developers choose to prioritize features. Beehaw is planning to switch to a different Lemmy implementation soon.
France, Spain, Belgium, and the Netherlands are in the wrong time zone because of Nazis https://lemmy.ca/post/2220899
Not only that, most of Spain (except the Canaries), the most extreme case, Is on a time zone that has a border with Russia, while actually being on the Greenwich meridian.
That doesn’t exactly explain why they’re still in those time zones 80 years later, despite only having been under Nazi control for less than 6 years.
I still like China time same for whole big ass country. Everyone in NA go by NYC time. fuck that tv schedule.
I think it’s kind of dumb tbh. I imagine at certain times of the year, you will have farmers on one end of the country waking up in complete darkness, while others are waking up in broad daylight (I didn’t do any actual critical thought to determine if this is actually true or not, but it seems right).
Spain more than France, but both, tend to eat later, wake up later, as a response. Farming schedules are going to be dawn till dusk, and food market/retail hours would tend to follow. Stock market traders will match sleep/work schedule to market hours.
The real problem with this is the official dictate that businesses in the west of China have to operate to Beijing time hours.
If you just said “businesses in the west open at 11 and close at 7, while Beijing does 9 to 5”, it’d be like a smaller-scale version of what I (and others, including elsewhere in these comments) have advocated for: everyone operating on a single time zone, worldwide (usually UTC).
Lets just do a single time zone
I prefer the current way — I can be in another state or another country and I know that 7am is a good time for breakfast, around noon is a good time for lunch, and so forth. (If you don’t change latitude sure, just go outside to figure this out, but it’s complicated if it’s overcast, or the latitude isn’t what you’re used to, or…)
Time has a number of meanings — UTC is great for machines, local time is (IMHO) a good concept for humans.
I think local time would work pretty much the same with a single time zone.
Single time zone: You get to a new place and look up what time is good for breakfast here
Many time zones: You get to a new place and look up what time zone you’re in.
Either way you need to look up what the local time is. But with a single time zone, i think the breakfast time and work hours would be a bit better attuned to sunrise/sunset at your location.
To me, the main difference is more philosophical. I think it’d encourage a more global perspective.
Edit to add: it’s more of a pie in the sky wish. I dont think it would be worthwhile to actually remove time zones. It would be very expensive for not a lot of gain. In the same vein, I’d like to:
sort out our calendar (evenly sized months, dates corresponding to weekdays, and not have prime number of weekdays),
sort out our time units. Lets keep it all in the same base (not 24h days and 60min per hour)
transition to a base-12 numeric system. It’s just much more satisfying.
Checking the time zone ones (or more like your phone just switching automatically) vs having to remember the offset every time until you’ve gotten used to it. I’d go with the first one every time
Problem with a single time zone is working across them. They’re a huge pain in the ass, but it would be even worse without them. Keeping track of who is in what time zone is difficult, but keeping track of everyone’s schedule without using them as a placeholder would be horrible. ‘what time is a good time for breakfast where you are’ and then doing the math anyway just isn’t as convenient as ‘oh, it’s already 5pm where you are’
That’s an interesting idea, but I disagree to some extent. Although, I really love the idea of having a single unified global time, it would make traveling inconvenient.
While staying in a different part of the world, you would need to translate local times to your home time. For example, 21:30 may sound like evening to you, but somewhere else that could be midday, morning or anything else. If you look at museum opening hours, it’s not immediately apparent if it opens just after breakfast or just before lunch time. You would need to do these translations several times a day during your stay to understand when things will happen.
However, time units are an inconsistent mess, and the calendar is a total disaster. If we need another french revolution to fix that, I’m not going to stand in its way.
Many time zones: You get to a new place and look up what time zone you’re in.
Well, sorta — but it’s no effort at all because my timekeeping device (phone) does this automatically.
For me, the time of day is internalized in a way that I think is hard to switch. Same as how I was raised with imperial units — even though I prefer (and use professionally) metric, the intuition can be a little harder to get. But to each their own of course :)
I feel time zones would be documented better than local lunch times.
Would be a pain in the ass
alright, then from now on your noon is at 19:00 and your midnight is at 07:00
Sounds good, thank you!
Yeah, and? its just an arbitrary number.
Yeah! We want utc more widely used.
Would be ideal, but it’s going to be impossible to convince the world to do it.
They won’t even abolish daylight savings.
An item on my bucket list has been to create a map with “gradients” (really just 1-minute rectsngular bands) of what time the high noon is in that location. This map is just a subset of that, coloring red the areas with an over-30-minute offset. I’d make one for January and one for July to account for DST on both hemispheres.
I’ll probably convert a publicly available timezone shapefile into a Plate Carée (or similar) projection SVG, create a “gradient” spanning the entire globe and then use it as texture for the SVG shapes, horizontally offset appropriately.
That would be really cool!
You should make one that shows how much the official time is wrong with respect to the local time.
That would require way more effort than “find picture from elsewhere on the Internet, scale it down to a size my Lemmy instance will let me upload, and then upload it.”
But anyway, you can basically get that from this chart, for the most part. The rightmost edge of each red section is 30 minutes ahead, or the leftmost is 30 minutes behind of where it should be, when those edges are caused by the time zone itself (rather than national or regional boundaries like state lines), growing by an hour per vertical line.
So, the westernmost parts of Spain are about 1 hour 30 ahead, while the easternmost parts of Poland are 30 minutes behind. The westernmost tip of China is about 3 and a half hours ahead.
Yes, I know about China and Spain, that’s why it would be interesting to plot it.
“wrong”. technically it’s entirely made up. you can write whatever number you want on the scale where the sun hits the zenith as long as all people nearby can agree to it.
Yeah, methinks a gradient would have been better instead of a solid demarcation
World: So China, you are one of the largest landmasses on the planet. How many time zones do you want?
China: No thanks. * sips tea *
It strikes me that the Middle East, central Europe, and south-east Asia are the best places for time zone accuracy, while western Europe, western Africa, and northern Asia are the worst.
We ought to get rid of that minus one time zone - nobody’s using it.
Actually I think I don’t understand the concept. I think some of the guys in the other time zones might be using the minus one but be wrong.
Damn this is confusing.
It sort of makes sense for most of the countries on there, as they (or the slice of them in the awkward timezone) aren’t big enough to justify splitting their timezones in half. Just pick the one that matches the most people and move on…
But what the bloody hell are countries like Spain, Portugal, and France doing?? Basically their whole country is in the wrong timezone!
They’re basically doing the same thing China does. It just ends up looking even sillier because there’s an international border between them and Germany.
Portugal’s a little weird because they should he UTC-1, and unlike their neighbours they don’t stretch their time massively by pretending to be in the same time zone as Germany. But they compromise by being in UTC.
