4 ms·
My favorite time-related false beliefs are about time zones: 1. 1AM happens 24 times a day 2. Ok, so 1A is screwed up because of DST. Noon happens 24 times a
by inlined 10y ago
My favorite time-related false beliefs are about time zones:
1. 1AM happens 24 times a day
2. Ok, so 1A is screwed up because of DST. Noon happens 24 times a day.
3. The maximum distance between time zones is 24 hrs
4. Time zones are in 1hr increments
5. In half hour increments?
6. UTC offset is a good thing to store in someone's profile
7. People live in a fixed number of UTC offsets
- jaggederest 10y agoAdd to it: Time zones change linearly from east to west and west to east For each physical location there is exactly one time zone
- inimino 10y agoAnd: The time zone you use is a matter of geography, not political affiliation.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoUnderstanding that point suddenly makes half of the list much more obvious.
- plopilop 10y agoYou can also add: * One geographical location won't change its timezone over time * Apart from DST, one geographical location won't change its timezone over time * If a location changes timezone, the leap is always less than an hour, maybe a few hours * Ok, less than a day * Why are you talking about 2011, December 30th in Samoa Islands?
- 77pt77 10y ago> For each physical location there is exactly one time zone Care to elaborate?
- Crespyl 10y agoI don't know of any parcels of land that are simultaneously in more than one zone, but I do know that (until recently?) Indiana used to change time zones from Eastern to Central instead of using DST.
- 77pt77 10y agoI knew that. What I understood was same geographical location with several time-zones at an instant in time. Modulo border disputes I don't know of any such thing.
- jaggederest 10y agoThere are several places on earth that have an official and unofficial time zone, chiefly on time zone borders - some places in Indiana, for example, and the far western part of China where the time zone varies from solar time very significantly. In those places, if you ask a user where they are, and then show them a time zone based on that, it may not reflect what they think.
- kedean 10y agoNot sure if it's what they meant, but the boundaries move, so the timezone you store in a location today may not be the one that it corresponds with in a year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Indiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Indiana
- Gibbon1 10y agoI think my favorite if I remember correctly Arizona doesn't follow DST. The Navajo Nation does, but the Hopi do not. The Hopi Reservation is inside the Navajo Nation. But there is and area of Navajo Nation inside the Hopi reservation. There are also a large number of discontinuous bits of Navajo Nation.
- matheweis 10y agoI am from Arizona; you are correct. No DST is awesome, but causes no end of coordination problems with people outside of AZ... for important meetings like job interviews basically the only option is to be prepped on both hours. The reservation thing is fun with cell phones - in northern parts of the state, there are places where your cell phone will adjust time by an hour depending on which cell tower you manage to connect to. So one moment your screen will display 2:30, the next 3:30, and a few minutes later it's back to 2:30 again. You fall back to using relative times; "we'll meet in an hour, etc."
- Declanomous 10y agoI still wear a watch because of reasons like that. (I look at my watch, I have 2:30) "What time do you have?" "3:30" "Ok. Let's meet in an hour. That's 4:30 for you." (Which I know will be 3:30 for me) My watch also runs for years on a single battery. I probably get asked for time once a week by somebody whose phone has died. (Wearing a watch is the universal symbol for "I have the time")
- jwilliams 10y ago5. Hah. One of my favorites... 45minute time offsets. There is a good list here: https://www.timeanddate.com/time/time-zones-interesting.html https://www.timeanddate.com/time/time-zones-interesting.html
- matheweis 10y agoA friend of mine and I partially decloacked anscammer using this recently; the caller allegedly being somewhere in the US, when asked what time it was responded with a time that was a half hour increment off from any current us time. Ergo, they were living in an area with 30 minute time zones.
- Lazare 10y agoI ran into this a while back when I wanted to make sure every user got emailed a report at 6am, Monday morning, their local time. My chosen solution was a script to be triggered by a cronjob that ran when reports needed to be emailed out, but not otherwise, eg, at 6am in every timezone, every Monday. All I needed to do was figure out what times those were. Simple right? It didn't take long until I realised I needed to make some concessions to reality. :)