3 ms·

Nah, we will hang on to GMT on some sort of half-arsed "principle" and hang the inconvenience. Anything else would be admitting that the EU is right about som

Nah, we will hang on to GMT on some sort of half-arsed "principle" and hang the inconvenience. Anything else would be admitting that the EU is right about something.

gaius 8y ago
GMT is the time from which all other times are derived. It’s not going anywhere.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- netsharc 8y ago
  But BST (British Summer Time) is GMT + 1 hour. So e.g. London and Berlin always has a constant 1 hour difference (they both switch to summer time and back at the same moment). I used to live at GMT+7, I just realize now that this doesn't mean I was always 7 hours away from London, in summer I would've been 6 hours away. Edit: I just realized you're replying to a comment about GMT, not about BST. GMT is theoretically the old name anyway, it's UTC nowadays.
  - matt4077 8y ago
    But do hey switch at the same moment... or one hour apart?
    - tialaramex 8y ago
      They switch at the same moment, they're both defined to switch at 0100 UTC. So in London it will go from 0059 to 0200 in the Spring, and from 0159 to 0100 in the Autumn In Berlin it goes from 0159 to 0300 in Spring and from 0259 to 0200 in the Autumn. Making the change at 0100 UTC is pretty convenient if your timezone is close to the zero line, because most people will be asleep or at least in bed and won't care. It's not so practical near the dateline where 0100 UTC is the middle of the day.
- tialaramex 8y ago
  (Almost) Everybody's civil clocks are actually based around Universal Time, UT, which is a continuation of GMT for the modern era. Universal Time assumes the Earth is basically a ball spinning at a nice smooth constant speed, which is wrong, and so we have to bodge things in practice which we do by having a bunch of different Universal Times managing the bodge in steps. So, UT1 is basically we measure where some very distant quasars are in the sky, rather than the Sun - and, since we're assuming that something so far away is essentially fixed to our reference point, and we're spinning, you can use this to work out what the time is very accurately. But when you measure UT1 it's a bit spiky, because, as mentioned earlier, the planet is not actually a ball, and it isn't actually spinning at a nice constant speed. Earth Rotation is uneven and varies over time. Making cuckoo clocks that measure distant quasars would be a monumental pain in the arse, so we don't do that. Instead we made another Universal Time, the Co-ordinated Universal Time or UTC, which works like this: 1. Figure out what UT1 is, right now at the start of your co-ordinated system of time, UTC. But then for seconds passing use Atomic clocks and make an allowance for the fact that if you're further from the middle of the planet (e.g. up a hill rather than by the coast) time will pass differently for you. This measurement (of the atomic clocks, which ignores Earth Rotation entirely) is called TAI (International Atomic Time) 2. Continuously re-measure UT1 (the IERS does this work) and if it seems as though UTC and UT1 are going to be different by, like, a second soon, then either add or remove a second in UTC to put them closer together typically at midnight on New Years when everybody is too busy/ drunk to care. These are "leap seconds". So at any time UTC = TAI + n where "n" is some integer the IERS gets to increment or decrement as necessary. We could just get rid of Universal Time, and switch to basing civil time on TAI, no more leap seconds, the IERS would exist only to help with astronomy - but nostalgia seems to have won for now, and so we're stuck with this complicated scheme.
- m4r35n357 8y ago
  I don't think you are answering what you think you are answering.

Nah, we will hang on to GMT on some sort of half-arsed "principle" and hang the inconvenience. Anything else would be admitting that the EU is right about something.

gaius 8y ago

GMT is the time from which all other times are derived. It’s not going anywhere.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
netsharc 8y ago
But BST (British Summer Time) is GMT + 1 hour. So e.g. London and Berlin always has a constant 1 hour difference (they both switch to summer time and back at the same moment). I used to live at GMT+7, I just realize now that this doesn't mean I was always 7 hours away from London, in summer I would've been 6 hours away. Edit: I just realized you're replying to a comment about GMT, not about BST. GMT is theoretically the old name anyway, it's UTC nowadays.
- matt4077 8y ago
  But do hey switch at the same moment... or one hour apart?
  - tialaramex 8y ago
    They switch at the same moment, they're both defined to switch at 0100 UTC. So in London it will go from 0059 to 0200 in the Spring, and from 0159 to 0100 in the Autumn In Berlin it goes from 0159 to 0300 in Spring and from 0259 to 0200 in the Autumn. Making the change at 0100 UTC is pretty convenient if your timezone is close to the zero line, because most people will be asleep or at least in bed and won't care. It's not so practical near the dateline where 0100 UTC is the middle of the day.
tialaramex 8y ago
(Almost) Everybody's civil clocks are actually based around Universal Time, UT, which is a continuation of GMT for the modern era. Universal Time assumes the Earth is basically a ball spinning at a nice smooth constant speed, which is wrong, and so we have to bodge things in practice which we do by having a bunch of different Universal Times managing the bodge in steps. So, UT1 is basically we measure where some very distant quasars are in the sky, rather than the Sun - and, since we're assuming that something so far away is essentially fixed to our reference point, and we're spinning, you can use this to work out what the time is very accurately. But when you measure UT1 it's a bit spiky, because, as mentioned earlier, the planet is not actually a ball, and it isn't actually spinning at a nice constant speed. Earth Rotation is uneven and varies over time. Making cuckoo clocks that measure distant quasars would be a monumental pain in the arse, so we don't do that. Instead we made another Universal Time, the Co-ordinated Universal Time or UTC, which works like this: 1. Figure out what UT1 is, right now at the start of your co-ordinated system of time, UTC. But then for seconds passing use Atomic clocks and make an allowance for the fact that if you're further from the middle of the planet (e.g. up a hill rather than by the coast) time will pass differently for you. This measurement (of the atomic clocks, which ignores Earth Rotation entirely) is called TAI (International Atomic Time) 2. Continuously re-measure UT1 (the IERS does this work) and if it seems as though UTC and UT1 are going to be different by, like, a second soon, then either add or remove a second in UTC to put them closer together typically at midnight on New Years when everybody is too busy/ drunk to care. These are "leap seconds". So at any time UTC = TAI + n where "n" is some integer the IERS gets to increment or decrement as necessary. We could just get rid of Universal Time, and switch to basing civil time on TAI, no more leap seconds, the IERS would exist only to help with astronomy - but nostalgia seems to have won for now, and so we're stuck with this complicated scheme.
m4r35n357 8y ago
I don't think you are answering what you think you are answering.