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It's not entirely arbitrary. There's a limited number of places you can put the prime meridian without the date line bisecting some significant land mass (which
by alextgordon 16y ago
It's not entirely arbitrary. There's a limited number of places you can put the prime meridian without the date line bisecting some significant land mass (which would be very inconvenient for the people living there). Britain happens to be one of those places.
- megrimlock 16y agoEven putting the IDL over the sparsely populated Pacific is inconvenient enough that it was drawn to zig-zag across 40 degrees of longitude, or 2.5 hours of timezones, to be less annoying! You know... we should optimize the IDL with a graph partitioning algorithm. We can measure inconvenience by the number of times any human's life trajectory passes the IDL. That's impossible to measure, so let's use recorded passenger airline / boat transportation numbers as a proxy. That also quantizes our graph into distinct origin and destination nodes. We penalize any graph edge that transits the IDL. Then we just find the min-cut of that graph, and draw the new IDL across the cut. That still leaves us lee-way about where to cross each edge in the cut, so we can apply aesthetic heuristics to try to draw a maximally straight line, or one most aligned with meridians. Then this will no longer be arbitrary.
- futuremint 16y agoI'd like to see some code and a blog post for this! This is far more interesting to me than the iOS update :)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- kemiller 16y agoSure, that's why they chose it. ;) And rightly so, since they came up with a good idea. But California came up with the iP(ad|od|hone) so it gets to set timing for that.