5 ms·
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: switching to UTC+0:30 will put a large number of countries in a common time zone without them deviating from their
by irdc 3y ago
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: switching to UTC+0:30 will put a large number of countries in a common time zone without them deviating from their solar time too much.
- qwytw 3y agoAnd make converting time between different time zones/countries even more confusing.
- jhugo 3y agoIndia manages to deal with a fractional offset from UTC, as well as several other countries. It’s really not that big a deal.
- netsharc 3y agoThat makes me wonder of the little adaptions they need, that we Minute-Zero-ians ;) don't notice... do many Indian desktops have world clocks, for example?
- rational_indian 3y agoRegular people dont't have world clocks. Only people who need to care about this do.
- madcaptenor 3y agoI just had a look through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UTC_offsets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UTC_offsets, because I thought it was just India and some obscure little islands - but some fairly substantial countries (Iran, Afghanistan, Nepal, Myanmar, Sri Lanka) also have non-whole-hour time zones.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Tagbert 3y agoand that 30 minute offset makes quick mental timezone math doubly hard and error prone. What is the benefit of merging timezones?
- irdc 3y agoThe EU is big enough and the CPU in your watch is fast enough that it won’t matter.
- qwytw 3y ago> CPU in your watch I'm much more concerned about the one in my head.
- seydor 3y agoBut more work for programmers
- anticensor 3y agotzdata is a thing
- petre 3y agoAs if DST isn't enough work - it messes up the linearity of time.
- jonathankoren 3y agoThis is a very special troll post, and I am all for this troll.
- irdc 3y agoIt’s not a troll post, I’m very serious: UTC+0:30 corresponds to the solar time at the geographical midpoint of the continental EU. The advantages are legion.
- jonathankoren 3y agoNon hour time zones are an abomination
- irdc 3y agoTime zones are arbitrary and the result of a historical accident. If the standardisation of timekeeping were to have happened in Amsterdam (not unlikely seeing the history of telescope development[0]) the issue would have been moot as UTC would be what is now UTC+0:19:32.13. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_telescope
- jonathankoren 3y ago15 degrees an hour is not arbitrary. It’s an astronomical fact
- fouronnes3 3y agoHas someone calculated the optimal unique timezone for the EU given population distribution and the goal to minimize the sum product of number of people and solar time difference?
- madcaptenor 3y agoYou can get a quick and dirty answer by assuming all of each country's population is at its center of population. Centers of population of each country: https://cs.baylor.edu/~hamerly/software/europe_population_weighted_centers.html#results https://cs.baylor.edu/~hamerly/software/europe_population_we... Country populations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_state_of_the_European_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_state_of_the_European_U... If I've done the math correctly (and this was very quick and dirty) you get something like +0:40 / 10 degrees E, roughly the longitude of Hamburg or Milan. Ultimately there's gridded population data that could be used to get a better answer but I suspect it's in this neighborhood.
- skerit 3y agoI'm good for a 30 minute shift either way if we can forever stop talking about this. I really like the extra hour of sunshine in the Summer time, I would miss it. And to think this proposal would even take away an extra hour on top of that... Yikes.