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Nah, the weirdest time zone is Africa/Addis_Ababa, which nobody in Ethiopia follows. Instead the locals offset the time by 6 hours. So the AM cycle starts at
by guidedlight 2y ago
Nah, the weirdest time zone is Africa/Addis_Ababa, which nobody in Ethiopia follows.
Instead the locals offset the time by 6 hours. So the AM cycle starts at dawn (i.e. 6am), and the PM cycle starts at dusk (i.e. 6pm).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Ethiopia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Ethiopia
- squiggleblaz 2y agoSounds like it could be a candidate. Any system which can't be expressed in standard software is stranger than every system that can be.
- dangsux 2y ago[dead]
- dpassens 2y agoBut whether standard software is able to express this system is up to the software, not the system, no? Why is this way of timekeeping weird, apart from the arbitrary decision not to support it?
- tankenmate 2y agoThe decision to not support it isn't "arbitrary" per se; it's a function of utility vs cost to implement (which a healthy dose of fudge). "Standard software" for timekeeping is far more useful precisely because it is used by far more people.
- dpassens 2y agoMaybe arbitrary was the wrong word. I understand that this is an implementation cost issue and I'm not saying that the decision not to pay this cost wasn't reasonable. My objection is not with tzdb, but with the characterisation of a real-life practice as weird just because software doesn't accommodate it. Shouldn't what people do be the reference for what is normal, rather than the rules encoded in software?
- lazide 2y agoSoftware doesn’t accomodate it because it’s weird relative to literally the rest of the world.
- dpassens 2y agoSure. But that's completely different from saying it's strange because software doesn't accommodate it.
- lazide 2y agoIs it?
- dpassens 2y agoYes, it is, because in your phrasing the fact that nobody else keeps time that way is the cause and lack of support in software the effect. The comment that I originally responded to is phrased as though lack of software support is the cause of weirdness. I object to the latter since software is not the source of truth, the social practices it aims to encode are. It is perfectly reasonable to say that this particular practice is so rare that it is out of scope, but this makes tzdb a not quite correct approximation of reality, rather than reality an approximation of tzdb.
- psychoslave 2y agoIndividuals are full of conflicting incompatible desires and people as they group are exponentially so. There are people who want to end any other human to ever live homeless in starvation or any kind of poverty and there are people who want to eliminate anyone they judge as threat or a nuisance while reinforcing there feeling that they dominate everything that will ever matter in the world and the rest. Software can help all kind of purpose.
- tsimionescu 2y agoI would agree it's weird, but not because software doesn't support it, but because it's different from what the vast majority of the population of the world does. The fact that software doesn't support it is a downstream consequence of that.
- dpassens 2y agoI agree with that take. It's also quite different from saying that it's weird because software doesn't support it, which is the claim I took issue with. Maybe I should've phrased my comment differently.
- Majromax 2y agoNot necessarily. To be inexpressible in software, all it has to do is be unpredictable; it can still be boring. Let me define "local snoozing time" (LST): it's set to my local standard timezone as of today, but every time I hit the snooze button on my morning alarm it shifts 9 minutes backwards (the length of the snooze). By definition, I wake up at 8am in LST, regardless of what the world is doing. If the time shifts by more than one hour compared to the prevailing timezone, LST shifts forwards by a whole number of hours on Saturday morning, 2am LST to minimize that difference. This timezone is "boring" but uncomputable, since it depends on unpredictable events.
- Ekaros 2y agoFor country near equator that is not actually unreasonable system to define day cycle.
- rob74 2y agoYeah, for countries further away from the equator this would be crazy. Actually I thought Ethiopia is already far enough from the equator to have significant changes of sunrise/sunset times, but according to https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/ethiopia/addis-ababa https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/ethiopia/addis-ababa, they only vary by ~ 40 minutes over the year, so I guess that's close enough to "constant" for most of the population...
- kbbgl87 2y agoAnd they live 7 years in the past.
- guidedlight 2y agoThey do. So I guess the observed timezone is UTC-61314.
- Scarblac 2y agoProbably depends on how many of those 7 were leap years at any point in time?
- AStonesThrow 2y agoEthiopian Christians have retained many Jewish customs compared to others, so you will also see them observing something like kosher diets. Although dusk is not sunset, it may be the case that they've adapted the cycle from Hebrew calendar observance.
- marginalia_nu 2y agoThat's very similar to how the romans conceived of time. Wonder if it's an old relic from when north africa was a bunch of provinces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_timekeeping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_timekeeping
- arethuza 2y ago"An hour was defined as one twelfth of the daytime" That must have been fun for the Romans here in Scotland - an hour would be roughly two and a half time as long in winter as in summer!
- throw0101a 2y ago> That must have been fun for the Romans here in Scotland - an hour would be roughly two and a half time as long in winter as in summer! Mechanical clocks in Japan were designed to handle those situations: > Adapting the European clock designs to the needs of Japanese traditional timekeeping presented a challenge to Japanese clockmakers. Japanese traditional timekeeping practices required the use of unequal time units: six daytime units from local sunrise to local sunset, and six night-time units from sunset to sunrise. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_clock#Temporal_hours https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_clock#Temporal_hours
- pbmonster 2y agoMuch less of an issue without clocks. Look where the sun is, remember where it is at sunrise/-set (much easier if you're outside every day) and then mentally divide the sky into segments and just ballpark it.
- arethuza 2y ago"Look where the sun is" Well, maybe that was another problem with Scotland... ;-) No wonder they built a few walls and retreated south....
- Horffupolde 2y agoThat’s standard traditional Hebrew time still today.
- hprotagonist 2y agoEthiopian time keeping is peculiar all over. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_calendar The Ethiopian calendar has twelve months, all thirty days long, and five or six epagomenal days, which form a thirteenth month.
- hhdhdbdb 2y agoThat no odder than Gregorian
- charlieyu1 2y agoStill not weirder than Lunar calendar
- stronglikedan 2y agoWhy use celestial bodies at all? Let's bring the Soviet calendar back!
- hprotagonist 2y agosomething something every 5 years.
- IggleSniggle 2y agoIt's not odd as in a more unusual system, but odd in that it is widely incompatible with the calendar of most of the world, but still official calendar. Kinda like the Kodak calendar (which was instead 13 28-day months (364 days), and iirc does the off-day adjustments over the corporate winter holiday...actually pretty reasonable)
- pc86 2y agoMerry Corporate Winter Holiday!
- wakahiu 2y agoThis is common across East Africa, including Kenya where I’m from. The night ends at 6:00AM, with 7:00AM being saa moja (first hour) of the day. Similarly, the day ends at 6:00PM (thenashara). Intuitively, this clock makes much more sense than the English clock. There’s rarely confusion between times because it’s embedded in the language.
- spuz 2y agoWhat time is displayed on your phone when you are in Kenya? Is there a setting to make it display the commonly used time rather than the official time? I'm going to Kenya next year and I'm excited to see how my phone behaves.
- nine_k 2y agoThis is indeed a more logical clock, as it follows the natural cycle of activity. Equally, calendars that put the end of the year at the time after harvest ("autumn"), or at the start of agricultural work ("spring") are also more logical. Positioning the beginning of a new day at noon, and a new year t a solstice, is just a technical convenience, because these are easy to detect with very simple astronomy tools.
- nerdponx 2y agoWhat makes it more logical? The wheel turns all the same no matter where you mark the beginning. In the Northern hemisphere, there's actually something nice about starting the year in the dead of winter: it feels like the year is born in the spring and then dies away the following winter, not unlike a lifetime.
- delecti 2y ago> it feels like the year is born in the spring Then shouldn't the start of the year be when the year is "born"? Or alternatively, the end of the year when the year "dies"? January 1 is neither.
- 2y ago
- helsinkiandrew 2y agoThats almost as confusing as the Nautical Day. Where a day on ship started at noon the "previous" day - with PM proceeding AM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautical_time#Nautical_day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautical_time#Nautical_day
- layer8 2y agoThat’s also how Julian days work, they go from noon to noon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day
- dudeinjapan 2y agoWow, this is great! This is exactly how Ive thought times should be done. Ive always called it “local sunrise time”. All the advantages of DST without the biannual spikes in traffic fatalities.
- prmph 2y agoInteresting. I propose that the transition between AM and PM should happen right in the human-sensible middle of the day. If most people start their daily activity around 6, and retire by by 10pm, then the middle would be 14hrs. This would also give a nice 3-part division to the day that matches their use: 1st 8 hours for the morning, next 8 hours for the afternoon, and the next 8 hours for evening/night. Currently, morning alone is 12 hours, and afternoon is like 6 (or less) and the evening takes the rest. But I guess the current noon time is chosen for when the sun is highest in the sky, so maybe to preserve noon as the transition point, morning should start from 4:00 hrs, then the afternoon starts from 12:00 hours, and evening would start from 20:00 hours.
- ucarion 2y agoJapan does something similar in the context of things that close after midnight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Japan#Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Japa... FWIW, the English-speaking world used to switch years on March 25: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_(New_Style)_Act_1750#New_Year's_Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_(New_Style)_Act_1750#... Neither of these are technically things that tzdb can even talk about. They're concerned with civil time, not calendars or other "reckoning" problems.