7 ms·

Nepal Standard Time

32 points by gkop 12y ago

nnain 12y ago
It's pretty weird indeed. Think of the misery of a traveler from/to Nepal who has to do the extra mental math every time to figure out the time for another place. They could have settled for an easier time, considering the country stretches over quite a few longitudes. Don't know what was the logic here!
- kasey_junk 12y ago
  It's worse than that. In a few mile territory you have: IST - which is on a half hour. NPT - which is on a 15 minute. CST - which is several hours different (as China does not have timezones per say) BST - which is normal, but is only observed in a small part of the region.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    When I visited Urumuqi, Beijing time was used but everything opened and closed much later than usual. It was very strange.
  - rmc 12y ago
    China us on one timezone.
    - ArtDev 12y ago
      In typical bullheaded fashion, all of China is set to Beijing time. No wonder the people in the East are trying to revolt!
      - minot 12y ago
        Did you mean West?
        donatj 12y ago
        Far Far Far East.
- PinguTS 12y ago
  What is so weird? I've been there several times. I can assure you, it is no different than in any other country. You can wake up at 7am and the sun is out. The sun goes down at about 6pm. Go out, leave your desk and explore the world.
- mafm 12y ago
  I think it was chosen to emphasise that Nepal isn't part of India.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
annapurna 12y ago
"[It] was not till 1956 that [Nepal] set [their] watches for the first time to Nepal Standard Time, with the meridian at Mt Gauri Shankar, 100km east of Kathmandu [capital of Nepal]. It wasn't Mt Everest because Gauri Shankar was closer to Nepal's centre of gravity, as it were. It was a choice that set [Nepal's] clocks 10 minutes ahead of India, which at the time used the longitude that passed through Calcutta. When [India] switched their meridian to Hyderabad in 1971, [Nepal] officially had four degrees of separation, and presto, found ourselves a further five minutes ahead of the Indians." [1]http://web.archive.org/web/20110725100005/http://www.nepalitimes.com.np/issue/155/Heritage/10013 http://web.archive.org/web/20110725100005/http://www.nepalit...
mshakya 12y ago
So does this mean that NST uses distance between indian meridian and Mt. Gauri to set the NST?
- minot 12y ago
  It means Nepal Time is designed to be as true to the natural time as possible for Kathmandu, the capital city. It'd be a little ridiculous to say Nepal Time is UTC + 5:41:46 though. Not much more ridiculous than what we have now but still a little more ridiculous.
ArtDev 12y ago
In Nepal the year is 2071 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepali_calendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepali_calendar) It is an amazing country. Nepal is the "roof of the world".
- PinguTS 12y ago
  Nepal is not the roof of the world. Tibet is the roof of the world. I've been there and have people there, which I consider as friends.
jtokoph 12y ago
Tom Scott has a wonderful video walking through the overwhelming complexity of timezones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY
EToS 12y ago
Nothing in Nepal is ever standard, even down to the shape of their national flag! :)
- evanb 12y ago
  The construction of Nepal's flag is a straightedge-and-compass construction and is specified in their constitution. Numberphile made a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2Gne3UHKHs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2Gne3UHKHs
  - tokenadult 12y ago
    That's an outstanding video. I immediately shared this link you kindly shared with a Facebook group about mathematics for beginners and enthusiasts. Thanks.
    - evanb 12y ago
      Almost everything Numberphile does would be good for that group!
AaronFriel 12y ago
Things like this are why programmers can't have nice things. Cultural historical oddities make for fun facts and an enormous amount of added complexity. When I propose wacky, implausible ideas to friends like "a single world-wide time zone" or "replacing all writing with the international phonetic alphabet", the idea is to reduce things that make the technical debt for supporting the whole world enormous. As it is, English programmers are frankly, most likely to make things that only work for English speakers. And then the technical debt of supporting Latin alphabets and US time zones and all the like multiply together. We should be thankful as much of the world adopted UTF8 and UTC as early as it did, but I don't envy anyone who has to work with systems that don't have good support for internationalization. Those people are in a terrible position, and with legacy systems, they might have to implement a terribly complex set of rules that are taken for granted by most people, and sometimes not even explicitly written down anywhere outside obscure papers on the topics. Someone mentioned the current year in the Nepali calendar is 2071. So now you know, if you want to appropriately support customers in Nepal, you might want to support their calendar. But I don't know enough about Nepal to say whether or not anyone does. The Wikipedia page List of calendars is, frankly, a bit terrifying[1]. The fundamental problems of these fun cultural artifacts is the technical debt for old systems and the barrier to entry for new systems. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_calendars#In_use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_calendars#In_use
- _almosnow 12y ago
  >"a single world-wide time zone" or "replacing all writing with the international phonetic alphabet" Just wow man, you are taking lazyness to a whole new level.
  - minot 12y ago
    I'd go to bed at 7 AM and wake up at 1 PM. A regular nine to five job would be 3 PM to 11 PM. I, personally, have pretty much no social life so it wouldn't affect me that much if we had to work nine hundred hours to seventeen hundred hours UTC while living in central time zone (UTC - 6:00). I'd imagine we'd burn up a lot more fuel if everyone worked nights and slept days though. Also, I read somewhere that access to sunlight (or lack thereof) can alter people's emotional state.
briandear 12y ago
In North Korea, the year is 104. The Soviet Union had one time zone for the entire country. So 8pm in Moscow was 8pm in Vladivlostok. Afghanistan also has a 30 minute offset. Luckily for me (for now) Nepal isn't my target market!
- eCa 12y ago
  Trains (and station clocks) in Russia still run on Moskow time.
- listic 12y ago
  Nope, wrong for Soviet Union, it spanned 11 time zones: Kaliningrad (Königsberg) to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, with summer/winter time. By the way, there's another opportunity for oddity wrt. time: the change from summer to winter time and back can occur at different dates in different countries. And indeed, it does.
- nerfhammer 12y ago
  China currently only uses one time zone, enough though it should span ~5 zones
dyadic 12y ago
It's also worth mentioning Argentina, "Argentina determines whether to observe daylight saving time on a year-by-year basis, and individual provinces may opt out of the federal decision. At present, Argentina does not observe daylight saving time." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Argentina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Argentina
- dvirsky 12y ago
  In Israel the topic of daylight saving time is subject to weird religious power struggles, and basically how long DST lasts depends on how much political power the ultra-religious parties have in the current parliament coalition (the more powerful they are, the less DST we get). This causes problems with automatic time zone shifts in phones, in cases where the OS doesn't get updated with this year's date range changes. Just this year some versions of Android had to set the time-zone to Athens for a few weeks.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Is it incompetence, arrogance, ignorance, or ? that'd lead them to making such annoying decisions? Argentina doesn't have a nutty religion forcing them to do this right?
  - dyadic 12y ago
    I don't know. I'm not from here, just living here for a few months. But I'd say none of the above. The country is huge and could easily cover more than one timezone, I'd hazard a guess at political reasons based on that, but don't take me as an authority because I'm not
cespare 12y ago
I've run into this building various analytics systems. The off-by-45-minutes timezones mean that if you want to keep your data in UTC and translate to local time in the UI, you have to maintain 15-minute granularity. (Although 30-minute or 1-hour granularity might be good enough depending on what users you need to initially support.)
nerfhammer 12y ago
Nice time zone map: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/World_Time_Zones_Map.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/World_Tim... Note the 5 3/4 for Nepal. Why is there a little chunk of Greenland that's 3 hours offset from the rest of the country?
- maxerickson 12y ago
  Presumably it has more connection with Iceland than the rest of Greenland (not necessarily historically, but economically or transport or whatever). Wikipedia doesn't mention it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ittoqqortoormiit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ittoqqortoormiit
- xpda 12y ago
  Interesting! There are no airports in that area. The time zone is named Danmarkshavn time zone. Danmarkshavn is a weather station in the zone with a permanent population of 8.
brazzy 12y ago
Unround timezone offsets are exotic to you? That's not even the half of it, sonny! How about the year where Shanghai had the same 5 minutes and 52 seconds twice: http://www.timeanddate.com/time/change/china/shanghai?year=1927 http://www.timeanddate.com/time/change/china/shanghai?year=1... Or the year where Germany had TWO hours worth of daylight savings time (hint: that happens to be Moscow time)? http://www.timeanddate.com/time/change/germany/berlin?year=1945 http://www.timeanddate.com/time/change/germany/berlin?year=1... I actually once had a production bug based on that, due to an overzealous sanity check in the Java Calendar class which considered all dates in Germany in the summer of 45 invalid...
mnutt 12y ago
I recently received a bug report from a client asking for display support for "Central Western Standard Time". (+845, no DST, not officially recognized) It is the result of a compromise between Central and Western timezones in Australia, and is used by four towns and a roadhouse. (total population: ~200)

32 points by gkop 12y ago

nnain 12y ago

It's pretty weird indeed. Think of the misery of a traveler from/to Nepal who has to do the extra mental math every time to figure out the time for another place. They could have settled for an easier time, considering the country stretches over quite a few longitudes. Don't know what was the logic here!

kasey_junk 12y ago
It's worse than that. In a few mile territory you have: IST - which is on a half hour. NPT - which is on a 15 minute. CST - which is several hours different (as China does not have timezones per say) BST - which is normal, but is only observed in a small part of the region.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  When I visited Urumuqi, Beijing time was used but everything opened and closed much later than usual. It was very strange.
- rmc 12y ago
  China us on one timezone.
  - ArtDev 12y ago
    In typical bullheaded fashion, all of China is set to Beijing time. No wonder the people in the East are trying to revolt!
    - minot 12y ago
      Did you mean West?
      - donatj 12y ago
        Far Far Far East.
PinguTS 12y ago
What is so weird? I've been there several times. I can assure you, it is no different than in any other country. You can wake up at 7am and the sun is out. The sun goes down at about 6pm. Go out, leave your desk and explore the world.
mafm 12y ago
I think it was chosen to emphasise that Nepal isn't part of India.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

annapurna 12y ago

"[It] was not till 1956 that [Nepal] set [their] watches for the first time to Nepal Standard Time, with the meridian at Mt Gauri Shankar, 100km east of Kathmandu [capital of Nepal]. It wasn't Mt Everest because Gauri Shankar was closer to Nepal's centre of gravity, as it were. It was a choice that set [Nepal's] clocks 10 minutes ahead of India, which at the time used the longitude that passed through Calcutta. When [India] switched their meridian to Hyderabad in 1971, [Nepal] officially had four degrees of separation, and presto, found ourselves a further five minutes ahead of the Indians." [1]http://web.archive.org/web/20110725100005/http://www.nepalitimes.com.np/issue/155/Heritage/10013 http://web.archive.org/web/20110725100005/http://www.nepalit...

mshakya 12y ago

So does this mean that NST uses distance between indian meridian and Mt. Gauri to set the NST?

minot 12y ago
It means Nepal Time is designed to be as true to the natural time as possible for Kathmandu, the capital city. It'd be a little ridiculous to say Nepal Time is UTC + 5:41:46 though. Not much more ridiculous than what we have now but still a little more ridiculous.

ArtDev 12y ago

In Nepal the year is 2071 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepali_calendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepali_calendar) It is an amazing country. Nepal is the "roof of the world".

PinguTS 12y ago
Nepal is not the roof of the world. Tibet is the roof of the world. I've been there and have people there, which I consider as friends.

jtokoph 12y ago

Tom Scott has a wonderful video walking through the overwhelming complexity of timezones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY

EToS 12y ago

Nothing in Nepal is ever standard, even down to the shape of their national flag! :)

evanb 12y ago
The construction of Nepal's flag is a straightedge-and-compass construction and is specified in their constitution. Numberphile made a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2Gne3UHKHs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2Gne3UHKHs
- tokenadult 12y ago
  That's an outstanding video. I immediately shared this link you kindly shared with a Facebook group about mathematics for beginners and enthusiasts. Thanks.
  - evanb 12y ago
    Almost everything Numberphile does would be good for that group!

AaronFriel 12y ago

Things like this are why programmers can't have nice things. Cultural historical oddities make for fun facts and an enormous amount of added complexity. When I propose wacky, implausible ideas to friends like "a single world-wide time zone" or "replacing all writing with the international phonetic alphabet", the idea is to reduce things that make the technical debt for supporting the whole world enormous. As it is, English programmers are frankly, most likely to make things that only work for English speakers. And then the technical debt of supporting Latin alphabets and US time zones and all the like multiply together. We should be thankful as much of the world adopted UTF8 and UTC as early as it did, but I don't envy anyone who has to work with systems that don't have good support for internationalization. Those people are in a terrible position, and with legacy systems, they might have to implement a terribly complex set of rules that are taken for granted by most people, and sometimes not even explicitly written down anywhere outside obscure papers on the topics. Someone mentioned the current year in the Nepali calendar is 2071. So now you know, if you want to appropriately support customers in Nepal, you might want to support their calendar. But I don't know enough about Nepal to say whether or not anyone does. The Wikipedia page List of calendars is, frankly, a bit terrifying[1]. The fundamental problems of these fun cultural artifacts is the technical debt for old systems and the barrier to entry for new systems. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_calendars#In_use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_calendars#In_use

_almosnow 12y ago
>"a single world-wide time zone" or "replacing all writing with the international phonetic alphabet" Just wow man, you are taking lazyness to a whole new level.
- minot 12y ago
  I'd go to bed at 7 AM and wake up at 1 PM. A regular nine to five job would be 3 PM to 11 PM. I, personally, have pretty much no social life so it wouldn't affect me that much if we had to work nine hundred hours to seventeen hundred hours UTC while living in central time zone (UTC - 6:00). I'd imagine we'd burn up a lot more fuel if everyone worked nights and slept days though. Also, I read somewhere that access to sunlight (or lack thereof) can alter people's emotional state.

briandear 12y ago

In North Korea, the year is 104. The Soviet Union had one time zone for the entire country. So 8pm in Moscow was 8pm in Vladivlostok. Afghanistan also has a 30 minute offset. Luckily for me (for now) Nepal isn't my target market!

eCa 12y ago
Trains (and station clocks) in Russia still run on Moskow time.
listic 12y ago
Nope, wrong for Soviet Union, it spanned 11 time zones: Kaliningrad (Königsberg) to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, with summer/winter time. By the way, there's another opportunity for oddity wrt. time: the change from summer to winter time and back can occur at different dates in different countries. And indeed, it does.
nerfhammer 12y ago
China currently only uses one time zone, enough though it should span ~5 zones

dyadic 12y ago

It's also worth mentioning Argentina, "Argentina determines whether to observe daylight saving time on a year-by-year basis, and individual provinces may opt out of the federal decision. At present, Argentina does not observe daylight saving time." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Argentina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Argentina

dvirsky 12y ago
In Israel the topic of daylight saving time is subject to weird religious power struggles, and basically how long DST lasts depends on how much political power the ultra-religious parties have in the current parliament coalition (the more powerful they are, the less DST we get). This causes problems with automatic time zone shifts in phones, in cases where the OS doesn't get updated with this year's date range changes. Just this year some versions of Android had to set the time-zone to Athens for a few weeks.
MichaelGG 12y ago
Is it incompetence, arrogance, ignorance, or ? that'd lead them to making such annoying decisions? Argentina doesn't have a nutty religion forcing them to do this right?
- dyadic 12y ago
  I don't know. I'm not from here, just living here for a few months. But I'd say none of the above. The country is huge and could easily cover more than one timezone, I'd hazard a guess at political reasons based on that, but don't take me as an authority because I'm not

cespare 12y ago

I've run into this building various analytics systems. The off-by-45-minutes timezones mean that if you want to keep your data in UTC and translate to local time in the UI, you have to maintain 15-minute granularity. (Although 30-minute or 1-hour granularity might be good enough depending on what users you need to initially support.)

nerfhammer 12y ago

Nice time zone map: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/World_Time_Zones_Map.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/World_Tim... Note the 5 3/4 for Nepal. Why is there a little chunk of Greenland that's 3 hours offset from the rest of the country?

maxerickson 12y ago
Presumably it has more connection with Iceland than the rest of Greenland (not necessarily historically, but economically or transport or whatever). Wikipedia doesn't mention it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ittoqqortoormiit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ittoqqortoormiit
xpda 12y ago
Interesting! There are no airports in that area. The time zone is named Danmarkshavn time zone. Danmarkshavn is a weather station in the zone with a permanent population of 8.

brazzy 12y ago

Unround timezone offsets are exotic to you? That's not even the half of it, sonny! How about the year where Shanghai had the same 5 minutes and 52 seconds twice: http://www.timeanddate.com/time/change/china/shanghai?year=1927 http://www.timeanddate.com/time/change/china/shanghai?year=1... Or the year where Germany had TWO hours worth of daylight savings time (hint: that happens to be Moscow time)? http://www.timeanddate.com/time/change/germany/berlin?year=1945 http://www.timeanddate.com/time/change/germany/berlin?year=1... I actually once had a production bug based on that, due to an overzealous sanity check in the Java Calendar class which considered all dates in Germany in the summer of 45 invalid...

mnutt 12y ago

I recently received a bug report from a client asking for display support for "Central Western Standard Time". (+845, no DST, not officially recognized) It is the result of a compromise between Central and Western timezones in Australia, and is used by four towns and a roadhouse. (total population: ~200)