
How much is time wrong around the world? - ot
http://poisson.phc.unipi.it/~maggiolo/index.php/2014/01/how-much-is-time-wrong-around-the-world/
======
clarky07
It is interesting to see that much more of the world errs to the side of
having sun later in the day. As someone who lives just on the other side of a
timezone line in a green area, I can definitely see the appeal. It gets dark
at 4-4:30 in the winter here, and it sucks. There is actually a bill in our
state now to stay on daylight savings all year. I really hope we pass it and
don't have to "fall back" next year.

~~~
CWuestefeld
Unless you've got an employer that's enforcing very specific hours, what's the
difference? It you'd rather get up earlier, work earlier, and leave when it's
still light, what's stopping you?

The number that we assign to a time of day doesn't have any intrinsic meaning,
it's just a symbol.

~~~
CodeMage
Among other things, children. Sure, I might be able to get up earlier, work
earlier and leave when it's still light, but I still wouldn't have much time
to spend with my kid during daytime.

Another example: bus frequency. You know, small stuff that adds up ;)

~~~
MichaelGG
If shifting the timezone by an hour is a solution, then so is just shifting
work hours by an hour. How do children change anything?

There may be other, poor, reasons, that it sucks for you (like other people
insisting on going by a certain clock time) but I don't understand the
children part.

~~~
graywh
School start times, for one.

~~~
ithkuil
the point is that business and school hours can be (and are) different in
different countries. You can either change the timetables or the clock. To
change the former requires more coordination throughout the society, hence we
move the clock.

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chimeracoder
Since the rest of the site seems to be down, here is a direct link to the
relevant image:

[http://i0.wp.com/poisson.phc.unipi.it/~maggiolo/wp-
content/u...](http://i0.wp.com/poisson.phc.unipi.it/~maggiolo/wp-
content/uploads/2014/01/SolarTimeVsStandardTime.png)

~~~
bsimpson
He brags about using SVG in the post, but shares as PNG. =\

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wtvanhest
I'm going to argue that the colors should be flipped. Having sunlight last
longer seems like a feature not a bug. Taking Boston in to consideration, it
is dark here by 4:15 for weeks at a time in early winter. Every day of the
year, SF stays light later.

Boston would be dramatically more livable if it were to just change to the
next time zone. The red areas seem far more desirable to me.

~~~
Brian-Puccio
By "having the sunlight last longer", you mean to say "having the sunlight
later in the day. It's not that there's a longer period of sunlight, it's a
matter of personal preference as to when during the day the sunlight is.

(And I prefer it earlier and loathe DST.)

~~~
bostonpete
Where do you live? In Boston, the sun rises around 5 AM throughout the month
of June -- that's _with_ DST. Without, it, the sun would be up at 4 AM.
Anything before 7:00 is wasted for most -- anything before 6:00 is wasted for
the vast majority.

~~~
Brian-Puccio
Slightly west of you in NY where it rises at 5:30a EDT/ 4:30a EST.

I find it much easier to wake up at 5:00a if sunrise was half an hour ago and
the sun is well up in the sky. I can get up, go for a bike ride on the
boardwalk, shower, enjoy breakfast by a window.

And with sunset at 8:30p EDT/7:30p EST ... well, if I'm outside in the
evening, I'm usually hungry and want dinner by 7:30p, so the sunsetting then
wouldn't bother me in the least.

The winter is most miserable when the sun rises after 7:00a, waking up in
complete darkness is miserable for me.

If the vast majority doesn't like getting up to do things when the sun is up
already because they'd rather sleep in bed so they'd rather have everyone
change their clocks at great expense _shrug_ I guess that's their prerogative.

------
MichaelGG
I'm in Guatemala, and frequently see late dinners (later than 8PM+), but
Guatemala is about "perfect" in time. (And fortunately, doesn't participate in
timezone shifting nonsense, except on years when the local government
arbitrarily decides to implement a timeshift for a few months.) So it's
probably more a cultural thing, than a slightly shifted timezone.

While this article is interesting, I don't get the obsession people
collectively have with specific times and needing timezones. Don't like
getting up when it's dark? Get up later. Yes, that requires participation if
you depend on others' schedules. Schools are particularly notorious, starting
at ridiculously early hours. (My kids would have had to get up at 5.30 or so,
but I created a private school for them, and it starts at 9. Works fantastic
for them, they can stay up a bit later and play. There's no traffic rush for
the teacher, which is good. A much better solution than starting at 7.30.)

I imagine if there were no timezones, people would cope with this better,
since they'd be forced to. Instead of saying "kids shouldn't be up past 8!"
they'd actually stop and think about it.

~~~
dfc
People's obsession with "specific times" is kind of nice when you want to get
on a plane, execute a contract before the offer expires, allocate scarce
resources like tables at a restaurant or telescope time, calculate hours of
ec2 usage, ensure adequate physician coverage in an ER, etc.

I think "specific times" are one of the hallmarks of modern society.

~~~
MichaelGG
How do relative times help in your scenarios? How on earth would timezones fit
into EC2 billing?

~~~
dfc
Relative times? Timezones? Neither of these concepts appear in my comment. My
comment is concerned with "people's collective obsession with specific times"
and this gem:

"Don't like getting up when it's dark? Get up later. Yes, that requires
participation if you depend on others' schedules."

Modern civil society requires depending on other people; this is one of the
big problems with division of labor. Imagine bringing your child to the
hospital and having the nurse explain:

 _" Sorry Doctor Bob decided he wanted to get up a little later today. So your
child will not receive the routine emergency care that he needs. Oh and you
should probably rush home. this is can be a rough area. Sometimes the cops
that work the night shift decide they want to be in bed before it gets too
bright and the day shift cops are not real big on getting up when it is
dark."_

Collective obsession with coordination and organization is a hallmark of
modern society. How am I going to schedule a trip if I am not sure when the
plane will take off? How should I mitigate the risk that the pilot of my
connecting flight decides to take off early so he can put his kids in bed when
it gets dark?

I have no idea how timezones fit into EC2 billing. But I do know how specific
times relate to billing: "Billing commences when Amazon EC2 initiates the boot
sequence."[^1] That is a specific time, not a "We think it started sometime
after 0200 and before 0330."

[^1]:
[http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#Billing](http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#Billing)

~~~
MichaelGG
I suppose if you misconstrue my first comment as "people should just do
things, like, whenever, man", then you're right.

~~~
dfc
That is only part of my response. We seem to have fundamentally different
understandings of living in a modern society:

"Don't like getting up when it's dark? Get up later. Yes, that requires
participation if you depend on others' schedules."

I do not understand how you could even type "if you depend on others
schedules." Other than Christopher "Alexander Supertramp" McCandless I do not
know anyone who does not depend on other people's schedules. The disconnect is
not limited to this sub-thread, in another comment on this story you wrote
that you did not understand how children could reduce scheduling
flexibility...

------
zviad
Original article:
[http://poisson.phc.unipi.it/~maggiolo/index.php/2014/01/how-...](http://poisson.phc.unipi.it/~maggiolo/index.php/2014/01/how-
much-is-time-wrong-around-the-world/)

~~~
moogleii
Sadly it can't seem to handle the traffic as much as Slate

------
zer
Interesting fact just for fun: Afghanistan shares a 76 km long border with
China; this is where the biggest time zone jump occurs, an impressive 3.5
hours.

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brey
brilliant concept ...

... but this could probably be the poster child of where not to use the
Mercator projection.

yeah, Greenland overlaps five time zones. but they're tiny at that latitude!
this makes it seem like places as far apart as New York & Los Angeles are in
the same time zone.

edit: Miller not Mercator - but the point stands that it's distorting the size
of countries at high latitude, significantly exaggerating the issue.

~~~
zviad
It's not Mercator and I feel personally offended (it's Miller). I decided to
use a equirectangular just because otherwise drawing the gradients would have
been a hell.

~~~
brey
ok, it's not Mercator, but it has the same high-latitude distortions

any projection where Greenland is the same size as South America is IMO the
wrong choice :)

~~~
santialbo
Relevant [http://i.imgur.com/10sfTYY.png](http://i.imgur.com/10sfTYY.png)

~~~
kremlin
[http://mapfight.appspot.com/in-vs-gl/india-greenland-size-
co...](http://mapfight.appspot.com/in-vs-gl/india-greenland-size-comparison)

^ companion knowledge

------
blueblob
Down for me:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20140107014545/http://poisson.phc...](http://web.archive.org/web/20140107014545/http://poisson.phc.unipi.it/~maggiolo/index.php/2014/01/how-
much-is-time-wrong-around-the-world/)

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snissn
Earlier this year I was curious as to what would happen if we used a clock
that was actively calibrated to the solar high noon. I made this little web
page here: [http://mseiler.com/highnoon/](http://mseiler.com/highnoon/) that
uses your geolocation data and a few date-time and astronomy libraries to do
just that. It tells me that in NYC the time is shifted by about 11 minutes and
that number varies a lot throughout the year.

It would be a very different world if we were to set up meetings using the
actual solar time calibrated to the date and location of our meeting points!

~~~
upofadown
I suspect that your clock (or one with the same result) is the future...

Right now we have 2 clocks; Universal Time and time zone time. Even today,
there is no real practical reason to have such small time zones. It would make
sense to expand the size of the time zones to that point that there is only
one (Universal) and just use solar time for the cases where daylight is
important.

------
gruseom
I wonder if Spaniards used to stay up late before Franco changed their time
zone in the 1940s. Does anybody know?

~~~
darrhiggs
Yes, but the 1940's, and before, were different:[0]

" _" So you used to work in the morning at one job. Then it was necessary to
stop to rest. And then there was another job in the late afternoon and evening
— in order to earn enough money to survive," she says. "It's said to be the
origin of our way of life now."_"

[0]
[http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2013/11/30/244995264/spai...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2013/11/30/244995264/spains-
been-in-the-wrong-time-zone-for-seven-decades)

~~~
gruseom
That explanation isn't very convincing. People in other relatively poor
countries didn't develop that distinctive pattern.

~~~
darrhiggs
I don't think it matters if it's convincing or not.

I was answering the question, and the linked resource affirms it was.

------
kybernetikos
If you don't like having your time wrong, you could use my decimalised time
system that rotates the numbers based on your geolocation so that solar noon
where you are is always at the top of the clockface.

[http://kybernetikos.github.io/UIT/](http://kybernetikos.github.io/UIT/)

(You will of course have to allow it access to your location)

------
sirsar
Here's Google's cache.

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://poisson.phc.unipi.it/~maggiolo/index.php/2014/01/how-
much-is-time-wrong-around-the-world/)

------
stretchwithme
The anniversary of your birth may not always fall on the same day.

A year is actually 365 and 1/4 days long.

If you were born before 6 AM, this doesn't affect you. But for everybody else
25 - 75% of the time, the anniversary of their birth actually falls on the day
after, depending on what time of day you were born and whether it was leap
year and whether you born before the end of February (where we get that extra
day every four years).

And then throw in daylight savings time.

Of course, the reality is that sticking with the same day is good enough, just
as having some arbitrary number describe noon. 12 is, after all, an arbitrary
number too.

The important thing is that people agree on what these conventions mean and
that they help mark time.

~~~
stretchwithme
Sorry, this should read "the anniversary of their birth actually falls on the
day after or day before"

If you're born the year before leap year early enough in the day, leap year
makes the anniversary of your birth move to the previous day.

Needless to say, time can make your brain hurt.

------
dfc
The Olson tzdb used to have support for a solar-noon time zone for Saudi
Arabia. I forget the specifics but there was a need for solar noon and a
religious observance. It was just recently removed due to constraints
regarding the size of unsigned chars.[^1] It would be neat to remake the map
with the tz shapefiles and animate it a la xearth.[^2]

[^1]: [http://efele.net/maps/tz/world/](http://efele.net/maps/tz/world/)

[^2]:
[https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/a9ac0f6938c416f724a52115...](https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/a9ac0f6938c416f724a52115ca7b0b7abb13c347)

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bsimpson
Interesting to see how big US Central Time is. Most states in Central Time
(e.g. the Dakotas) should be on Mountain Time if we are strictly adherent to
the time zones. (Similarly, much of Eastern Time should be in Central, and
Hawaii is off by a timezone, presumably to keep them on the same date as the
mainland US.)

~~~
blahedo
In the US (and other countries that have _internal_ time zone borders), a lot
of the variation is to keep the TZ boundary falling through relatively
unpopulated areas OR to keep more of a state/region on the same time as its
capital or major city.

------
Void_
I noticed this when travelling from Eastern Slovakia to Western Germany. It
was really noticeable.

I personally prefer the red zones where the sun sets really late in the
summer, so it's nice to see the map of those. :-)

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wnevets
its perfect apparently.

