
Nepal Standard Time - gkop
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepal_Standard_Time
======
annapurna
"[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.nepalit...](http://web.archive.org/web/20110725100005/http://www.nepalitimes.com.np/issue/155/Heritage/10013)

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dyadic
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)

~~~
MichaelGG
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
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

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nnain
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
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.

~~~
rmc
China us on one timezone.

~~~
ArtDev
In typical bullheaded fashion, all of China is set to Beijing time. No wonder
the people in the East are trying to revolt!

~~~
minot
Did you mean West?

~~~
donatj
Far Far Far East.

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AaronFriel
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
>"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
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.

~~~
Arnavion
A single timezone for the whole world made much more sense in Asimov's Robot
novels. But that was because everyone lived underground or in domed cities (I
forget which), so they didn't care about the position of the sun and woke up /
went to bed at the same time globally.

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ArtDev
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
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.

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brazzy
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=1...](http://www.timeanddate.com/time/change/china/shanghai?year=1927)

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=1...](http://www.timeanddate.com/time/change/germany/berlin?year=1945)

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...

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briandear
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!

~~~
listic
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.

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

~~~
evanb
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
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
Almost everything Numberphile does would be good for that group!

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cespare
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.)

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mnutt
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)

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nerfhammer
Nice time zone map:

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/World_Tim...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/World_Time_Zones_Map.png)

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
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)

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

~~~
minot
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.

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jtokoph
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)

