Why do we still have time zones?

If you live in Anchorage and fly out to western Alaska for hunting or fishing the times for dawn and dusk are very different. Alaska used to have multiple time zones but they were abolished long ago. People adjust.
 
Australia is fun. Three time zones, but only the states in the southeastern quarter of the country observe DST. Oh, and just to make it more sporting, the Central time zone is off by thirty minutes. So in the summer, when it's 8 am in Perth it's 9:30 AM In Darwin, 10 AM in Brisbane, 11 AM in Sydney and Melbourne, and 10:30 AM in Adelaide. Crikey!


380px-Australia-states-timezones.png
 
Stewartb said:
If you live in Anchorage and fly out to western Alaska for hunting or fishing the times for dawn and dusk are very different. Alaska used to have multiple time zones but they were abolished long ago. People adjust.
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Yes. I find that many people don't appreciate how quickly the earth actually rotates and how different sunrise/sunset times are in different parts of the same time zone. I lived for a while in Panama City, FL, and I remember the sun setting absurdly early there compared to other places - it's at the extreme eastern edge of the Central time zone. The latest sunset in the summer is only 7:48 PM. Today, sunset there is 7:01 PM, while sunset in Van Horn, TX on the west edge of the time zone, is 8:18 PM.
 
Stewartb said:
If you live in Anchorage and fly out to western Alaska for hunting or fishing the times for dawn and dusk are very different. Alaska used to have multiple time zones but they were abolished long ago. People adjust.
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Hyder is officially in Alaska time but just on the other side of the border from Stewart, BC and runs on Pacific time. They also prefer using Canadian currency locally because the only bank for 100(s?) miles is also in Stewart.
 
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Seanaldinho said:
I was told one of the oil companies moved the time zone in ND so both of their offices on the western end of the state were in the same time zone. Never cared enough to fact check it...
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There are parts of ND technically in the Mountain time zone but all the locals operate on Central time. Mostly communities in the southern section of the Fort Berthold Reservation.
 
Did it for a career, it sucks. Time is an arbitrary number until things have to happen in closely coordinated events.

Humans are normally diurnal, overcoming time/distance problems requires a fixed reference, hence Z/GMT. The rest of it is for convenience.
 
Time zones didn't exist before railroads. Anyone could put a sundial in the yard and use that as the reference for local time. When the railroads started scheduling track use for east and west bound trains timing to the minute became important, but the hour of the day not as much. Regulator clocks were used to syncronize all the clocks on a rail line every hour, and the master clock was maintained in the rail company's main office.

This system eventually became adopted by governments into a worldwide time zone system. Is it a pain? Sometimes, but it's is better than resetting your watch to a new time every 50 miles. I say keep it.
 
And closer to home, if you head over to very friendly Newfoundland, they are on the half-hour just to add to confusion.
 
Pilawt said:
Australia is fun. Three time zones, but only the states in the southeastern quarter of the country observe DST. Oh, and just to make it more sporting, the Central time zone is off by thirty minutes. So in the summer, when it's 8 am in Perth it's 9:30 AM In Darwin, 10 AM in Brisbane, 11 AM in Sydney and Melbourne, and 10:30 AM in Adelaide. Crikey!


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I told myself, don’t do it, but I couldn’t resist. Had to do it, and by gum by golly, googling “quarter hour time zones” gets you this, https://www.timeanddate.com/time/time-zones-interesting.html
 
It’s rare a month or two goes by that all operating systems don’t get an update to their time zone files.

The things change constantly worldwide. Somewhere. For whatever stupid reasons.

Seeing that file change during regular patching is one of those files you just totally ignore as you’re looking at this month’s list of patches.

Ever-present in the list for as long as I’ve been patching *nix servers.

It’s not every month but after a couple decades of patches it seems like it, and doesn’t raise any eyebrows to see stuff changing in that directory regularly.

Those files also contain info on when daylight savings type changes happen so those are part of the reason they change so often. Various places muck with the week those happen all the time.

Of course the US moved those around a while back also which updated all of those files that year too.

Whether voted or decreed or whatever something somewhere is always being messed with.
 
RussR said:
Why do we still have metric and SI units?
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SI units include the metric ones. I assume you meant metric vs. Imperial/English units.

Reminds me of the old George Carlin skit:

It's 8 o'clock in Los Angeles.
It's 9 o'clock in Denver.
It's 10 o'clock in Chicago.
In Balitmore, it's 6:42.
 
chemgeek said:
And closer to home, if you head over to very friendly Newfoundland, they are on the half-hour just to add to confusion.
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India is on the half-hour as well. But, a neat little trick with India Time is that (if you wear an analog watch) if you turn your watch upside down, you'll be seeing British time. I don't know if that's a coincidence or something done purposely during the Raj, but it's pretty cool.
 
At least time zones (minus the half-hour/quarter-hour offset ones) serve some basic purpose of allowing people to know what the sun, and thus the average person, is typically doing in other locations. Even if we adopted a single time standard globally we would still have to remember 0900 here == middle of the day, most people awake versus 0900 there == middle of the night, most people asleep. The fact that all of humanity does not experience day/night at the same moments in time and we evolved to be awake during the day and sleep at night will inherently demand some concept of time localization, regardless of how that is implemented.

Don't get me started on imperial units though, they are so incredibly annoying (not to mention they are now defined off of their SI equivalents, so we are basically using SI units without most people knowing). We missed a big opportunity to move towards rationality when we rejected metrication in the 70s/80s.
 
A friend of mine from UCLA (the upper corner of Lower Alabama) points out they have their own time zone down there: 1934.
 
AKiss20 said:
Don't get me started on imperial units though, they are so incredibly annoying (not to mention they are now defined off of their SI equivalents, so we are basically using SI units without most people knowing). We missed a big opportunity to move towards rationality when we rejected metrication in the 70s/80s.
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I get in this discussion every once in a while and Imperial units actually aren't that dumb. Let me say that my degree is in a hard science, and I've lived and worked in Europe, so I'm comfortable in SI.

There is a certain elegance in using a base-12 system for measurement. Twelve having quite a few factors (1,2,3,4,6) makes dividing it into equal parts pretty easy on the fly. Base-10 isn't bad (1,2,5) but not quite as many. That's a big reason why our clocks are base-12 as well. I guess decimal time was a thing back in the day in France. Glad that didn't catch on.

As far as Fahrenheit vs. Celsius, I will argue that F is much better for day-to-day use than C. Fahrenheit kind of approximates a "percentage of hot" that a human feels (that's how I would explain it to my European friends who would ask me about it). 0*F is zero-hot. 100*F is all the hot you can handle. Everything else is a ratio of that.

I agree about rejecting the metric system. Except for our soda bottles. Those one- and two-liter bottles are single-handedly keeping the metric system alive in the US.
 
I once worked for a dive shop on Guam owned by a couple from Australia. He was pretty cool but she was not very fun to be around. At least once a day she would go off on a rant about "stupid bloody Americans and their stupid bloody measuring system". One day she had an Ambassador from Australia visiting the shop and took that opportunity to go off on her daily rant. It was about that time I had enough and turned around and told her "The metric system was developed by and for people who cannot count above 10 without taking off their shoes."

The Ambassador fell out laughing.

Paula tuned beet red.

I did not work there much longer.
 
smv said:
I once worked for a dive shop on Guam owned by a couple from Australia. He was pretty cool but she was not very fun to be around. At least once a day she would go off on a rant about "stupid bloody Americans and their stupid bloody measuring system". One day she had an Ambassador from Australia visiting the shop and took that opportunity to go off on her daily rant. It was about that time I had enough and turned around and told her "The metric system was developed by and for people who cannot count above 10 without taking off their shoes."

The Ambassador fell out laughing.

Paula tuned beet red.

I did not work there much longer.
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MDA?

I did a lot of diving on the island with them.
 
Sluggo63 said:
MDA?

I did a lot of diving on the island with them.
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GTDS.

Most of the 500+ dives I did while I was there were either solo or with a couple carefully selected hand-picked buddies (It was easy with a 14' Achilles and a 40hp outboard.) I tried cattle barge diving there once. Did not much care for it... Dude that ran MDA (Mark?) was a pretty cool dude. This was back around the turn of the century so things may have changed a bit since then.
 
Sluggo63 said:
MDA?

I did a lot of diving on the island with them.
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Diving was interesting when I was in Australia. The boat wanted our pressures in bars when we came back on board and I was set up for PSI. After the second dive or so I dug through the menus on my computer and reset the thing into bars.

Oddly, I was expecting them to have DIN tanks and brought an adapter. I didn't end up needing that.
 
I'm a Canuck. About 44 years ago Canada went metric. My generation still thinks in Imperial and most under 50 think in metric. You end up having to explain/convert values when talking to just about anyone. Lumber and plywood and pipe and a lot of other stuff is still sold in inch sizes, so if you're building a metric house you have fun. Aviation is a big mess of mixed systems.

All this to say that large changes take a very long time to take hold. It's not an overnight thing. Decades, at least.

Seems to me that all of China is on one time zone.
 
Some countries use meters for altitude and hectopascals for the barometric setting.
 
Everskyward said:
Some countries use meters for altitude and hectopascals for the barometric setting.
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Almost everywhere in the world outside the US uses Hpa.

China is in meters everywhere and we have to use a chart to convert meters to feet when we're flying there.

We used to fly into Kazakhstan a bunch and they use feet above the Transition Altitude, and QFE meters below. Since our equipment only works in MSL altitudes, we had to convert their altitudes given in meters AGL to feet MSL.
 
Sluggo63 said:
Almost everywhere in the world outside the US uses Hpa.

China is in meters everywhere and we have to use a chart to convert meters to feet when we're flying there.

We used to fly into Kazakhstan a bunch and they use feet above the Transition Altitude, and QFE meters below. Since our equipment only works in MSL altitudes, we had to convert their altitudes given in meters AGL to feet MSL.
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I flew into Russia once, which was where I encountered meters. Luckily the airplane was on the newer side and had a way to switch from feet to meters.
 
Dan Thomas said:
About 44 years ago Canada went metric. My generation still thinks in Imperial and most under 50 think in metric.
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Highway 1 north of Victoria BC, 1983:

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Everskyward said:
I flew into Russia once, which was where I encountered meters. Luckily the airplane was on the newer side and had a way to switch from feet to meters.
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A few years ago I flew in an Antonov An-2 in Bavaria. The airplane had two altimeters, one in feet and the other in meters. For local sightseeing flights the pilot kept the metric altimeter set to AGL above his home field elevation; thus indications of 4,200' MSL and 680m AGL.

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I've used Zulu time quite a bit in my life in the military, and frankly, it plain sucks except for those extreme few people who globe trot.

Zulu time is the fakest fake that ever faked. The only time that is "real" is local time, and human beings naturally reject ideas as dumb as Zulu time. It has some utility for some things, but is mostly useless.

As far as metric vs Imperial, as a mechanic, I see metric fittings and wrenches as having too loose of tolerances. If you really want to turn off a stubbortn metric fitting, it seems there is always an Imperial wrench that fits better than the designated metric wrench; there is no such thing in the other direction. I have no idea why this is.
 
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