The one Chinese time zone thing is only for political reason. It is not acceptable to have more than one time zone, because apparently that would threaten national unity, or something. :rolleyes:
In the polar region, they just pick one time zone that is convenient and stick with it. For example, the research station at South Pole uses New Zealand time, because everyone goes through New Zealand to get to the station, and I think there are also support operations that go on over there.
A couple of areas (Newfoundland? Parts of India?) change their time zones by a half an hour, just to make it easier for the traveller. The entire Soviet Union advanced their time zones by an hour for some reason.
(Missed the edit window) And the reason for this, in the case of India, is IIRC they wanted to have the same time in the whole country and chose the local time (according to the sun) in the centre of it along an East-West line.
It’s not that it never caught on, it’s that those clocks were meant to make the transition easier and let people get a feeling for how long a new “hour” should feel.
Same concept as when France moved to the euro - prices were displayed both in euros and the equivalent value in francs, so people could get an idea of how much “real money” the item was worth.
Now they’re only in euros, because euros have been there long enough that most people have gotten a handle on their worth. Except my grandmother, who still thinks in francs. No, not the “new franc” of 1958, the ones before that.
I have no doubt that, had decimal time caught on, clocks without gregorian time on them at all would have become the norm.
In Saudi Arabia, for the longest time, they had a clock that had 12 hours from sunrise to sunset, and 12 hours from sunset to sunrise. Sunset and sunrise were “zero hours”, thus one minute before sunset was 11:59. And, 6:00 was when the sun was directly overhead. This meant that the evening hours and daylight hours would be of different lengths and those lengths would change during the year. It was a joy when working on the standard time zone routines in Unix.
Judaism also has a similar religious time too. The main reason is that in Islam and Judaism, the day starts as sunset and certain prayers must be said by certain times of the day. However, the Saudis officially adopted the standard 24 hour clock sometime in the 1970s and I suspect that the standard 24 hour clock was used unofficially in Saudi Arabia for years before its adoption.
I’ve also never seen a Rabbi wear a Jewish clock wrist watch (although I’ve seen Jewish clocks with the words “oneish”, “twoish”, “threeish” written around the dial). However, you can find sites that convert Jewish religious time to secular time like http://www.myzmanim.com/.
Like the Gregorian calendar, the standard clock is pretty much universal mainly because if you deal with the rest of the world, you have to use it.
Heck, Nepal and the Chatham Islands (NZ) have 45 minute offsets. Wiki claims they are the only two “official” zones not on an hour or half-hour offset.
Newfoundland, and now Venezuela also have half-hour offsets, as does India. I think in some cases they’re just doing it to be difficult. Cecil’s take:
We (speaking of Norway) use both, and as Floater wrote, easily go back and forth between the two. When a friend asks when the new episodes of Mythbusters are on, I’ll say nine thirty (actually I’ll say halv ti, but that’s a different story), but the program listing will say 21:30, and my watch will show 21:30 when it’s time to drop everything else and turn on the TV. Everyones watches, if they have a dial and hands, will show 19:00, but if you ask them the time they’ll say it’s 7 o’clock, except the lady on the TV who’ll say “It’s 19 o’clock, here are the news.”
Occasionally I’ll say things like we’ll meet up at 17:00, but not all that often. It’s of course possible that younger people do that more often, and that the old way is changing, but I haven’t noticed such a trend.
In Canada’s arctic, the answer is yes. Although there are no settlements close enough to the geographic north pole that it makes any practical difference.
I lived in the arctic for a couple of years. The absurd thing that got me was the practice of daylight savings time. Like the south, some communities practice DST and switch their clocks around on the appropriate date. Some communities do not observe DST and don’t change clocks.
Absurd because for 3 months of the year, there is no sunset. And for another 3 months of the year there is no sunrise. There is no practicality to observing DST in the arctic.
I work in airline operations in the extreme north. Communicating local times in an area where time zones are only a couple of hundred miles wide with sporadic observance of DST is interesting.
The best explanation that I got was, “because they can.” I understand that some countries interpret it as a sort of Daylight Saving Time to more align time with sunrise but the half-hour and 15-minute deviations just don’t make much sense to me.
It’s usually to get a better alignment between astronomical noon and nominal noon.
Either for all of the country, most of the country, the part of the where the government sits, or because that’s what they used to do it before anyone came up with a common standard.
It’s not like there’s any significant drawbacks to the solution.
Well, the relatively few people who have to schedule cross-time zone events can just deal with it. That’s one of the burdens that internationalists have to bear. The 1 billion people in India are getting along just fine with their time zone. It would be more inconvenient for them to have a time zone boundary run right down the middle of their country, practically splitting Delhi. And choosing either Bombay or Calcutta time as the standard would throw sunrise-sunset too far off on one side or the other.
As far as Nepal goes, I doubt very much there’s much international scheduling going on that needs to take into account what time it is there.
