Hmm - you tell how India straddles two time zones, so they compromised. What good sense!
You should compare that with Australia, especially in summer. Firstly, there are three main time zones, including South Australia and Northern Territories, which are 30 minutes behind the eastern seabord and 90 minutes ahead of Wesern Australia. Then in summer, Tasmania goes into summer time before any other state, but Queensland doesn’t have daylight saving at all (because they say it fades the curtains, the cows don’t know when they’ll be milked, and the chooks stop laying eggs!). So now you have three timezones along the same sunrise. Then comes the standard daylight saving start, and two states jump onto the Tassie bandwagon, but Western Australia, Queensland and Northern Territories stay off, so you have, to put it nicely, a total confusion. All of this happens again when daylight saving ends.
Welcome to Australia - have another beer, and the pain goes away!
Cecil, Newfoundland wasn’t part of Canada in 1884. So the Newfoundlanders didn’t do anything in 1884 to annoy “the rest of” Canada. Newfoundland didn’t join Canada until 1949.
I was going to mention that Newfoundland wasn’t part of Canada in 1884. Good to know someone else knows.
For an even weirder time zone in North America there’s St. Pierre and Miquolon (sp?) off the southern coast of Newfoundland. It’s (I believe) 15 minutes ahead of Newfoundland time. So they’re three hours 15 minutes behind GMT.
No. Standard time for Saint Pierre and Miquelon is GMT - 3:00. St. Pierre and Miquelon went off a locally based time in May 1911 and went to AST (GMT - 4:00). They then switched to GMT - 3:00 in May of 1980.
As far as I know, the only areas of the world that have a standard time that isn’t offset from GMT by an even hour or half-hour are Nepal (GMT + 5:45) and the Chatham Islands, New Zealand (GMT + 12:45). See my response in the parallel thread Out of Sync Time Zones.
I never thought about the differences in time zones before, but it makes sense. When you have a large country like the U.S. that spans the continent, then it makes sense to break into hour time zones corresponding to hour divisions from GMT. It is relatively straightforward for keeping most areas reasonably close to noon high in the sky. Of course there are some odd points along the edges, because the edges aren’t going to fit as closely as the middle zones.
Another possibility would be to have a finer scale, have 30 minute time zones. Wouldn’t that be fun? Places along the edges of the time zones would have a better fit, but at the price of more confusion between time zones.
But if you have a relatively small country (or other political division that decides to operate independently), then maybe you want your local zone to more correctly approximate noon high in the sky. So if you pick a central (say) location as your local calibration, then run the whole country to that time zone, you keep your small country all running in synch with itself. Of course if your calibration point is not near the middle of an hour time zone swath, then you might find your local time zone not running on the even hour. Thus you have Newfoundland’s situation. Newfoundland is smaller in width than a 1 hour swath, and it is right on the edge near Eastern Standard Time (but in the next zone over). Couple that with the fact that it was an independent country when that system was established, and the justification becomes very sensible.
Cecil mentions Saudi Arabia follows some bizzare ritual in which the clocks are reset to midnight at sunset. Well, there’s a rational explanation for this. The day as we know it begins at midnight and ends at the next midnight (or 23:59, if you like :-)). But as per the Islamic calendar (Hijri), the day begins at sunset, and ends at the next sunset. Many people (including the government) used to keep track of the time as per the “Islamic Day”, which was useful for calculating prayer times, and since sunset times keep moving throughout the year, the clocks had to be reset to 00:00 every day at sunset. But this procedure is no longer used though; with the use of computers these times can be predicted very accurately for many years, remember this article is over twenty years old.
Keep going, Cecil!
Yes, rampisad, Australia’s time zone situation is certainly weird. Especially when you consider that South Aus. (SA) and the Northern Territory (NT), technically “30 minutes behind” the eastern states, are actually more than that - about 42 minutes in the most populous city, Adelaide (my home town), ranging to more than 80 minutes in Ceduna, on SA’s west coast. The “30 minutes” mark is actually set on Lake Menindee, in the eastern state of New South Wales (which houses Australia’s largest city, Sydney, and surrounds our capital, Canberra - not a part of NSW as the Australian Capital Territory was carved out of NSW to build it in. A bit like Lesotho in Southern Africa, surrounded by but not part of South Africa). Those arrogant b…ds in the east didn’t seem to think that SA and NT were important enough to have a time zone actually located within their boundaries. The town of Alice Springs, in the NT , is geographically almost exactly in the centre of this area, figured from east to west, and has a local noon about an hour behind Sydney’s (a little over). Don’t ask me why we don’t have a sensible one hour time gap like every other blasted locality on this meridian. Even more bewildering is the movement within the SA parliament to try and push us another half hour further out of whack with the sun by matching us with the eastern states. “Good for business” they say, despite business in the USA managing with four time zones (if you count Hawaii) and clobbering anything we can manage here, moneywise. And bugger the kids in Ceduna who would then have to go to school in the dark.
If I count Hawaii, I get more than four U.S. timezones. To wit:[ul]
[li]Eastern Standard Time (GMT - 5:00)[/li][li]Central Standard Time (GMT - 6:00)[/li][li]Mountain Standard Time (GMT - 7:00)[/li][li]Pacific Standard Time (GMT - 8:00)[/li][li]Alaskan Standard Time (GMT - 9:00)[/li]Hawaiian/Aleutian Standard Time (GMT - 10:00)[/ul]
>chukhung<No. Standard time for Saint Pierre and Miquelon is GMT - 3:00. St. Pierre and Miquelon went off a locally based time in May 1911 and went to AST (GMT - 4:00). They then switched to GMT - 3:00 in May of 1980.
Hmm, all I know is that when the milenium thing happened I heard that they were claiming that they were the first place in north america for it to happen. At the time I heard it was because they were 15 minutes ahead of us, but I guess a half hour makes more sense.
Places along the edges of the time zones would have a better fit, but at the price of more confusion between time zones.