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European timezones are wild
(i.imgur.com)
So much politics going on in this map.
The eternal UK 🤝 Portugal alliance and the awkward space it creates between them.
Spain and Poland are in the same timezones.
The weird corridor created by Belarus.
Ukraine is in a separate tz from Russia, I wonder when that was established
What the hell is going on with the light blue in the east?
That has been established for a long time. GMT is the reference time. Time zones are designed to allow us to keep our circadian rhythm in sync with the clocks. E.g. lunchtime and midday are at 1200. Otherwise Californians will be having lunch at 0500, while India would have it at 1730. That would get very confusing for travellers, very quickly.
It was extended further with Unix timestamps. They just count up seconds. No faffing with dates and conversions, no leap seconds or time zone changes to track. Just pure, unadulterated time. Unfortunately people get weird, if you give the date and time of a cinema showing in Unix time. The current time is 1694599045
So you're saying the confusion of someone visiting a different timezone and not knowing what hour of the clock the sun goes down or comes up is worth avoiding, but the confusion of anyone that has to deal with timezones in any way, such as tv programs, emailing your office overseas, calling your grandma in Ireland, waiting for the release of your new game, wondering what time your aeroplane gets in, etc etc etc is not worth avoiding?
It's not like the sun rises and sets at a consistent time anyway. Not that people have lunch at a certain hour.
A while ago we made a completely arbitrary 'setpoint', and then we've gone and put relatively arbitrary offsets on top of that, and have an arbitrary subset of those offsets change at relatively arbitrary times of the year. It's insane.
Well time were first laid down because of trains. Every would have there clocks set to 12:00 the sun at or close to its highest point. And that was when a horse was the fastest you could ever travel. Then trains move fast and can just go around each other if they are on the same track. So we had to make times more offical so we wouldn't dispatch trains on collision courses.
Yes trains and to a lesser extent telegraphs gave us time zones.
But now we have mass air travel and the internet.
So metric time for all. I would be down for that.