Re: OT: Time zone question

>One thing I though was screwy about Oz time was Western Australia
>being off-alignment from other zones by 30 minutes.  The same thing
>happens in India.  I'm not quite sure what logic is involved there.
I think the "logic" is simply that most of the populated areas in that
region of Australia are closer to 142 deg 30 min east longitude than
to either 135 or 150 degrees.  Why is that so odd?  The
round-to-the-nearest-hour strategy simplifies things, sure, but it
really only makes local sense when the population is more or less
evenly distributed east-to-west within the time zone.  When it's
clustered significantly far away from an even multiple of 15 degrees,
it makes sense to adopt a reference meridian that's closer to where
the pipples is..