Re: Date and time on Cindu: yearly update

On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 7:11 PM, ROGER MILLS <rfmilly@...> wrote:
> A common failing, self included......It's the goodwill that counts.
I disagree.  Too easily faked. :)

> OMG I never even thought of that..... (Does UTC = GMT?)
The short answer is "yes"(*).


> I was born sometime in the morning hours of May 23, in the Central Time Zone.
US Central Time is nominally 6 hours west of GMT/UTC.  Was Daylight
Saving Time in effect?  These days it is in effect in the US on May
23rd (and is in effect now), and C*D*T is only 5 hours west of
GMT/UTC. But IIRC your birth might predate its adoption.

(*)Longer answer: the designation "Greenwich Mean Time"/"GMT" has been
used for two different time representations, 12 hours apart, and it is
the historical confusion between these two that led, on the occasion
of the adoption of a new standard for measuring time, to the
deprecation of the term "GMT" (which hasn't stopped anyone from
continuing to use it, of course) and the adoption of the term "UTC".

The acronym "UTC" is, incidentally, supposedly for "Coordinated
Universal Time" - the committee was split over the choice between the
English acronym CUT and the French acronym TUC and adopted "UTC" as a
compromise between them.  It works in English as "Universal Time -
Coordinated" , standing alongside "UT0", "UT1" and "UT2" as a specific
entry in the general category of "Universal Time".

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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