Re: Date and time on Cindu: yearly update

Mark J. Reed wrote:
> 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".
For whatever it's worth, the fact that there exists a new standard UTC
doesn't mean that people stopped using the old standard GMT, so GMT
would've been correct for a long time after the introduction of UTC. For
instance, Australian time zones were based on GMT until a few years ago
(so we would've skipped a few seconds at the end of one year, rather
than just one every now and again). I have no idea if or when any other
places have changed time zones... (We even have a defacto time zone over
in eastern Western Australia/western South Australia of +8.45, being
halfway between West Australia's official +8.00 and South Australia's
official +9.30; whether in practice that's UTC+8.45 or GMT+8.45 would be
hard to tell, and almost certainly completely irrelevant, there being no
official definition or clock.)

--
Tristan.

Reply