Re: CHAT: Timezones was The English/French counting system

On Mon, Sep 15, 2003 at 08:17:04PM -0400, Roger Mills wrote:
> Time zones are rather crucial, at least in a reasonably advanced culture--
> they were introduced in the US as I recall in order to coordinate train
> schedules, inter alia.
No, Standard Time is crucial.  What time zones replaced was local sun time,
where every degree of longitude a train travelled caused the time to
change by four minutes.  That's untenable.

Having a *single* time zone for the whole planet would be carrying
the time zone idea to its logical conclusion, and would be a big
improvement over the current situation of one time zone for
roughly every fifteen degrees except following some political boundaries
but not others and changing for daylight savings but not everywhere and
not at the same time.  Here in Atlanta, we're on Eastern time even though
longitudinally we belong in the Central time zone.  But at least all
of Georgia is in the same zone, unlike Florida which is mostly Eastern but
has parts in Central.

> China I believe has a single time zone - Beijing standard-- even though it
> extends over many degrees of longitude.
Yup.  If it works for them I don't see why it shouldn't work for everyone
else. :)

> ObConTime: Most of Cindu uses a 20-hour clock; the day begins at midnight,
> which is 0100 for the Kash. Noon is thus 1100.   The hour is 50 minutes, so
> a "half-hour" is ..25; the major divisions of the hour are 10min.intervals,
> kunim. Each time zone covers the equiv. of 18 degrees of longitude.
My conculture occupies a different planet, and I'm still working out
the details of its timekeeping and calendar.  The numbers to work with
are at least as irreconcilable as those we have here:

One mean day is approximately 31 hours, 49 minutes, and 15 seconds in
Earth units.  Their mean tropical year is 346.027063 of their days, which is
in Earth units 458 days, 18 hours, 20 minutes, 51 1/6 seconds.

I haven't worked out what their equivalent of a month will be; perhaps
a logical subdivision of the year, or perhaps there is some astronimical
phenomenon that will take the place of the phases of the moon for this
purpose.

-Mark

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