[time-nuts] Time-zones and World time..

Chuck Harris cfharris at erols.com
Thu Oct 30 13:42:40 UTC 2008


With the great ease of computers to make the transformations,
there really isn't any point in removing local timezones.  It
is just a table after all... it is nothing like the old days when
every major town used Local Sidereal Time (eg. 12:00 is when the
sun is at its highest).  That caused major problems for the
railroads.

The biggest problem with local timezones is all of the continuously
changing variations on Daylight Savings Time.  That accounts for
the majority of the changes in the unix tz functions.

It was recently reported that the onset of DST coincides with an
increase in heart attacks, and the return to standard time coincides
with a decrease in heart attacks.  Yet another reason to ditch
Daylight Savings Time.

-Chuck Harris

Steve Rooke wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've been under the radar for a while so have not been able to keep up
> with the threads I was contributing to but that has been done to death
> and I will drop them. I've been very interested in reading peoplels
> thoughts on time-zones. Has there been any moves to adopt a common
> time for all countries in the world so as to alleviate the
> difficulties in dealing with time-zones?" I know there was the idea of
> Internet-time going around some time ago but I think that seems to
> have died a death. Thinking about it, what's the problem of adapting
> to daily life which is shifted by some number of hours off the clock.
> If we all used UTC everyone around the world would know when a certain
> time was in their own day. In my case for New Zealand, +12 hours would
> probably be adopted for the country, so AM becomes PM and I'd get up
> at 7PM (still that's not much different from now :) instead of AM.
> 
> I guess the question is, what's the likely-hood of a world standard
> time being adopted (sort of like Star Trek)?
> 
> 73
> Steve - ZL3TUV




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