2w ago

A Map of the world showing where the local time zone is wrong

94 comments

Wrong title, it should be:
A Map of the world showing where the local time zone is wrong more than half hours
An hour is a human concept, we just divided the day to 24 parts, we could use whatever else division. Local time is correct only on the center longitude, which is a line with zero thickness.
Also it's clearly visible that France and Spain are in the wrong time zone, and it was changed by the Nazis. Before WW2 France and Spain was in the same zone as Britain. France changed because of the German occupation, and they forgot to change back after the war.
- Correction: Spain time zone was not changed by the Nazis, It was changed by the Fascists. Franco changed it to have the same time as Germany.
  Fun fact: Have you seen videos of dogs begging for food the day after the time change, having to wait an extra hour? Spaniards were the same, and after the time change, they continued eating lunch and dinner according to their biological clock. That’s why Spaniards have lunch and dinner at later hours.
- Nazi time Nazi time
  
  It's nazi o clock somewhere
- technically correct

Time zones are fundamentally wrong and immoral. Only the Time Cube is correct.
- even Caves of Qud celebrates this legacy
  
  Oh man, I did not know that Qud had a TimeCube reference...
- a great song about it
- If you want a real trip click through the different archive dates on this site. Dude goes through a whole progression of who he's pissed off at month to month.
  
  It's great. He adds them randomly in the middle of rants too.
- should I read it?
- gene?
  
  There are four simultaneous 24 hour days! It's bellybutton math.
- You are not authorized to discuss Time Cube!
- Absolute classic.
  I would have voted for the TimeCube guy over Trump.

France, Spain, Belgium, and the Netherlands are in the wrong time zone because of Nazis https://lemmy.ca/post/2220899
- That doesn't exactly explain why they're still in those time zones 80 years later, despite only having been under Nazi control for less than 6 years.
- Not only that, most of Spain (except the Canaries), the most extreme case, Is on a time zone that has a border with Russia, while actually being on the Greenwich meridian.

You should make one that shows how much the official time is wrong with respect to the local time.
- That would require way more effort than "find picture from elsewhere on the Internet, scale it down to a size my Lemmy instance will let me upload, and then upload it."
  But anyway, you can basically get that from this chart, for the most part. The rightmost edge of each red section is 30 minutes ahead, or the leftmost is 30 minutes behind of where it should be, when those edges are caused by the time zone itself (rather than national or regional boundaries like state lines), growing by an hour per vertical line.
  So, the westernmost parts of Spain are about 1 hour 30 ahead, while the easternmost parts of Poland are 30 minutes behind. The westernmost tip of China is about 3 and a half hours ahead.
  
  Yes, I know about China and Spain, that's why it would be interesting to plot it.

Lets just do a single time zone
- I prefer the current way --- I can be in another state or another country and I know that 7am is a good time for breakfast, around noon is a good time for lunch, and so forth. (If you don't change latitude sure, just go outside to figure this out, but it's complicated if it's overcast, or the latitude isn't what you're used to, or...)
  Time has a number of meanings --- UTC is great for machines, local time is (IMHO) a good concept for humans.
  
  I think local time would work pretty much the same with a single time zone.
  Single time zone: You get to a new place and look up what time is good for breakfast here
  Many time zones: You get to a new place and look up what time zone you're in.
  Either way you need to look up what the local time is. But with a single time zone, i think the breakfast time and work hours would be a bit better attuned to sunrise/sunset at your location.
  To me, the main difference is more philosophical. I think it'd encourage a more global perspective.
  Edit to add: it's more of a pie in the sky wish. I dont think it would be worthwhile to actually remove time zones. It would be very expensive for not a lot of gain. In the same vein, I'd like to:
  sort out our calendar (evenly sized months, dates corresponding to weekdays, and not have prime number of weekdays),
  sort out our time units. Lets keep it all in the same base (not 24h days and 60min per hour)
  transition to a base-12 numeric system. It's just much more satisfying.
- Yeah! We want utc more widely used.
- Would be a pain in the ass
- Would be ideal, but it's going to be impossible to convince the world to do it.
  They won't even abolish daylight savings.
- alright, then from now on your noon is at 19:00 and your midnight is at 07:00
  
  Yeah, and? its just an arbitrary number.
  
  Sounds good, thank you!

This map really brings home how awful this projection is for this map's purpose and how awful most projections really are near the poles. Greenland isn't that big. I know this map is Plate Carree, not Mercator, but the size issue of an equirectangular projection is really similar when comparing longitude and size for the entire globe from pole to equator. 15 degrees of longitude for a timezone stops making sense that close to the poles. Greenland would mostly fit in the central time zone of the United States for example. Given its sparse population, dividing it up into 3 timezones seems unnecessary.
- 15 degrees of longitude for a timezone stops making sense that close to the poles
  Yeah exactly. The concept of time zones themselves really starts to break down at those latitudes, and I don't think it matters what map projection you show it on (though something like Robinson or Winkel-Tripel, with curved time zones, would definitely make things clearer), it's a fundamental aspect of the way in which light is hitting the Earth's surface.

"wrong". technically it's entirely made up. you can write whatever number you want on the scale where the sun hits the zenith as long as all people nearby can agree to it.
- Yeah, methinks a gradient would have been better instead of a solid demarcation

It strikes me that the Middle East, central Europe, and south-east Asia are the best places for time zone accuracy, while western Europe, western Africa, and northern Asia are the worst.

World: So China, you are one of the largest landmasses on the planet. How many time zones do you want?
China: No thanks. * sips tea *

It sort of makes sense for most of the countries on there, as they (or the slice of them in the awkward timezone) aren't big enough to justify splitting their timezones in half. Just pick the one that matches the most people and move on...
But what the bloody hell are countries like Spain, Portugal, and France doing?? Basically their whole country is in the wrong timezone!
- They're basically doing the same thing China does. It just ends up looking even sillier because there's an international border between them and Germany.
  Portugal's a little weird because they should he UTC-1, and unlike their neighbours they don't stretch their time massively by pretending to be in the same time zone as Germany. But they compromise by being in UTC.

Thank goodness I don't live in an area with the wrong timezone, assuming grey is clear.

I still like China time same for whole big ass country. Everyone in NA go by NYC time. fuck that tv schedule.
- The real problem with this is the official dictate that businesses in the west of China have to operate to Beijing time hours.
  If you just said "businesses in the west open at 11 and close at 7, while Beijing does 9 to 5", it'd be like a smaller-scale version of what I (and others, including elsewhere in these comments) have advocated for: everyone operating on a single time zone, worldwide (usually UTC).
- I think it's kind of dumb tbh. I imagine at certain times of the year, you will have farmers on one end of the country waking up in complete darkness, while others are waking up in broad daylight (I didn't do any actual critical thought to determine if this is actually true or not, but it seems right).
  
  Spain more than France, but both, tend to eat later, wake up later, as a response. Farming schedules are going to be dawn till dusk, and food market/retail hours would tend to follow. Stock market traders will match sleep/work schedule to market hours.

An item on my bucket list has been to create a map with "gradients" (really just 1-minute rectsngular bands) of what time the high noon is in that location. This map is just a subset of that, coloring red the areas with an over-30-minute offset. I'd make one for January and one for July to account for DST on both hemispheres.
I'll probably convert a publicly available timezone shapefile into a Plate Carée (or similar) projection SVG, create a "gradient" spanning the entire globe and then use it as texture for the SVG shapes, horizontally offset appropriately.
- That would be really cool!

Hell yeah, I'm in Correct Time

We ought to get rid of that minus one time zone - nobody's using it.
Actually I think I don't understand the concept. I think some of the guys in the other time zones might be using the minus one but be wrong.
Damn this is confusing.

Spain and western China are fucked 😬

when?
in the summer or winter?
- One of the many reasons this makes no sense.
- This uses standard time across the board. Because accounting for shifts due to pretendy-magic-time would be impossible in a static image.
  
  We spend most of our year in daylight savings time. Standard time is the pretendy-magic-time.

Yes, but do you know how many time zones there are in the Soviet Union?
Because I already asked once.
- Is a video the right tool to answer a question when the answer is literally a couple characters?
  
  No, but a track from Negativland's best album is fun to listen to.
- Is there any escape from noise?
  
  I'm recording all the noise...
- 11, if someone actually wanted to know
  
  Eleven. It's not even funny.

Make another that compares to daylight saving time.

Does anyone have a source link with a high resolution version?
- This one here should be pretty high res. I only scaled it down to 4000 px wide. If you're not seeing that, it may be something funky with your instance's proxy—check my instance.
  But the original was 9600 wide iirc. If you want that, it cake from signing up to a mailing list that was linked by someone else in my earlier post in this community.
  
  Beehaw is on a quite old Lemmy version, the picture is fine for the recent ones
  https://aussie.zone/pictrs/image/7479fde6-4477-47dc-9bf4-339dde2b4cb8.png?format=webp

Having lived in parts of the red and grey zones, some of the colours should be reversed

So looking at the US map, it looks like a lot of the red zones are because they've arbitrarily defined the borders of the time zone. But US time zones are mostly concerned with making sure that the country is roughly evenly spaced across time zones. Really the northeastern part of the country is what's out of alignment.
- No? We're perfectly fine!
  
  I lived in New England for a couple of decades. Trust me, you're not.

Russia looks funny

Asia needs to get its shit together.
- I don't think Asia on the whole is doing particularly bad. The projection makes it look worse because north Asia is the worst part of Asia, and the projection makes that part look much bigger than more southern parts.
  The Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, and southeast Asia are all great.

The entire timezone and Gregorian calendar concepts are outdated political tool. We should’ve switched to consistent UTC-only clock and natural World Calendar or Cotsworth calendar
- natural World Calendar
  Couldn't find details of what that is.
  Cotsworth calendar
  Ok this is very interesting. I like it.
  But personally, I'm a bigger fan of the Calendar of Harptos from the fantasy Forgotten Realms world. Conveniently, it also has 365 days per year, except every 4 years when it's 366. 12 months of three ten-days each. It has a few more intercalary days than Cotsworth, but maintains a number of months divisible by 4 so we can continue having 3 months per season.
  And speaking of seasons. In this idealised world, everywhere (or at least everywhere that uses the Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter season cycle) should use meteorological seasons, rather than the ridiculous astrological seasons currently more popular in Europe and North America.

I want more sun after my work. Local time zones don't make any sense.
- Humans generally are awake during daytime hours and sleeping during night time. It makes sense that the time we assign them are fairly consistent.
  Then there's China just being ridiculous.

And people wonder about Brexit

94 comments