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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Half-hour time zones
From: Paul Hirose
Date: 2001 Nov 02, 7:45 PM
From: Paul Hirose
Date: 2001 Nov 02, 7:45 PM
Anyone know why some places have time offsets not an integral number of hours from Greenwich? Like Newfoundland. According to my atlas (a few years old), standard time there is some hours and 30 minutes behind Greenwich. I don't see any advantage to such an odd time zone, and several disadvantages. For example, I've heard that some GPS receivers won't allow fractional hour offsets for the local time display. And my watch, which has a secondary time zone, is the same way. Years ago I wrote a program which had to know the local time offset from Greenwich, and it accepted any offset, down to decimal seconds if you wanted. No arbitrary limitations for me! But I can sympathize with programmers who decline to cater to (or are ignorant of) weird time zones. I'd like to hear how Newfoundland got that time zone. -- paulhirose@earthlink.net (Paul Hirose)