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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: half-hour time zones
From: Dan Allen
Date: 2001 Nov 02, 9:21 PM
From: Dan Allen
Date: 2001 Nov 02, 9:21 PM
The official history from some well-research Unix timezone work has Nepal being 5:41:16 ahead of GMT until 1920, then 5:30 until 1986, and now 5:45 ahead, which is closer to their older value. Timezones didn't come into being until the 1880s. -----Original Message----- From Navigation Mailing List [mailto:NAVIGATION-L@LISTSERV.WEBKAHUNA.COM]On Behalf Of Trayfors, William Sent: Friday, November 02, 2001 6:54 PM To: NAVIGATION-L@LISTSERV.WEBKAHUNA.COM Subject: Re: half-hour time zones Paul: There are some weird ones. India is on the half-hour (GMT +5:30). Nepal used to be...maybe still is... 40 minutes off the hour (just to be different from India) at GMT +5:40 :-)) There may be others. Bill At 06:44 PM 11/2/01 -0800, you wrote: >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) ______________________________________ Washington Decision Support Group, Inc. Advanced Information Technology Consultants 2401 South Lynn Street, Arlington, VA 22202 Tel 703-838-8784 Fax 703-838-0019