NavList:
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, 9:18 PM
From: Dan Allen
Date: 2001 Nov 02, 9:18 PM
Nepal was 5 hours and 30 minutes ahead of GMT until 1986, and then they decided to get really weird and Nepal is now 5 hours and 45 minutes ahead of GMT! Some of the Unix timezone files have some interesting history about these things. Dan Allen -----Original Message----- From Navigation Mailing List [mailto:NAVIGATION-L@LISTSERV.WEBKAHUNA.COM]On Behalf Of Paul Hirose Sent: Friday, November 02, 2001 6:45 PM To: NAVIGATION-L@LISTSERV.WEBKAHUNA.COM Subject: half-hour time zones 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)