this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
1264 points (98.1% liked)

Comic Strips

12976 readers
2121 users here now

Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.

The rules are simple:

Web of links

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] stebo02@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

12:00 is not solar noon more often than it is.

if timezones were done correctly it would be and the numbers wouldn't be that arbitrary

[–] vithigar@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

It definitely would not be, regardless of whatever "done correctly" means. Solar noon at exactly 12:00 is only going to happen on a single line of longitude. If you have a timezone centered on that line and exactly 15° (one hour) wide then solar noon will be up to 30 minutes away from 12:00 depending on your east/west position in that timezone.

It was exactly this realization that the numbers were arbitrary and 12:00 didn't need to be solar noon that led to the creation of timezones in the first place, so that it's not 4:14 in Norwich while it's 3:52 in Birmingham and just travelling from city to city doesn't mean you're changing your watch constantly and it becomes actually possible to write a sensible rail schedule.

Timezones are already a step toward an arbitrary standard time for the purposes of making communication easier and not needing to change your watch just because you moved around. UTC everywhere would just be another larger step in that already established direction.