125 Years of Longitude 0 0' 00" At Greenwich 429
An anonymous reader writes "This week marks the 125th anniversary of the International Meridian Conference, which determined that the prime meridian (i.e., longitude 0 0' 00") would travel through Greenwich, UK. One of the reasons that Greenwich was agreed upon 'was that 72% of the world's shipping already depended on sea charts that used Greenwich as the Prime Meridian.' Sandford Fleming's proposal of a single 24-hour clock for the entire world, located at the center of the Earth and not linked to any surface meridian, was rejected / not voted on, as it was felt to be outside the purview of the conference."
I'm a Greenwich resident (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems at least Slashdot is not behind, I think that I have noticed before that mod points are attributed/expired at 0 hour UTC, 4 or 5 hours before midnight EDT/EST ! ;-))
It's because meters and feet are the same (Score:0, Interesting)
They're BOTH standard lengths.
A stride or a handspan is equally appreciable by anyone with legs or hands, but only if they are nonstandard.
The metric system's touted benefit of normal conversion is incorrect, by the way. You can have the same benefit with imperial by measuring in kilofeet. How many feet in a kilofeet? 1000. A megafeet? 1000000. How simple! Much better than that metric thing!
See how silly that argument is?
As to the "liters are so easy to work out", that too is bunk. Your water is 1.0064 kg per litre at STP. At 110C it's a thousandth of that. And how many people care about plain old water? They work with milk, beer, oil, treacle and so on. So you still need to remember weird conversions with metric.
And the only thing left is the "how many inches in a chain?" query.
It's only ever asked in maths class.
NOBODY CARES how many inches in a chain.
NOBODY measures the distance to London in miles, yards, feet and inches. Miles does just fine. How many miles in 1000 miles? So easy to convert!
But back on topic, why put the clock at the centre of the earth?
1) Who's going to put it there
2) Who is going to be able to check it
3) WHY???
The third one is real. Why? Is it because 99% of the rest of the world didn't get the meridian (for good reasons at the time: do you change 76%+A LOT of all maps or do you change the 24% that don't use Greenwich? No brainer).
What does it give us?
Nothing.
What does it solve?
Leap seconds.
The ONLY problem with that is that you need your time aware product to be updatable for leap seconds and that adds a few cents to your $100 GPS locator.
But missing out on leap seconds means the stars change location faster and we have to update all the astronomy books and astronomy software and astronomy hardware.
The costs are about equal.
It's the gadget manufacturers trying to offload a cost onto someone else.
Just recognise it for what it is.
Re:Happy birthday to 180th meridian too ! (Score:3, Interesting)
Reminds me of that limerick:
A young rocket scientist named Wright
once traveled much faster than light
He set out one day, in a relative way
and arrived on the previous night
Instead of going through the hassle of upgrading an Orion Project [wikipedia.org] spaceship, all one has to do is fly conventionally from Honolulu to Tokyo.
Now they tell me!
Saudi Arabia tried that (Score:5, Interesting)
It's called Riyadh Solar Time - look it up. It last one year year before they realised how much of a pain in the arse it was. Also, Japan used to have per-city time zones in five-minute increments, and that was a real pain for doing business, or calculating journey travel/arrival times. Discrete time zones for relatively large areas are just more practical in general.
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Interesting)
Saying "April 1st" feels more natural to English-speaking people than "1st of April" for the same reason that saying "blue car" feels more natural than "car of blue". It's because we put adjectives before nouns, while in e.g. French it's the opposite, and explains why they prefer to say "1er Avril".
Are you trying to claim that Americans say "April 1st" because April is an adjective? April is a noun. The reason that non-American English speakers say "1st of April" is because it's the "1st [day] of April". When you put it like that, "April 1st" sounds weird.
It boils down to the fact that what your used to is what sounds natural to you. There are many examples of very odd constructions in English that seem natural only because they are familiar.
This is yet another "it's not what I'm used to hearing, therefore it's wrong/inferior" argument. (Fahrenheit versus Celcius springs to mind)
Re:Happy birthday to 180th meridian too ! (Score:2, Interesting)
No, timezones are one hour apart and the international date line is the edge between two timezones, so while you cross the date line, you also cross into another timezone: 1d+-1h. This also means that the international date line is not even theoretically the 180th meridian, just like the 0 meridian is the center, not the edge of a time zone.
Re:Happy birthday to 180th meridian too ! (Score:3, Interesting)
No, timezones are one hour apart and the international date line is the edge between two timezones,...
Dead wrong.
Just look at, no read Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]: Most of the IDL is actually in international waters at the 180th meridian and separates the +12:00 time zone from the -12:00 time zone. The difference is 24:00, which is the usual time span of one calendar day.
However, inhabitated land masses and islands tend to have deviations in their time zones, yielding differences between 21 hours (between Russia and Alaska) and 25 hours (between Tonga and International Waters around it).
Re:It's because meters and feet are the same (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Happy birthday to 180th meridian too ! (Score:4, Interesting)
Flying Sydney, Australia to California is similar. There have been numerous times when I departed Sydney after lunch on Saturday, spend 14 hours in a plane, then land at San Francisco in time for breakfast on _the same day_.
Amusing chat over IM with a friend one such day:
Them: How's your Saturday?
Me: Good, had lunch in Sydney then breakfast in San Francisco after that.
Them: wtf???
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not because English is a vernacular language for most people that it is the de facto lingua franca for the rest of the world. Let's not forget that for a very long time, French was the language of diplomacy for a few centuries, and the official language in the European Union, until the UK and Ireland joined in and bullied their way through.
That's b/s. The European Communities did never have a single official language; it used all of the Member States' languages in parallel from the beginning. (Well, some institutions do have a working language, eg the European Court of Justice uses French internally, probably because its located in Luxembourg.)
BTW, when the UK and Ireland joined, there was no European Union.
Please don't confuse lingua franca and a vernacular language.
Please don't confuse modern French and lingua franca, which originally referred to the Frankish language, a West Germanic language only remotely related to Romance languages such as French.
In other words: The rest of the world speaks English because: a/ it's an easy language, b/ most of English speakers are too lazy, or can't be bothered to learn another language.
That's only because English is already useful enough, so there is no need to learn a different language.
The reason for English being such prevalent is, of course, the British Empire spreading it.
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, I think you're wrong. Months DO get used in adjective form quite a bit: "November rain", "May flowers", "June bugs", "April showers", etc! We tend to think of the month as modifying things. Today is the 21st, and is an October 21st.
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, we continue to teach date formatted in a completely nonsense format (MM/DD/YYYY) instead of either high to low (YYYY/MM/DD) or low to high (DD/MM/YYYY) like the rest of the world.
While the AC got modded "Troll", he/she has got a point, expressed in narrow terms, which I'd like to expand at the risk of being Offtopic: Why is it so difficult to standardize things from place to place?
- Video. The PAL standard is better quality than NTSC (Never The Same Color), so why did the Americas adopt an inferior option?
- Voltages. Being asthmatic, my wife took her nebulizer on a recent trip to Europe and within ten seconds busted our converter. We busted another one before ordering a special-delivery converter for medium-sized devices, the whole escapade setting us back about 180 CHF.
- Car filters. Working at a company that distributes car stuff, a trip to the warehouse is an eye opener, there's over 1,500 types of just oil filters, the difference between some of them being half a millimeter in circumference. Add windshield wipers (also windshields, for that matter), engine bands, tires (or tyres for all you Britons, cheers mate), fuses, and I wonder why no institution has put an end to this nonsense, like the API (American Petroleum Institute) did with engine oils (BTW, a shining example of standardization success).
- Keyboards. Even in Western nations, configurations change however slightly, so that a QWERTY in the USA is a QWERTZ in Switzerland, then another thing in Spain, etc, which tends to REALLY slow down typing speed.
- DVDs. Take away the PAL and NTSC thing, and you've still got to deal with the DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD+RW, DVD-RW, DVD-DL+R, DVD-DL-R, DVD-DD+R, DVD-DL-R, the majority not compatible with all burners, drives and/or players.
- Steering wheel/Street flow. Some do it on the left side, some do it on the right side. WHY???
Best comic strip I've read in the last few months is from Spain, shows some exhausted dude being compared to Sisyphus [wikipedia.org]:
- "Seven years of toil, but I've finally ripped, subtitled and uploaded all the world's DVDs to the Internet, with cover jpgs and all".
Then the guy points a gun to his head as an off-voice says:
- "Now stick them all up your ass, 'cause here comes High Definition, Blu-Ray, HDD and whatever the fuck else".
End of rant.
Back on topic, whoever ruled the Seven Seas first, got to do the homework and implement a practical system of navigation, and at the time it was the British, so I have to tip my hat to them, they did a bloody good job at it, as it still stands to the day and really needs no revision. Leave it at Greenwich, or as it's known in time circles, Coordinated Universal Time.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson did a gentleman's job at explaining the concept during a lecture available on the web:
- The Greeks named the constellations (while inventing the concept), so we still use the Greek names for them.
- The great Islamic culture of a thousand years ago named the visible stars, so we still use the Arab names (Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka, Rigel and Betelgeuse, to name a few just from Orion). FWIW, my favorite star name is the tip of the Big Dipper's handle - Al Kaid, which means "leader of the mourning maidens".
- The Brits invented the modern system of correspondence and postage, so their stamp is the only one that does not specify the country of origin, to this day.
- The North Americans invented the Internet, so USA websites are dot-com, while the rest of the world uses dot-com-dot-suffix.
All I'm saying is, in a modern world with thousands of pockets of eccentric engineers, it's comforting to find examples of global standardization, and the time zones is one of them.
Re:Happy birthday to 180th meridian too ! (Score:3, Interesting)
Hey, thanks for the nod and the insight, I quote the Wikipedia article on the International Date Line:
"Crossing the IDL travelling east results in a day or approximately 24 hours being subtracted".
Here's the thing, living on the Pacific Coast of the Americas (Mexico, to be precise), Japan would be to my west, even as a European-style education has drilled into my mind that Japan is to the east. Fun to have a previously shut window of perspective opened ajar, in a gentle manner. Well done, sir!
Re:Prime Meridian Moved (Score:3, Interesting)
The reason is that this kept the 90 degree west meridian in the same place the the original. Guess where that is...
Tells you where the power and money was when the GPS system was set up.
First, the article you linked says nothing about why it was moved other than GPS was more accurate. Care to cite a source on your claim? There's someone in the comments saying it, but that's also not sourced.
Also, I love that you say that but ignore this, from the article you linked. This is about selecting Greenwich as the prime meridian back in the day:
Rival 1: Washington was a key competitor, but the US threw its weight behind Greenwich, taking it out of the race.
Any chance to bash the US, eh?
Re:It's because meters and feet are the same (Score:2, Interesting)
In my younger days I was pretty damn good with wood, and working with sixteenths of an inch (or a thirty-second of an inch, or tighter, with a wood that sawed and sanded clean), was cake. So was sliding between an eighth and five thirty-seconds in my head. Approximations were something along the lines of 'a fat eighth.' It was all easy. On the other hand, people who can read perl like it was a second grade textbook frighten me. Although I'm sure it's cake for them.
As for estimations, what is your value for 'large'?
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Interesting)
Honestly, I get it from being a former military linguist and studying various languages. The US military/State department testing for languages puts English as a category 5, most of the romance and Slavic languages (a couple exceptions) as category 2 or 3 and many of the Asian languages (that use different alphabets) and middle eastern (Arabic, Hebrew, a couple of others) as category 4. I don't remember any category 1 languages.
These categories are based on simplicity and consistency of the rules for grammar, spelling, etc. They also take into account (as I understand it) difficulty of pronunciation. Korean, for example is a category 4 language. It is a phonetic language though, so once you learn the alphabet it's fairly easy to sound out any word. English, on the other hand, has horrible consistency of spelling and phonetics. Two, to, too; hear, heard; tear (cry), tear (rip); etc etc.
I am a native English speaker. I've studied French, German, Korean, Chinese, a little bit of Japanese, a little bit of Spanish and dabbled briefly with Tagalog. For me, the most difficult has been Chinese, with French, Spanish, and Tagalog being the easiest. I can't speak to any difficulty learning English because I was reading novels at age 4 and don't remember any issues with the language. My "English is considered difficult" is based entirely on my study of other languages, the test mentioned above, and my experiences living with and dealing with other languages and their native speakers.
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:3, Interesting)
That, plus the fact that the World Superpower since WW2 speaks it.
Re:Happy birthday to 180th meridian too ! (Score:3, Interesting)
Primer is a great film, one of my favorites. Just be prepared to invest quite a bit of time into understanding it.
The discussion reminds me of a story my father tells: for a high school English paper, he was supposed to write about an invention he'd like to create. He decided to create a time machine by placing a centrifuge on one of the earth's poles. He of course left out any mention of the IDL.
The teacher gave him a perfect score simply because she couldn't figure out why it wouldn't work.
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:3, Interesting)
I didn't say word order didn't matter, I said that most of the time it doesn't significantly alter the basic meaning of the sentence. Your example demonstrates this perfectly - it's entirely incorrect, yet any English speaker would, in fact, understand what you are trying to say. As long as you don't break up the prepositional phrase, you can shuffle the words in that sentence in any way you want, and it will still be understandable.
And yes, I realize that English grammar has rules, the point was that they tend to be a lot more streamlined than in most other languages.
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:3, Interesting)
Unless you are calculating area then you need to calculate it as (Pi/2)*r^2 vs Pi*r^2. In general it is a good idea to avoid division if possible. Messing around with 1/2 pi is tricker and can lead to more errors then messing with 2pi. In essence Pi is the lowest common factor so it is more correct for a constant.
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not really obvious that aux verbs are easier than tenses, both have their own spooky weirdnesses.
Yeah, maybe not. I think it maybe just that other languages treat tense formation more explicitly and the speaker is forced to think about the underlying concepts more. For example, I remember my Greek professor having a hell of a time explaining verb aspect to the English speakers, and I can't recall any similar difficulty with basic linguistic concepts when learning English (could've just been a particularly dense group, for all I know).
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's even worse for British/Irish people. For less than £50 I can fly to another EU country. Together, we speak 22 official languages, and a load of "less-official" ones, like Welsh or Catalan. And that's not including Norway or Iceland, another two countries with their own language. 50% of EUians speak English, and there's no way I can learn 21 other languages, so I'll just have to get embarrassed instead.
two more gripes (Score:2, Interesting)
right handed versus left handed traffic. solution best decided by vanuatu:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9b/Vanuatu_driving.png [wikimedia.org]
rail gauge. there's european and chinese, standard, but russia uses a broad gauge, which is a serious problem for economic development:
http://www.chinapost.com.tw/business/2008/01/11/138592/Beijing-to.htm [chinapost.com.tw]
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's also an official language of international diplomacy
French was the official language of diplomacy until about the middle of the 19th Century when the British Empire refused to use it. At that point in time, and re-enforced by the rise of the US, the official language of diplomacy around the world (the lingua franca "french language") has been English. English is the lingua franca of diplomacy.
English is also the official language of global air-traffic control with only one exception (hello France again).
I speak French, I love France. But as a global language? Yes you need it in France but even in ex-French colonies you'll find that more people want to speak English to you than want to speak French.
Working at a pan-european organisation (two official languages English and French) summed up the dominance of English. When a Frenchman, Italian or German had an argument they had it in ENGLISH even if they all spoke French. One day I sat in a meeting where someone, French, proposed that it should be held in French. The Spanish, Dutch, Italian and German contingent made clear that this wasn't an option. The Brits in the room didn't even have to say anything.
French is a beautiful language when spoken by beautiful French women.