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."
Happy birthday to 180th meridian too ! (Score:5, Informative)
And don't forget the 180th meridian that came with it. When you cross the 180th meridian, you have to set your watch back/forward 23 hours !
Quite a few people are unaware of it ;-))
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1919PA.....27..416F [harvard.edu]
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Re:Happy birthday to 180th meridian too ! (Score:5, Funny)
I recently flew from LA to Fiji. On the way forward, you land two days after departure, on the way back, you land at the same time you departed...
It's pretty disturbing.
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:Happy birthday to 180th meridian too ! (Score:4, Funny)
Aaron: Man, I'm starving. I haven't eaten since later this afternoon.
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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.
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Oh man, I intend this as a high compliment - fifty years from now, Primer is going to be regarded by intellectual snobs (the trendsetters) in Brazil, China, India and Indonesia as maybe the finest example of American Geek Cinema of early Twentieth First Century, so far ahead of its' cultural time that it's almost awe-inspiring.
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bad mod cancelation
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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!
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Hehe... got you ! ;-)
I said most people were not used to this...
It is actually the other way around, you have to fly from Tokyo to Honolulu to land on the previous day ;-)
Your comment was nevertheless very interesting ;-)
Cheers,
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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!
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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.
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Yep, you are right, of course no two adjacent timezone have the same time ! Even if it"s not the same day on each side !
By the way, you can cross the 180th meridian (officially dateline with exceptions mentioned by another poster) without changing date :
Coming from Tokyo, you cross the line at 23:30 on say, October 21th, once the line crossed, you are now at 0:30, October 21th ;-))
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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).
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You are technically correct !
But in truth, the +12/-12 timezone is the same timezone with the dateline in the middle.
This image makes things a lot clearer:
http://www.worldtimezone.com/ [worldtimezone.com]
Since GMT is 0 if we had +12 timezones and -12 timezones we would end up with 25 timezones ;-))
So +12 and -12 take the same space as as one unique regular timezone would take.
I'm a Greenwich resident (Score:3, Interesting)
125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder how much longer it will take for the US to catch up?
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. Plus using AM/PM instead of 24 hour ("Military Time") again like the rest of the civilised world.
Don't even get me started on our lack of metric....
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Funny)
We're currently 5-10 hours behind, not too far, but we don't seem to be gaining.
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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 ! ;-))
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Funny)
The distance between the US and Greenwich is increasing, so continental drift will only make it worse.
I hear congress is going to pass a law to correct this...
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Don't even get me started on our lack of metric....
But you have a beautiful metric, in bodyparts!
It's perfect for D&D. "I advance five feet" is much more immersive than "I advance two meters".
Pity that you didn't make a corresponding time system replacing seconds, hours and days by heartbeats, digestions and bodyrottings.
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Insightful)
Most likely you only think "feet" are better than "meters" in D&D because you're used to imperial units and they feel more "natural" to you. As someone who grew up in a country where inches and feet are units only used when dealing with things imported directly from the US I always have to stop and think for a second when trying to remember how long "five feet" is, or how heavy something that is "150 pounds" really is, and don't get me started on the British use of "stones" for weight...
/Mikael
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Funny)
I always have to stop and think for a second when trying to remember how long "five feet" is,
What's to remember? Five feet is the reach of your longsword.
And I don't care where you live, you should always carry a longsword.
And 30 feet of rope.
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Or you could just use "steps" (where one RPG "step" = 1 metre).
Well, they're huge steps... but the real-word "foot" isn't quite the average shoe size, either.
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1 yard?
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Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Funny)
Well, of course! It just doesn't sound the same when one says "I wouldn't touch that with a 3-meter pole."
You mean: "I wouldn't touch that with a 3-meter american".
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:4, Funny)
No, he's talking about length, not girth.
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Re:It's because meters and feet are the same (Score:4, Insightful)
Clearly you're not a woodworker. Small measurements are where the metric system shines... large measurements people just estimate anyway.
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Re:It's because meters and feet are the same (Score:5, Insightful)
You miss the point. The advantage of using the same base across all measurements is not merely that it goes well with the digits we use, but it means different type of measurements work well together. A cubic meter works out to exactly a thousand liters, which when filled with water would weigh 1 metric tonne, which is 1 thousand kilograms. The pressure of 10 metres of water works out to 1 atmosphere, which is approximately 100,000 Pascal, which is 100,000 Newtons per square meter. At sea level the acceleration due to gravity is approximately 10 M/s so 1kg is roughly 10 newtons worth of weight. If you have a force of 1 Newton over 1 meter , you get 1 joule worth of energy, which is the energy drawn per second by 1 ampere of electric current at an electric potential of 1 volt.
Now, lets say you have a pool of water that is 10 feet deep and 10x20 yards by the sides. You want an electric engine operating at 230V to drive a pump that can empty the pool through a pipe that has a diameter of 3inches. The drain is at ground level. You don't want to leave it on unsupervised at night so you want it to take no more than 2 hours. How many amperes of current will your engine draw? What's the total amount of energy necessary to empty the pool? How much pressure does the pump have to handle?
I would STRONGLY suggest you convert to SI units before trying to solve that problem.
I agree with both of you (Score:3, Informative)
Using the same base across all measurements is really convenient - parent is correct about that.
But GP is also correct in that it is super convenient for your measurement base to have many factors. A unit comprising 10 smaller units can be smoothly divided in half, but not in thirds or fourths. For that purpose, 12 is a much more useful number than 10. You guys are debating the orthogonal advantages of two different systems: both are correct.
So the ideal would be a base 12 metric system, with all unit
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What was it fahrenheit was measured by? 32 F = water freezes, 100 F = body temperature, 212 F = water boils?
For reference, 0F is when salt water freezes, 32F is when fresh water freezes, and 100F is human body temperature (or at least that of Dan Fahrenheit.) The boiling point of water was not taken into account for creating the scale, it was just placed upon the scale later on.
I will grant that your point remains intact however.
One neat detail about the Celsius scale making more sense: Originally it was reversed, as in 0C was the boiling point of water, and 100C was the freezing point. It was only 'reversed'
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Is that dwarf feet, orc feet or hobbit feet?
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:4, Insightful)
While MM/DD/YYYY seems illogical, it maps exactly to the way you say it - April 1st, 2010 = 04/01/2010
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Insightful)
And if I say "1st of April, 2010"?
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For God's sake, say it any way you want, and write it in ISO YYYY-MM-DD format. Since no-one in the world uses YYYY-DD-MM, it is perfectly unambiguous.
Personally, I'm constantly irked by the fact that, in Canada, when you see something like 05/10/2010, you never know whether it's month or day first. In general, I see DD/MM more often, but because of strong American influence, every now and then you get a form with MM/DD, so you always have to look out for that.
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"nth of month, year" isn't exactly uncommon either.
Also, the written form Americans use causes a lot of confusion when dealing with non-Americans who use yyyy-mm-dd, dd/mm/yyyy or yyyy/mm/dd.
And as always, I think grandpa Simpson's classic comment really sums up the attitude behind why so many Americans are reluctant to switching; “My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!”
/Mikael
Greenwich... mmmm (Score:2)
And as always, I think grandpa Simpson's classic comment really sums up the attitude behind why so many Americans are reluctant to switching; “My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!”
/Mikael
Homer himself would say: Greenwich... mmmm.. pizza!
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I believe the way they put it when we write our notes for logs is: Use a system for dates. It doesn't matter if it's not the standard in north america. But use a system that works for you. Sometimes retraining someone to a new one simply screws them up.
Mine is yyyy/mo/dd, my friends is yyyy/dd/mo, one of the inspectors(OPP) that I was taught by uses dd/mo/yyyy. All three are valid.
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Funny)
Also, the written form Americans use causes a lot of confusion when dealing with non-Americans who use yyyy-mm-dd, dd/mm/yyyy or yyyy/mm/dd.
Why the hell do you think we do it?
You know we work REALLY REALLY hard to piss you guys off.. I mean we even elected a NICE president this time around just so we could fuck with you and elect Hitler next time... And yes I do mean "The Hitler". He flew out on that last plane that took off from the street right outside the bunker right before the Ruskies took it. We picked him up a few days later trying to enter Sweden. Apparently he had a bunch of gold in some bank there or something, who knows... Anyway we've had to replace most of his body over the years with alien implants we got from the Roswell crash but still you guys are just going to FREAK!
Hummmm, I wonder what you will think when we start a third war on terror, involving our own terror campaign... We like to call it... Where on earth did those Yankees hide that Hydrogen Bomb!
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Insightful)
Saying "April 1st" feels more natural to English-speaking people
Not to *this* English speaker. Some English speakers come from places other than the US.
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: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.
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Sorry but that is not just an inexact analogy, that's a total failure as an analogy: "car of blue" is not at all like "1st of April". The first one is clearly wrong, the second is clearly correct.
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Insightful)
While MM/DD/YYYY seems illogical, it maps exactly to the way you say it - April 1st, 2010 = 04/01/2010
uhm alot of people think in languages other than US English
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Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Insightful)
People in other English speaking countries say it correctly too (e.g. "[the] first of April two thousand and ten"). Americans say it wrong because they write it wrong.
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why I use ISO dates. Either 2010-04-01 or 20010401 or 2010.04.01 or 2010/04/01, optionally followed by a hh:mm:ss.ms timestamp. They have the wonderful property that (so long as the separators are consistent) the dates are correctly sorted by simple string comparisons!
Hooray for date formats where the digits are in most-to-least-significant order...
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English is considered by linguists to be one of the hardest languages to learn, because it doesn't really follow any of its own rules. I'll agree we should be ashamed as native English speakers that more of us can't speak other languages.
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I'd really like to know where you are getting that from; I've heard that sentiment before, but only from native English speakers.
As someone who had to learn English (and attempted a few others), I can tell you that it's far and away one of the easiest languages you can learn (assuming your native language is somewhere in the Indo-European family).
English can't really
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.
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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
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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 f
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On pronunciation, there's a great poem on the internet that starts with this:
Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I
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As you mention, the main issues in English are spelling and pronunciation which are extremely irregular, and phrasal verbs which often have little logic to them. Take 'get over' (as in stop being upset about something) vs 'get across' (as in make a point) for example.
On the other hand our verb conjugation is very easy when compared to Romantic languages due to it's heavy use of modifiers instead of having to learn 40 odd words per verb.
Also we have don't have the (IMHO ridiculous) gender system for all noun
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Grammatical gender is mostly just a way to classify different morphological classes of nouns, there's nothing ridiculous about it.
In English you can just slap a bunch of random phonemes together, and if the end result is pronounceable, it's a perfectly cromulent word. In languages with more complex noun inflection, you have to make sure that you can form all the required forms in some (more or less) sane way.
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Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Insightful)
The difficulty for native, American English speakers is, which other language does one learn? (Native American, English speakers have their own set of problems. :-) ) In high school and college I took Spanish, and became relatively proficient at speaking, reading, and writing it. In my first job, though, I spent five or so years working closely with Japanese, took Japanese language classes, and got relatively proficient at speaking it, too -- but my Spanish suffered terribly. Then my job changed, and I went instead to Germany. I got moderately proficient in German, but lost practice in Japanese (to say nothing of my Spanish). I then returned to the US, in an environment where foreign language skills are of absolutely no value at all.
I'm now in a situation where I remember three foreign languages poorly, interchange words and syntax between them with embarrassing frequency and, after what seems like a lifetime of learning languages and accommodating other cultures, can only speak English fluently. What have I accomplished? I worked hard at learning my coworkers' and customers' languages, largely because I didn't want to feel chauvinistic about others' use of English, but couldn't get enough life-long practice in each to become and/or remain fluent.
I am totally impressed with anyone who learns English as a second language -- I'm sure there's a language somewhere with more exceptions to its rules, but I'm unaware of it -- but, as a lingua franca it's usually clear that English is the language to learn. It's less clear which language a native English speaker should learn.
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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.
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:4, Informative)
It's also an official language of international diplomacy (it comes *before* Spanish translations on US Passports), and is spoken in a lot of North African and Caribbean nations, so you have more places available to comfortably vacation =)
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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 ag
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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 r
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That, plus the fact that the World Superpower since WW2 speaks it.
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet you have a holiday called the Fourth of July...
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:4, Informative)
That's because of the George M. Cohan song "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy" [lyricsplayground.com] which includes the line "... born on the 4th of July."
The tablet [wikipedia.org] that the Statue of Liberty is holding says, "July IV, MDCCLXXVI". I've always known it as Independence Day or July [the] 4th.
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Do you have any idea what that would do to the March Pi Day [wikipedia.org]?
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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: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.
NTSC came much earlier. (Score:5, Informative)
- Video. The PAL standard is better quality than NTSC (Never The Same Color), so why did the Americas adopt an inferior option?
That's sort of like asking why we adopted the clearly inferior analog STDV standard instead of digital HDTV. NTSC was standardized in 1953, PAL was not standardized until 1963. Naturally, PAL was the superior standard...it was based around technology that was ten years more advanced.
Not true for WGS84 (Score:3, Informative)
It is worth noting that in the coordinate system most used today (WGS84), this is no longer true.
See this [googlesightseeing.com] explenation or check google maps.
Re:Not true for WGS84 (Score:5, Informative)
Your link says nothing at all about WGS84. Here is one that does: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Geodetic_System [wikipedia.org]
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Greenwich, UK? (Score:2)
How many other Greenwich's are there at 0 longitude?
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Because there's also a London, Ontario.
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So why not have a "London" and a "London, Ontario"? I thought it was pretty common in english to assign the minor version a secondary title to differentiate it... not to assign every other possible version a secondary title as well. Do americans really say they're going to "Paris, France" for their honeymoon, or do they just assume people will know that no-one would want to go to Texas for a romantic holiday?
timecube.com (Score:2)
nuff said.
Re: (Score:2)
On a scale of 1 to 10 for batshit crazy, that is an 11. Seriously, I would be afraid to be in a room with that guy.
Re: (Score:2)
timecube.com [timecube.com]
His ideas intrigue me and I'd like to subscribe to his newsletter
WTF?? (Score:3, Insightful)
I have tried finding a reference to this and can't. What does it mean by being located at center of the Earth and not linked to any surface meridian? Time zones are linked to surface meridian's right? So how would a system work that was not linked to anyplace on the surface?
UTC and Computers (Score:2)
One of my favourite Jeff Atwood quotes is "All you UKers who live in UTC+0 are a bunch of dirty, filthy, stinking time zone *cheaters*".
Re: (Score:2)
Except we mess up the simplicity by being on "British Summer Time" (daylight saving time, one hour ahead of UTC) as civil time for much of the year.
Roll-on Sunday! (when we go back, and I get an extra hour in bed :-)
Anybody wondering (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
I agree. At the same time you should abolish the whole "daylight savings" time. Just use UTC for everything, and then simply state that stores 3 hourse before local midday and close 8 hours after (for the 9am-8pm hours).
Re:We still live in the past (Score:5, Insightful)
stores [open] 3 hours before local midday
You imply that the entire population can consistently and correctly subtract 3 from a number.
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: (Score:2)
Actually, local solar time instead of a nation-wide time zone was the standard... until the invention of the railway, which cut travel times and brought time tables.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (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: (Score:3, Funny)
I used to leave near New Orleans.
My bet is "this guy's house in Belleville, IL"