Transcription

A map of the world with vertical lines marking the time zones from UTC-12 to UTC+12. It has a legend:

Wrong Time

“Natural time zones” are 15° in longitude. Land in red observes a time other than the zone it lies within. Smaller islands depict their 12 nautical mile territorial sea, for visual effect. In some cases this includes a state’s archipelagic waters.

Plate Carrée projection, WGS-84 datum. December 2018 © International Mapping, all rights reserved.

  • Wrong title, it should be:

    A Map of the world showing where the local time zone is wrong more than half hours

    An hour is a human concept, we just divided the day to 24 parts, we could use whatever else division. Local time is correct only on the center longitude, which is a line with zero thickness.

    Also it’s clearly visible that France and Spain are in the wrong time zone, and it was changed by the Nazis. Before WW2 France and Spain was in the same zone as Britain. France changed because of the German occupation, and they forgot to change back after the war.

    • That would require way more effort than “find picture from elsewhere on the Internet, scale it down to a size my Lemmy instance will let me upload, and then upload it.”

      But anyway, you can basically get that from this chart, for the most part. The rightmost edge of each red section is 30 minutes ahead, or the leftmost is 30 minutes behind of where it should be, when those edges are caused by the time zone itself (rather than national or regional boundaries like state lines), growing by an hour per vertical line.

      So, the westernmost parts of Spain are about 1 hour 30 ahead, while the easternmost parts of Poland are 30 minutes behind. The westernmost tip of China is about 3 and a half hours ahead.

  • This map really brings home how awful this projection is for this map’s purpose and how awful most projections really are near the poles. Greenland isn’t that big. I know this map is Plate Carree, not Mercator, but the size issue of an equirectangular projection is really similar when comparing longitude and size for the entire globe from pole to equator. 15 degrees of longitude for a timezone stops making sense that close to the poles. Greenland would mostly fit in the central time zone of the United States for example. Given its sparse population, dividing it up into 3 timezones seems unnecessary.

    • 15 degrees of longitude for a timezone stops making sense that close to the poles

      Yeah exactly. The concept of time zones themselves really starts to break down at those latitudes, and I don’t think it matters what map projection you show it on (though something like Robinson or Winkel-Tripel, with curved time zones, would definitely make things clearer), it’s a fundamental aspect of the way in which light is hitting the Earth’s surface.

    • The real problem with this is the official dictate that businesses in the west of China have to operate to Beijing time hours.

      If you just said “businesses in the west open at 11 and close at 7, while Beijing does 9 to 5”, it’d be like a smaller-scale version of what I (and others, including elsewhere in these comments) have advocated for: everyone operating on a single time zone, worldwide (usually UTC).

    • I think it’s kind of dumb tbh. I imagine at certain times of the year, you will have farmers on one end of the country waking up in complete darkness, while others are waking up in broad daylight (I didn’t do any actual critical thought to determine if this is actually true or not, but it seems right).

      • Spain more than France, but both, tend to eat later, wake up later, as a response. Farming schedules are going to be dawn till dusk, and food market/retail hours would tend to follow. Stock market traders will match sleep/work schedule to market hours.

  • It strikes me that the Middle East, central Europe, and south-east Asia are the best places for time zone accuracy, while western Europe, western Africa, and northern Asia are the worst.

  • It sort of makes sense for most of the countries on there, as they (or the slice of them in the awkward timezone) aren’t big enough to justify splitting their timezones in half. Just pick the one that matches the most people and move on…

    But what the bloody hell are countries like Spain, Portugal, and France doing?? Basically their whole country is in the wrong timezone!

    • They’re basically doing the same thing China does. It just ends up looking even sillier because there’s an international border between them and Germany.

      Portugal’s a little weird because they should he UTC-1, and unlike their neighbours they don’t stretch their time massively by pretending to be in the same time zone as Germany. But they compromise by being in UTC.

    • Humans generally are awake during daytime hours and sleeping during night time. It makes sense that the time we assign them are fairly consistent.

      Then there’s China just being ridiculous.

  • The entire timezone and Gregorian calendar concepts are outdated political tool. We should’ve switched to consistent UTC-only clock and natural World Calendar or Cotsworth calendar

    • natural World Calendar

      Couldn’t find details of what that is.

      Cotsworth calendar

      Ok this is very interesting. I like it.

      But personally, I’m a bigger fan of the Calendar of Harptos from the fantasy Forgotten Realms world. Conveniently, it also has 365 days per year, except every 4 years when it’s 366. 12 months of three ten-days each. It has a few more intercalary days than Cotsworth, but maintains a number of months divisible by 4 so we can continue having 3 months per season.

      And speaking of seasons. In this idealised world, everywhere (or at least everywhere that uses the Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter season cycle) should use meteorological seasons, rather than the ridiculous astrological seasons currently more popular in Europe and North America.

  • We ought to get rid of that minus one time zone - nobody’s using it.

    Actually I think I don’t understand the concept. I think some of the guys in the other time zones might be using the minus one but be wrong.

    Damn this is confusing.