I once digged into this database out of curiosity and found incredibly detailed research on many edge cases. Like time zones in Germany being temporarily aligned to Moscow during soviet occupancy after World War Two.
One particular commenter stood out to me, so I looked him up because I was interested which kind of people spend so much time correcting timezone information.
Turns out he was an astrologer and wanted his astrology-program to work perfectly correct.
I find it funny that we have to thank astrology for the correct calculations in our banking software :).
On the other hand, it was also astrologers that made copyright claims on the database and caused it to become unavailable to the world for a short period of time.
It were not astrologers, it was a company that creates astrology software.. Don't mix people with companies, they are different things! One is there definitely for the money, the other may or may not..
If you like this there has been a interesting discussion on the tzdb mailing list about how to handle the Vancouver change and the next releases of the tzdb and the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository: https://lists.iana.org/hyperkitty/list/tz@iana.org/thread/IE...
> I’ve perused the tz repository before, and I always learn something interesting. For example, during WWII Britain adopted double summer time, adding two hours to the clock in the summer and one hour in the winter.
My country, Spain, did the same but never fixed it, so we are still in this "double summer time". It is one of the main reasons why Spanish people seemingly do everything later (breakfast, lunch, dinner) than other European countries.
Just last night some friends brought up the time change tonight and the news from British Columbia, and what the California government has or hasn't done about it currently and in the past and why we haven't just gotten rid of the system already to save us the trouble of adjusting clocks twice a year.
And of course, there was instantly a heated debate about whether to permanently choose Standard Time or Daylight Saving Time, with passionate, almost religious arguments for both options. I feared sectarian violence was about to erupt at the dinner table.
Our collective relationship with time is truly unhinged.
The thing is, it doesn't matter. Everyone with an argument is wrong. All you're arguing about is when you start/finish work/school. But it it doesn't matter and you have to arbitrarily label the hours of the day with numbers, you'd obviously pick standard time and not randomly offset everything by an hour.
The problem is that so much of our culture is tied to specific hours on the clock (e.g. "9 to 5"), even though it doesn't need to be that way. China has one time zone and it works fine. Most of Spain is west of Greenwich, yet remains on European time. People there just adjust and don't insist that certain times of day have universal meanings.
Standard Time vs Daylight Saving Time is exactly the same as Big Endian vs Little Endian. Jonathan Swift is laughing at us from the beyond.
Though I'd prefer solar noon to be close to clock noon, I'd be fine with permanent DST if it meant we stop fiddling with the clocks twice a year. I can adjust the relationship between clock time and solar time for myself just fine, even if some aspects of society care more about clock time than solar time. It's the hour jump twice a year that annoys me.
Nice visualizations. I went the opposite way, showing how many times the timezones were adjusted for different regions, on map (both with and without DST).
Readit News
One particular commenter stood out to me, so I looked him up because I was interested which kind of people spend so much time correcting timezone information.
Turns out he was an astrologer and wanted his astrology-program to work perfectly correct.
I find it funny that we have to thank astrology for the correct calculations in our banking software :).
I was curious and found more info here: https://www.computerworld.com/article/1548822/astrolabe-with...
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Linked from https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/main/asia#L3818
I don't think I have anything on my network hammering GH...
My country, Spain, did the same but never fixed it, so we are still in this "double summer time". It is one of the main reasons why Spanish people seemingly do everything later (breakfast, lunch, dinner) than other European countries.
But Spain is much further to the west.
And of course, there was instantly a heated debate about whether to permanently choose Standard Time or Daylight Saving Time, with passionate, almost religious arguments for both options. I feared sectarian violence was about to erupt at the dinner table.
Our collective relationship with time is truly unhinged.
#teamdaylightsaving
Don't talk to me or my son ever again.
Isn't Pacific Daylight Time = Mountain Standard Time?
You can offset everything by an hour and still have 'standard' in the name of the timezone.
The problem is that so much of our culture is tied to specific hours on the clock (e.g. "9 to 5"), even though it doesn't need to be that way. China has one time zone and it works fine. Most of Spain is west of Greenwich, yet remains on European time. People there just adjust and don't insist that certain times of day have universal meanings.
Standard Time vs Daylight Saving Time is exactly the same as Big Endian vs Little Endian. Jonathan Swift is laughing at us from the beyond.
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https://blog.scottlogic.com/2021/09/14/120-years-timezone.ht...
https://ciju.in/writings/understanding-timezones
> A spirited attack on daylight savings from Canadian intellectual Roberton Davies in 1947: [full quote]
> A story of a public clock in Nashville in the 1950s with “dueling faces”—one time for conservatives and another for liberals.
> An account of the “day of two noons” in New York City in 1883, when standardized time zones were adopted and “local time” was abandoned forever.
> A detective story about ascertaining the proper chronology of time zones in Resolute Bay, a tiny community north of the Arctic circle.