Time Zones

[jiacinto]

I was driving across IN and entered IL. I then realized that the time zones don't make sense at all. I was in Georgia at Ruby Falls and realized that the next County over in TN is in CST.

Who made the lines? What if you have a friend in Convington, IN and in Danville, IL? How do you arrange to meet somehwere? Isn't it weird that on one side of the line it's 4 PM and 5 PM on the other? How do people keep appointments?>

[MrSoundAndVision]

1. The Banks...

made the lines, and Indiana was stubborn. And it's not so weird when you consider that the Indiana state legislature passed a bill making pi=4 (pi=3.14159).

[jiacinto]

2. why did they do that

nt

[MissMarple]

3. Arizona and Hawaii don't do time zones.

And there are parts of other states that don't. I don't blame them. It's basically stupid. Why not just have folks go to work an hour earlier? That seems much more honest.

:D

[theorist]

6. Urban Legend

Snopes strikes again. It mentions that the Indiana State House of Reps passed a bill (unanimously) to make pi=3.2. You can find the text on the web by putting "indiana pi" into google. The reasoning for this is pretty ludicrous. The author of the bill was flustered with the idea of irrational numbers (neverending decimals for those who forgot), and thought he could put an end to it. He failed.

[Some Moran]

8. Really?

The version I heard had the value of Pi fixed to either 3 or 4 (can't remember) to be more biblically correct.

[mrbill]

4. the railroads.........

google is cool.

The concept of standard time was adopted in the late 19th century in an attempt to end the confusion that was caused by each community's use of its own solar time. Some such standard became increasingly necessary with the development of rapid railway systems and the consequent confusion of schedules that used scores of different local times kept in separate communities. (Local time varies continuously with change in longitude.)

The need for a standard time was felt most particularly in the United States and Canada, where several extensive railway routes passed through places that differed by several hours in local time.

Sir Sandford Fleming, a Canadian railway planner and engineer, outlined a plan for worldwide standard time in the late 1870s. Following this initiative, in 1884 delegates from 27 nations met in Washington, D.C., for the Meridian Conference and agreed on a system basically the same as that now in use.

http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/info/time-zones-history.htm

[jiacinto]

5. Ok

It's just weird.

[Interrobang]

7. Thanks for mentioning Fleming!

I get really touchy about this one, since it was one of our boys who came up with this idea.

Jiacinto, standard time makes sense if you consider that before standard time, everyone would sort of set their clocks based on what they thought the time should be based on where the sun was, or what they thought a "reasonable" time would be for the sunrise, or when the sun was at its zenith, or so on. This could be problematic, because in one town, it could be 3 PM, while just down the road in the next town, it would only be 2:30, or something.

There's also a problem that days are different lengths in different places. You can notice the difference in day length and relative sun position if you have friends who live at a sufficiently different latitude: During the summer, when the days are longer, it's dark in Long Island, NY about 30 minutes before it's dark where I live in London, ON. (We noticed this discrepancy personally one day when we were joking around about resting on Saturdays -- he's Jewish, I'm not -- and he said, "By the way, Shabbat shalom," and I said, "It's not Shabbat yet; the sun's not down." "It is where I am," he said.) So imagine trying to run a railroad on some kind of schedule with that mess going on!

The actual placement of the lines are roughly based on the meridians of longitude, but they do tend to detour a bit to try to appease geopolitics. ("Half an hour later in Newfoundland!" and a few other places, too!)

Boy, was Sir Sandy a genius!