Good morning all, Very interesting discussion on time zone boundaries in UK and USA.
Here in Australia, time zones are simply bizarre with major anomalies between states. If we ignore those states (e.g. Queensland) where the curtains don't fade in summer because they don't use Daylight Saving, then we have Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST), Australian Central Standard Time (ACST) and Australian Western Standard Time (AWST). Logically, the boundaries would be on some sensible longitude, but the boundaries are on state borders with some interesting anomalies.
Parts of western New South Wales use ACST because historically, businesses in the mining town of Broken Hill did business in Adelaide (South Australia) rather than Sydney. However, AEST goes further west in Victoria, and a long way further west in Queensland. Why this historic anomaly persists is beyond me. It has long since outlived its value, and now seems to be maintained to satisfy a few businesses in Broken Hill. I also think that there is a large dose of "we are different" involved, but that's a political comment!
The most interesting anomaly is a small section of Western Australia near the South Australian border which has its own little time zone, sort of mid-way between ACST and AWST. Presumably this is to allow the public servants who work in the village to communicate with their bosses in Perth.
Many years ago when working in Antarctica, we used an informal local time that was designed to better mesh with AEST to allow for easier communication with head office in Melbourne and then Hobart which are a long way to the east. I forget the offset from UT, but it was at least a couple of hours.
Despite these anomalies, people manage to survive OK, and it's fun to watch the time displayed on mobile phones change from AEST to ACST when heading west. Presumably, when the mobile phone handshakes with the first phone tower in the central zone, it gets the signal and changes the time. However, my GPSs don't do this automatically because they operate on CIA time which is invariant. I have to make a manual offset through the setup menu. I guess that a smarter GPS could be programmed to do this automatically. After all, the GPS knows where it is, and thus it should be able to check which time zone it's in. It would require some form of database of time zone boundaries to be loaded onto the GPS, but given the strange boundaries in Australia and the US, perhaps it is just too difficult. Gotta love technology!
Cheers, John John Pickard john.pick...@bigpond.com --------------------------------------------------- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial
