I was shocked when, mere moments ago, I discovered that Australia's time zones are chopped up as per this diagram. I'm assuming the +11 refers to how far off Greenwich Mean Time the area is. Isn't it odd, though? If it's, say, midnight in Sydney (and the rest of New South Wales, Melbourne and Tasmania), it's 11 pm in Queensland, which is in exactly the same longitude, 11:30 pm in South Australia, which is farther west than virtually all of Queensland, 10:30 pm in the Northern Territories and 9 pm everywhere else. Is it just me or does this seem a bit more complicated than absolutely necessary?
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
quicko: time zones
I was shocked when, mere moments ago, I discovered that Australia's time zones are chopped up as per this diagram. I'm assuming the +11 refers to how far off Greenwich Mean Time the area is. Isn't it odd, though? If it's, say, midnight in Sydney (and the rest of New South Wales, Melbourne and Tasmania), it's 11 pm in Queensland, which is in exactly the same longitude, 11:30 pm in South Australia, which is farther west than virtually all of Queensland, 10:30 pm in the Northern Territories and 9 pm everywhere else. Is it just me or does this seem a bit more complicated than absolutely necessary?
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3 comments:
Yep. That's the mess that gets created when all the southern states go onto daylight savings, and the tropical ones and Western Australia don't. We're on standard time at the moment, so all the eastern states are the same (GMT +10), NT and SA are the same (GMT +9.5), and WA is over there doing its own thing, as usual (GMT+8).
Oh my! I'm totaly ashamed to say I didn't know that!!! That is totally strange - why did they do that? Maybe it's for the cows in Queensland or something!
Sam, it's not for the cows, or the curtains for that matter, it's simply because it's too damn hot and sticky to be cooking dinner or attempting to get small children to go to bed at what is in reality 6pm but for southerners would be 7pm.
Kim - in case you haven't already picked on it, "damn" is effectively simply a strong adjective here, not a swear word so we don't feel the need to replace it with "darn" - what has sock repair got to do with it anyway.
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