On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 8:57 PM, Chris Angelico <[email protected]> wrote:
> [ Alexander Belopolsky] I bet people in Russia who know what > Moscow time is outnumber those who know what UTC is at least 100 to 1. I > > bet you will get a similar ratio in California between UTC and say > Eastern > > Standard Time. > > Of course. Local time is always better known than UTC. Moscow Time is hardly local for Russian Anadyr or Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, but people still use Moscow Time for train schedules there. In fact, those places are closer to California than they are to Moscow. > But any given local time is only going to be known in its own locality. Depends on a locality. Local time at the village of Greenwich is fairly well-known. :-) > I would bet > that the people in Russia who know Eastern Standard Time, or the > people in California who know Moscow time, would be quite low. > I suspect that anyone who knows about UTC would know about both Moscow and New York. > > Let's have a show of hands here: how many people know what "C" stands > for in > > UTC and what "M" stands in GMT and what is the significance of these > > letters? > > I know, on both counts, because I'm a wonk. Well, in this case you know more than I do. I know that "M" stands for "mean" (I've heard that on BBC:-) and that it has something to do with the solar time, but I cannot tell you "mean" of what it is or whether BBC's fifth beep comes on a UTC or GMT second. > But those specifics are > part of what I would elide, along with leap seconds and relativity, > when explaining a scheduling system. Right, but most people (myself included) only learn about UTC when they learn about those complications. I would say in New York, Eastern Time is for most people, EST is for nerds and UTC is for wonks. (Let's face it - nobody's going > to schedule a meeting to such accuracy that any of it will matter.) > Time is a lot messier than most people need to care about. Right. So let them use the time that their wall clocks are showing. When a New Yorker calls Cupertino, they have three options: Eastern, Pacific and UTC. The first two are a slight inconvenience for one of them and the third is a major annoyance for both.
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