Rick Measham wrote:
>http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/2011296/
When Parliament was debating the introduction of DST in the UK, as a
wartime measure in 1916, Lord Balfour (a member of the House of Lords,
the upper chamber of Parliament), with the usual aristocratic concern
for matters of inheritance, noted precisely this problem with it:
Supposing some unfortunate lady was confined with twins and one child
was born 10 minutes before 1 o'clock. ... The elder child would be
registered as being born at 12.50, but the younger child's birth,
ten minutes later, would be registered at 12.00. ... the time of
birth of the two children would be reversed. ... Such an alteration
might conceivably affect the property and titles in that House.
We can only hope that times of birth are annotated with the timezone
abbreviation where such ambiguity occurs. I rather suspect that it's
not standard practice, though. My understanding (from a British nurse)
is that hospital clocks are not especially accurate, so that they can't be
relied upon for minute-level accuracy anyway. The birth times of me and
my three siblings (all single births) were all recorded as exact multiples
of five minutes, so I presume there's some rounding going on there,
but I'm at a loss to determine whether the rounding performed was down
or to nearest. There's not much concern for precise timing in evidence.
-zefram
