Dear John, Your inspiring message about longitude correction prompts more thoughts from me. You say:
> ... most of our [US] Time Zones have wiggly > irregular boundaries that sometimes span > distances far greater than 15 degrees. Everyone necessarily lives within 7.5 degrees of a multiple of 15 degrees but, as you correctly imply, time zone boundaries don't follow lines of longitude. You can live far more than 7.5 degrees from the multiple of 15 that goes with your clock time. Here I have a conjecture that applies specifically to the U.S. and, maybe, U.S. readers can tell me that I am wrong: A greater proportion of the population of the U.S. lives to the WEST of the multiple of 15 degrees that governs their clock time than lives to the EAST of that meridian. This is certainly true in the U.K. because only a tiny proportion of the British land mass is to the east of 0 degrees longitude. I just happen to live in that small bit. The conjecture is certainly true in summer when Daylight Saving Time shifts the relevant meridian 15 degrees further east but, I assert, it is true in winter too. Am I right? My conjecture is part of a bigger hypothesis that "time zones creep westwards". I assume that the wiggles are not hard-wired into the U.S. Constitution? My guess is that, every so often, a town close to a time-zone border asks to go to the other side. Is this right? If so, what is the procedure? By my hypothesis, towns on the west of a border more often ask for the border to be moved to their western side than towns on the east of a border ask for the border to be moved to their eastern side. There are villains in the U.K. who want the country to be in the Central European Time Zone. If this happened, it would be a spectacular example of a Time-Zone Creeping Westwards. All the best Frank --------------------------------------------------- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial
