G'day,
In his very interesting observations on Australian time zones, John
omitted one additional absurdity: the standard longitude for Australian
Central Standard Time (ACST) is not, as it arguably should be, set on
135E--the same time zone as Japan. Instead it is located at 142 30'E
(which is about the longitude of Mildura in Victoria and incidentally,
very close to the longitude of Broken Hill) which places it on the 'half
hour'. I'm told that the reason for shifting the time zone eastward
(another confirmation of Frank King's conjecture!) is to make business
hours in Adelaide more nearly coincide with those in Melbourne and
Sydney...).
best wishes from sunny South Oz,
Peter
On 15/02/2011 11:07, John Pickard wrote:
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
[email protected]
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