Transcription

A map of the world with vertical lines marking the time zones from UTC-12 to UTC+12. It has a legend:

Wrong Time

“Natural time zones” are 15° in longitude. Land in red observes a time other than the zone it lies within. Smaller islands depict their 12 nautical mile territorial sea, for visual effect. In some cases this includes a state’s archipelagic waters.

Plate Carrée projection, WGS-84 datum. December 2018 © International Mapping, all rights reserved.

  • Wolf314159@startrek.websiteEnglish
    0·
    11 days ago

    This map really brings home how awful this projection is for this map’s purpose and how awful most projections really are near the poles. Greenland isn’t that big. I know this map is Plate Carree, not Mercator, but the size issue of an equirectangular projection is really similar when comparing longitude and size for the entire globe from pole to equator. 15 degrees of longitude for a timezone stops making sense that close to the poles. Greenland would mostly fit in the central time zone of the United States for example. Given its sparse population, dividing it up into 3 timezones seems unnecessary.

    • Zagorath@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
      0·
      11 days ago

      15 degrees of longitude for a timezone stops making sense that close to the poles

      Yeah exactly. The concept of time zones themselves really starts to break down at those latitudes, and I don’t think it matters what map projection you show it on (though something like Robinson or Winkel-Tripel, with curved time zones, would definitely make things clearer), it’s a fundamental aspect of the way in which light is hitting the Earth’s surface.

  • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.orgEnglish
    0·
    11 days ago

    An item on my bucket list has been to create a map with “gradients” (really just 1-minute bands) of what time the high noon is in that location. This map is just a subset of that, coloring red the areas with an over-30-minute offset. I’d make one for January and one for July to account for DST on both hemispheres.

    I’ll probably convert a publicly available timezone shapefile into a Plate Carée (or similar) projection SVG, create a bitmap “gradient” spanning the entire globe and then use it as texture for the SVG shapes, horizontally offset appropriately.

  • lurch (he/him)@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    12 days ago

    “wrong”. technically it’s entirely made up. you can write whatever number you want on the scale where the sun hits the zenith as long as all people nearby can agree to it.

    • fossphi@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      11 days ago

      Yeah, methinks a gradient would have been better instead of a solid demarcation

  • Zagorath@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
    0·
    12 days ago

    It strikes me that the Middle East, central Europe, and south-east Asia are the best places for time zone accuracy, while western Europe, western Africa, and northern Asia are the worst.

    • Zagorath@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
      0·
      11 days ago

      This one here should be pretty high res. I only scaled it down to 4000 px wide. If you’re not seeing that, it may be something funky with your instance’s proxy—check my instance.

      But the original was 9600 wide iirc. If you want that, it cake from signing up to a mailing list that was linked by someone else in my earlier post in this community.

  • muzzle@lemm.ee
    0·
    11 days ago

    You should make one that shows how much the official time is wrong with respect to the local time.

    • Zagorath@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
      0·
      11 days ago

      That would require way more effort than “find picture from elsewhere on the Internet, scale it down to a size my Lemmy instance will let me upload, and then upload it.”

      But anyway, you can basically get that from this chart, for the most part. The rightmost edge of each red section is 30 minutes ahead, or the leftmost is 30 minutes behind of where it should be, when those edges are caused by the time zone itself (rather than national or regional boundaries like state lines), growing by an hour per vertical line.

      So, the westernmost parts of Spain are about 1 hour 30 ahead, while the easternmost parts of Poland are 30 minutes behind. The westernmost tip of China is about 3 and a half hours ahead.

    • Zagorath@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
      0·
      11 days ago

      This uses standard time across the board. Because accounting for shifts due to pretendy-magic-time would be impossible in a static image.

        • Zagorath@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
          0·
          11 days ago

          Daylight saving time would take it from western Europe being red to almost all of Europe apart from Russia and Belarus being red. It would invert the parts of the contiguous US states so the current correct time places are wrong, and the current wrong parts are correct. Which means both the east and west coasts (the most populated parts by far) are now wrong. And incidentally, Alaska stays entirely red. It would make the western most edges of NSW and Victoria good, as well as the western half of South Australia, at the expense of Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Canberra, and Hobart, nearly half the country’s population, before you even begin to account for the rest of the southeast.

          • Wolf314159@startrek.websiteEnglish
            0·
            11 days ago

            Just pointing out the ridiculousness of getting petty and insulting about the way other people define time scales because you don’t agree. There is no objective truth here, just subjective opinions. ALL of those opinions and methods have flaws, especially your beloved “everyone should just use UTC”. There is no such thing as “correct” here, so putting that word in your map’s title and using “right” and “wrong” in this discussion is just naive.

  • infeeeee@lemm.ee
    0·
    12 days ago

    Wrong title, it should be:

    A Map of the world showing where the local time zone is wrong more than half hours

    An hour is a human concept, we just divided the day to 24 parts, we could use whatever else division. Local time is correct only on the center longitude, which is a line with zero thickness.

    Also it’s clearly visible that France and Spain are in the wrong time zone, and it was changed by the Nazis. Before WW2 France and Spain was in the same zone as Britain. France changed because of the German occupation, and they forgot to change back after the war.

  • humanspiral@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    11 days ago

    I still like China time same for whole big ass country. Everyone in NA go by NYC time. fuck that tv schedule.

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      0·
      11 days ago

      I think it’s kind of dumb tbh. I imagine at certain times of the year, you will have farmers on one end of the country waking up in complete darkness, while others are waking up in broad daylight (I didn’t do any actual critical thought to determine if this is actually true or not, but it seems right).

    • Zagorath@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
      0·
      11 days ago

      The real problem with this is the official dictate that businesses in the west of China have to operate to Beijing time hours.

      If you just said “businesses in the west open at 11 and close at 7, while Beijing does 9 to 5”, it’d be like a smaller-scale version of what I (and others, including elsewhere in these comments) have advocated for: everyone operating on a single time zone, worldwide (usually UTC).

    • Zagorath@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
      0·
      11 days ago

      That doesn’t exactly explain why they’re still in those time zones 80 years later, despite only having been under Nazi control for less than 6 years.

    • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
      0·
      11 days ago

      Humans generally are awake during daytime hours and sleeping during night time. It makes sense that the time we assign them are fairly consistent.

      Then there’s China just being ridiculous.