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It was a nice idea but I think Swatch made a big mistake by taking their headquarters as the base to calculate it. It needed to be an independant concept to br
by jber 13y ago
It was a nice idea but I think Swatch made a big mistake by taking their headquarters as the base to calculate it.
It needed to be an independant concept to bring other companies/competitors on board.
- Aloha 13y agoIt's an arbitrary choice, just like how Unix time is since 1970, or how UTC is timezone for Greenwich England.
- joezydeco 13y agoGreenwich wasn't arbitrary at all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Meridian_Conference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Meridian_Conferen...
- Aloha 13y agoHistorical precedent and agreement make the choice no less arbitrary - 0 degrees could have been anywhere, there is no technical reason that Greenwich was chosen.
- joezydeco 13y agoIt says so right in the article. Choosing Greenwich as 0-longitude meant that the International Date Line would be located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, avoiding a situation where it could be two dates in the same country simultaneously.
- Aloha 13y agoHave you looked at the map for the IDL? http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/International_Date_Line.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Internati... That not jiggered by politics at all.
- joezydeco 13y agoI thought we were talking about the "arbitrary" choice of Longitude 0. What's the political (and not economic) basis for the later IDL modifications?
- Aloha 13y agoThat fails to make the first choice any less arbitrary - the choice was made to line up with existing sea charts - which of course used the Greenwich as 0 - but Greenwich as 0 was an arbitrary choice in the first place - not all arbitrary choices are bad ones, that was the crux of my argument in the first place.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- chmars 13y agoIt was probably mainly a PR idea, though a good one … on the other hand, from a neutral point of view, Biel/Switzerland is not really different from Greenwich/UK as a zero point.
- bluedevil2k 13y agoNot to be too US centric, but the time standard should be set around New York City. Bankers in London and San Fran all work on NYC time.