Time Zone Curiosities

This is a podcast version of a radio show by K103 Gothenburg Student Radio. Find us at k103.se. Due to copyright, the music is shortened. Greetings everybody, welcome to another episode of Ordinary Observations. With me, Jack, it is 8pm on a Wednesday evening, unless you're listening to a rerun of the radio show or a podcast version on whichever podcasting platform you choose to use, in which case it could be anytime at all. That's going to be sort of relevant to what we're talking about today. This is going to be a little bit of a topsy-turvy episode, I think. But everybody loved the, well, everybody loved, yeah. The Julius Caesar, Julien calendar slash Inventing July, changing up the calendar thing last week. So I figured why not keep digging in this, you know, rich vein of content. I do have a little personal anecdote to share this week, and then we're going to explain why time zones are the way they are. I don't believe I have any apologies or too much admin to get through. I did accidentally say it towards the end of last week's show that the quiz I'm going to be doing at Foxes was on the 7th of November. That was incorrect. It will be on the 6th of November. It's a Thursday, a week from tomorrow, if you're listening to this on the radio show. Yeah, right. I don't think there's anything more to get through, otherwise we'll just get kicked off with a tune here, and then we'll go into my little personal anecdote. This first song is the Red Clay Strays called People Hayden. Yeah, that was the Red Clay Strays with People Hayden. You're listening to Ordinary Observations here on K103 Gothenburg's student radio. Now I said this week we're going to be talking time zone curiosities. So you can probably imagine when I say that I've got a personal anecdote to share that it's something related to that. Right, just a couple weeks ago I had the great misfortune you see of making a mistake due to a mix up in time zones. So I was planning to attend an international football match between New Zealand and Norway in Oslo, scheduled to be played on Wednesday the 15th of October, which is two weeks ago from right now if you are once again listening to the radio show. For a bit of important context, if you didn't already know it, I'm from New Zealand personally. I live here in Gothenburg. In fact, I have done so for very nearly seven years now. And because of this, it is quite rare, you could understand, that I get to see any New Zealand sport teams play live in the flesh as it were. So I've always considered myself a relatively engaged sports fan. It doesn't, you know, I'm pretty interested in a broad range of sports. And so this is a downside for me being so far away from seeing the teams that I would like to see play. But it's just for that reason that I was particularly excited when I saw that New Zealand national men's team, the All Whites had announced a one or friendly against Norway in Oslo, which is just a few hours drive up the highway from where I live here in Gothenburg. Excellent, I thought, hell yeah, that's great, a great opportunity, especially considering I've won, never seen the All Whites play before, especially considering our captain Chris Wood had an excellent season playing for Nottingham Forest in the Premier League last year. And even more, especially considering we were playing against Norway, who I've said like three times now, who have Erling Haaland, surely the most talked about footballer since like the 2022 World Cup, right? He's been the biggest name in football for a few years, given all that and Norway playing really well at the moment, so it all comes together, it would be a great experience is sort of my thinking. So given all that, when I saw way back in February that this match had been announced, I immediately marked it in my calendar, October 15th, that was going to be the day. I figured I'd take a day off work, so I could parties with some of the other New Zealand fans up at Oslo, it would be a great time. I'm sure you all understand, right, fast forward until this month, October. I took a fair bit of time off this summer, so I didn't really want to sacrifice any further time off, don't have a whole lot stacked up there in the bank, but I had organised to get a match ticket and some supporter overalls, can outfit, supporter overalls outfit through the Flying Kiwis, which is a New Zealand football supporters group, which travelled to the away matches and sing all the songs and wave the big flags and get the banners made up in the crowd in the stands, that kind of thing, like the whole crowd participation part of it. There are heaps of New Zealanders living in the UK, so for them this is quite a convenient trip, it's not such a long flight from the UK over to Oslo. All up, the Flying Kiwi troop for this match was going to be just over 150 people, they even arranged an amateur football match between the two groups of fans, so there was going to be a team representing the New Zealand fans and a team representing the Norway fans, they're going to play each other at like a local ground the night before, which is again, great, it's all about the love of the game, meeting fans of the other team, great positive environment, super cool. Now I'd arranged to borrow a car and my boss said it was totally fine if I left work after lunch on Wednesday, the game was scheduled to start at 6pm, the drive from Gothenburg up to the stadium in Oslo is about three, three and a half hours depending on the traffic. I suspected I would likely get tied up in a bit of after-work rush hour sort of deal and also there, but I had plenty of time to get there if I left here from my work at lunch. So my plan was to enjoy the game, sing the songs, meet some of my fellow New Zealand compatriots living overseas and then I would make them late night drive home, sure it would be as I say late, but it would be worth it for the experience, I hope you agree. And so that's, that was my plan, Tuesday afternoon, knocked off work and on my way home stopped by the supermarket, was going to pick up some stuff to make some sandwiches to eat as dinner on the drive up to Oslo, Norway famously very expensive place to be, so I figured you know a few pre-made sandwiches, I'd pack a lunch, I'd pack a dinner, a few pre-made sandwiches that I could eat while driving up on the way, chicken, mayonnaise, spinach, tomato was my plan if anybody was interested in that. So I had just sat down at my computer, this is Tuesday night, figure out a couple more logistical issues before I drive up to the game after work tomorrow, when a little Google notification popped up on my phone, New Zealand vs Norway match starts soon. So I thought, that's odd, the game doesn't start for you know another whole day, I'm going to it, Google's like really you know giving me a lot of warning for this one, giving me a decent size heads up, but I figured I'd better have a quick search and lo and behold Google was right, the game was about to start in 10 minutes, it turns out in fact the game was not scheduled for Wednesday the 15th of October as I had it in my calendar, but rather Tuesday the 14th of October. So here I was, just sitting at home alone in Gothenburg, sitting at my desk like in my underwear, suddenly feeling pretty stupid, realising I would not be seeing the football game that I had been so looking forward to. I sent a quick message to the organiser of the Flying Kiwi supporter group I was just talking about, I'd been in contact a little bit with him throughout the whole thing, he was organising where people were sitting, he was organising the tickets part of it, he was organising the sizes for the overall costumes and stuff people were wearing. So I sent him a quick message and I said you know basically I've had a real mistake here mate, obviously I'm not going to make the game, so if you can somehow and you know if there's anybody who needs a ticket, if anybody hasn't got a ticket or whatever doesn't want to buy it, you can just give them mine because I'm not going to make it in 10 minutes, I'll be sitting here watching the game from the couch, pretty good dude, he instantly replied back with a voice message saying you know, the usual kinds of commiserations when something like this happens, obviously it's a big shame, you won't be able to make it, that's really disappointing and you know, you can understand why I was super disappointed when stuff like that happens, but he said not to beat myself up too harshly because I wasn't the only one, you see myself and evidently a number of others had been getting my information regarding this match from the New Zealand football Instagram page, an Instagram page whose follower base is almost entirely in New Zealand, a country who sets their clocks to a time zone about 12 hours ahead of that, which Norway does depending on daylight saving, but that's by the bye, now you see what's happened here, I'm sure it's starting to dawn on you, whilst in New Zealand the game was being played on Wednesday the 15th of October, in Oslo, Norway where the game was actually being played, the date was in fact still Tuesday, the 14th of October and that's why I wasn't there, that's why it was marked in my calendar as the 15th, listen learned the hard way you might say, you probably pretty right, but at least I wasn't one of the few people who accidentally, well accidentally or deliberately booked flights, for Tuesday night thinking they would get into Oslo a whole day early only to learn the game like I did was on while they were in the sky and would end approximately the same time that they landed, they learned their lesson a little more the hard way than I learned mine, at least I had not really invested any money besides the match ticket into this whole thing, so yeah disappointing, this little saga got me thinking about some time zone related mistakes and mishaps, I figured there had to be a few interesting stories to be found, I dunno if I was right in that, there's a few stories to be found, not a huge number of interesting ones, couldn't really find heaps that were solely to blame on just the time zone thing, they all seem to have at least some other era usually human or mechanical or whatever, but we'll start off with like an explanation of time zones because I think that is relatively interesting and I've done a bit of research on it so I'm gonna punish you guys with that, first up we'll hit a tune and then yeah we'll get straight into why we have the time zones we have, this next tune is by a band called Sell Everything, it's called Girls, Girls, Girls Yeah so that was Sell Everything with Girls, Girls, Girls, you're listening to ordinary observations on K-103, I figured I would just add by the way, I was talking about that New Zealand vs. Norway football game that I missed, that ended 1-1 which is great, great result for New Zealand football, we usually take those kind of draws as a sort of victory, so I mean that's great that that happened, I was a little bit nervous for a moment there that they were gonna have the best game they've ever played and then I would be really disappointed that I missed out being there, but then at the same time it's not like I wanted them to lose either because I had missed out being there, anyway so that's just another little thought that I thought I'd add onto the tech on the end of there, but that's by the bite, I figured this episode the main question we would look at is time zones, how we have them, why they look like they do, how did we get here, short answer, trains, long answer, it's coming right up, you see back in the good days like let's say pre-1800, every town and city had its own time based on its own solar experience, 12pm noon would have been the exact moment, the sun was at the highest point in the sky and that makes perfect sense right, it's high noon, as many still do they would have had old-timey clocks hanging out in town squares which people would have used to set their own devices to, if you were to pour to own a wristwatch or a clock at home, well at least the church bells you know they would blast out and punish everybody with a few dongs on the hour, every hour right, they still do that in many places and that's what sundials were for, I know that nobody knows how to read a sundial anymore, least of all me, but every once in a while you'll pass a sundial of some description and that's great if you'd need to know the exact like solar time of where you are, right as we all know the sun rises in the east and moves westward across the sky, this means that if it's solar noon above your head right now, everywhere to the east of you has already had their solar noon for today and everybody to the west is yet to have their solar noon for today, the variation corresponds to about four minutes for every degree of longitude, so for instance example time, today the 29th of November, Stockholm which lies at longitude 18 degrees east had its solar noon at 11 31 am, because Gothenburg is closer to 12 degrees longitude, we had our solar noon at 11 55 am, that is a whole 24 minutes later which is you know it's not nothing, that's pretty decent size difference, so four minutes per degree and 18 minus 12 that's the difference in longitude, six degrees longitude difference, four times six, about 24 whole minutes, there you go, you get the point, back in the horse in carriage kind of days like I say pre 1800, this time discrepancy was not really a big deal, by the time you rode a horse or if you couldn't afford one, walked to Stockholm, that 24 minutes time difference is not really going to matter, you're not going to even notice it right, your body clock is just going to adjust those couple minutes every day, that 24 minutes not really going to matter, you'll just adjust your clock to the one in Stockholm town square when you get there and you'll go on with your day, however that would have looked after you know walking that distance before the invention of trains, for curiosity's sake Google Maps says it's 470 kilometers from Gothenburg to Stockholm and that will take you 106 hours, well it'll take me I guess Google Maps counts and do they tailor it for me, do they average out how fast I usually walk, I guess they do, people walk at very different speeds whatever, 470 kilometers Google Maps tells me this will take 106 hours of continuous walking, obviously I could go along very nice well paved footpaths the whole way, in the old days the footpath would have not been that smooth and there would have been like bandits and highwaymen along the road, only too happy to you know steal my silver, that whole process would surely leave you a little waylaid as it were, I guess horse would be faster, but the point remains is that the 24 minutes in time difference with the rider horse whether you walk with you whatever before the invention of a train not going to make a big difference, thankfully trains did get invented, in the early 1860s the railroad was built between Stockholm and Gothenburg, for historical context the very first passenger rail services serviced by steam engines had taken place in the United Kingdom and the United States of America in the early 1830s but you know things were really beginning to pick up steam if you'll allow me to use that metaphor by around the 1850s early 1860s kind of deal and that's when yeah that's when the Swedish railroad was built from Gothenburg to Stockholm, the first passenger service between Gothenburg and Stockholm took approximately 14 hours which is not always that much better than how it is now actually to be honest with you more importantly than the travel time itself however is that people needed to know what time the train was arriving and what time the train was leaving the station where they were getting on and where they were going right, each station the train stopped at the time would be a few minutes different and you could probably imagine why this would become a massive pain in the ass for anyone trying to write the schedule and anyone trying to read the schedule so instead of trying to write timetables with a rival and departure time specific to each town or station along the way some clever cookie at some railway companies came up with a nifty trick called railway time i guess i should put that in verticommers railway time they would define their own time usually just the local time of wherever their headquarter officers were located and they would print all their schedules using that particular time zone this would have made things a lot simpler for the companies themselves first and foremost so like the conductor and the driver and the employees they wouldn't need to be adjusting their watches to each station as they go along they would just have a cool little almanac thing on the back of a piece of paper or whatever with all the time conversions for each location along their line pretty clever and for like individual travelers trying to ride the train the act of remembering how railway time compares to the specific time of where they live was probably not that difficult right if you just remember the railway time is say five minutes ahead of your own time zone well just get to the station 10 minutes early and you'll be fine not that hard if you so happen to live somewhere where the railway time is seven minutes after your time zone well then you know that you don't have to stress too much to get to the station before the train does your arrival time is ahead of what the train thinks the arrival time you understand what i'm saying here not that hard you can probably figure it out if you're catching a train from the same place from the same station every time you ride a train so the first company to invent this quote unquote railway time was the great western railway that was the name of the company way back in 1840 they defined their railway time on London time or Greenwich Mean Time which we're going to hear a little bit more about we're going to hear a lot more about it Greenwich Mean Time was the time defined by the National Observatory at Greenwich which is yeah it's an observatory in sort of central London ish not not far from like central London that was the national observatory so they can do the calculations with where the stars are and where how you know watch the sun go overhead and that kind of thing and they can decide when it is exactly solar noon in London and therefore that became known as Greenwich Mean Time or London Time at way back in the day they would call it that we're gonna break it up here with the tune this next song is called Same Kids by Girl Scout and then we're gonna get into the problem with railway time Yes there was Girl Scout with Same Kids you're listening to Ordinary Observations on K-103 got the most student radio and we're halfway through some nice punishing time zone curiosity chat we had just talked about the introduction of what was called railway time back in 1840 by the Great Western Railway first to do it defined their time on Greenwich Mean Time the problem with this great idea for that particular railway company the problem with this however is that different railway companies we're all defining their own quote unquote railway times and if you are say a passenger riding a train using a specific railway time say London for instance what you really don't want is to meet a train coming the other way using a different railway time because their company's headquarters happen to be in a different city say Bristol for instance or maybe they were using the old system of operating based on the actual time it is at that particular stretch of track you could see why that would lead to some difficulties in scheduling unfortunately this was something that would occasionally happen and that was typically unhealthy for many involved so the next logical step was that some clever individual came up with another brilliant idea what if we had the same time at every station for every train company they said it couldn't be done and to be fair it did take quite a while by 1948 however a majority of rail companies had accepted GMT Greenwich Mean Time as their time basis of operations some towns and cities across the United Kingdom also adjusted their clocks so that they now woke went to work and slept in sync with Londoners others however understandably I might add didn't fancy being told by those uppity pricks in the capital what the time was and so a third hand had to be added to many clocks around the country one to indicate the hour and one each to signify how many minutes had passed the hour in both local time and in London I do imagine this whole debacle to be relatively funny the UK is really not that wide right it's not it's not that big so most places would have their solar noon within like 10 minutes of when London is not a huge adjustment to get used to could the average person really like look into the sky and say yeah now now it's noon the time span when it's noon is not that easy for your average human brain to be like yeah now this very moment the sun is its highest point in the sky surely nobody's personal watch was that accurate in 1840s either right I would have imagined if you were a train station manager and you're just like fuck can we please just use London time and everyone's like nah we don't want to be told by London is what the time is surely if you're that train station manager you could just slowly adjust the clock by a few seconds each day until you're in sync with London time right nobody's going to notice that the sun is in the highest point in the sky three minutes after what the what the time on their watch says I don't know it just seems like something that you could have gotten away with back in the day maybe harder for bigger cities sure but it's a question that's been lingering on my mind but whatever as with many historical changes of this kind of nature eventually the new way of time for keeping had become the norm by 1855 which was 15 years after the first introduction of railway time like 98 percent of towns and cities were using Greenwich Mean Time and in the decade or two following this most of those third hand signals that we just mentioned the local time they got removed from public clocks they'd become obsolete I suspect I can't prove this but I suspect that the small towns which were able to refuse sort of the sweeping tide of Greenwich Mean Time were probably not serviced by railroads right and therefore were able to operate on their own local time for you know an extra decade or whatever now despite this near national acceptance of GMT by the late 1850s or so it didn't actually become law until 1880 40 years after the great western railway had first introduced the initial instance of the so-called railway time across the Atlantic in a rapidly expanding United States of America trains were a big deal and becoming more so and they were also having similar issues with the fact that nobody could agree on what time it should be the best example of this was what is now known as the Valley Falls train collision where two trains traveling opposite directions collided on a section of single track in Valley Falls Rhode Island the investigation found that one of the trains heading south had been running a minute late a minute late and therefore should have missed its cutoff time to enter the section of single track they were supposed to have a window of five minutes but now only had four the conductor of course didn't want to wait didn't want to be further delayed he was going south he was taking people to the beach and he tried to just sneak through just in time now this era alone probably would have been okay because the engineer of the other train heading north had been expecting to meet the oncoming southbound locomotive and he was waiting for it at the other end of the section of single track he waited the mandated five minutes that we just mentioned he then waited an extra minute just in case before assuming that the other train must have been delayed earlier on its journey and will now therefore have to wait for the next passage window after the northbound train had passed through from what I can understand this was the correct assumption to make that's how the trains worked in those days that's how the system is supposed to work the compounding problem however was that not only was the southbound train one minute late according to the conductor's watch the conductor's watch was two minutes slow and so the train was in actuality a total of three minutes late which doesn't seem like an enormous margin for error does it the northbound train had just rounded the first bend of the section of single track when it was met by the southbound train flooring it trying to make it through on time at about 60 kilometers an hour and that didn't go so well for either vehicle 14 people killed and 17 were severely injured imagine if to take the Swedish example again 17 people were killed every time an sj drain was delayed by three minutes that would be problematic so you can start to understand why this didn't really feel like a large margin of error does it I'm sure you can just apply that exact same analogy to your trains anywhere you live three minutes 17 people die I don't make the rules interestingly enough a local man happened upon the side of the crash in the moments after and captured what is believed to be the first photograph of a train crash so there you go there's another little fun aside for you the investigation following the crash once again this is the valley falls train collision we're talking about investigation following found a couple things running trains solely on timetables with no signalling mechanism pretty dodgy especially when those timetables have such little margins for error as in this situation and especially when the time each train is running off is just the conductor's personal wristwatch which is obviously prone to all kinds of human and mechanical error there were 475 people on that southbound train could you imagine the pressure in a situation where your wristwatch the accuracy of your wristwatch is responsible for the life of 475 people times were different back then I suppose we've got fail safes now and I think that's really good both trains were run by the providence and war sister railroad same company which ran services in road island and across the rest of new england shortly after this accident they established a coordinated railway time similar to the whole thing we just explained in the united kingdom and therefore that became what is considered america's first time zone and so that's why we have the concept of time zones if you are in to train history and you want to keep reading more about the timekeeping issues that cause head-on train crashes I highly recommend you navigate to the wikipedia page list of rail accidents brackets before 1880 most of them are actually boiler explosions because of faults in their manufacturing or because engineers over pressurized them that sounds like a truly horrific way to go hopefully fast but you you know those pictures of the old steam engineers shoveling coal into the locomotive as fast as they possibly can just imagine that thing exploding obviously full of hot coal full of boiling water made of the thickest metal you could possibly imagine awful awful awful that's what most of the rail accidents before 1880 were like but some of them were crashes caused by the fact that the two trains going in two opposite directions were running on different times that's why we have our modern concept of time zones train scheduling combined also with the rising popularity of the electric telegraph which meant people could communicate across greater distances faster than they ever could before and that has business applications as I'm sure you'll all be aware here in Sweden we're a little bit hesitant to build railways because we thought it would you know cost too much and evidently because the shipping lobby was very strong so by the time the major railway linking Stockholm to Gothenburg opened in 1862 the practice of using unified rail time was pretty well established in like we said places like the United Kingdom places like the United States uh so we didn't have to suffer I say we we didn't have to suffer through the growing pains of people dying in horrific rail accidents because of timetable disagreements fun little aside again they used Gothenburg time for Sweden's railway time Stockholmers weren't happy about that the only Swedish entry on the aforementioned list of rail accidents brackets before 1880 that I could find was the Lagerlunda rail accident Lagerlunda Ulickan of 1875 but that was due to a signalling issue rather than a scheduling thing evidently the signalling was unclear and the driver thought they were good to go leading them to departing the station and crashing with an oncoming train nine people died and the station master was sentenced to six months in prison a modern investigation suggested that maybe the driver was just colorblind which is I mean funny's the wrong word but there's something to it you understand anyway regardless of who could see what colors all Swedes were agreeing the time was the same by January 1st 1879 at that time the government made a compromise between Stockholm and Gothenburg on the two coasts and said that Örebro solo time that's going to be the national time of Sweden anybody outside of Sweden Örebro was like the fourth biggest city maybe fifth it might be fifth yeah I think it's fifth which makes a lot of sense though because comparatively Örebro isn't quite a central location and so that that works just over 10 years before Sweden decided to unify their national time in 1879 little old New Zealand was the first country in the world yet again to agree upon a unified time and make it the law of the land so that adds another thing to the list woman's right to vote climbing Mount Everest splitting the atom and now the first unified time zone go Kiwi give them a taste by about 1900 almost all inhabited places on earth were included in some sort of agreed upon time zone but not many of them were standardized as a specific hour offset from GMT Greenwich meantime as we have today they would agree upon their national time but that just they just picked you know the center of their country or their capital city to be their national time they weren't standardized as we're familiar with it today that standard that we use to notate all our time zones today UTC which stands for coordinated universal time was defined in 1960 and simply chosen to be what had already been known as GMT Greenwich meantime because that Greenwich meantime that had been agreed to be the prime meridian from way back in the late 1800s by the 1930s the majority of countries worldwide had already coordinated their time zones to be a specified hour offset from UTC for example sweden UTC plus one which is central european new zealand is UTC plus 12 or plus 13 depending on daylight saving and everywhere else is somewhere in between those two values you get the idea that is the history of the time zone system we use today how fun i hope you learned something next up after this tune we're going to go through a couple strange time zones and then it'll be time to wrap it off this next song is ignorant savanta with hoodie you're listening to ordinary observations and we just ran through a big long history of how we got the time zones that we have today i forget another fun little uh a side would be to go through a couple strange time zones that we have around the world a few countries use time zones with a half hour offset most of them have the full hour right UTC plus one minus one plus two minus two plus 13 minus 13 whatever it is some of them have plus something in a half the largest of these is india it spans two so-called natural time zones which sort of makes sense like that's every 15 degrees is a natural time zone because that's sort of the difference that would make an hour solar time hard to explain that one in an audio medium but just trust me on this india spans two natural time zones but it keeps itself simple using just the one shrill anchor follows india's time zone iran is the other major country which uses a half hour offset they use UTC plus 330 afghanistan uses UTC plus 430 so yeah it's not very common there's only a few countries that use the half hour offset a few places go even harder though most notably napal full country UTC plus 545 so they go down to the 15 minute degree of accuracy there combined with eucla a town in western australia right at the border there with south australia so it observes UTC plus 845 and that's the only place in the world to do that they have a population of 53 people last time they did the census so you can see why they sort of just get away with doing their own thing there and east of new zealand again the chatum islands how good they use a 45 minute offset the time right there is UTC 1345 right now so there you go shout out to the chatums and then we got a big listenership out there so china is sort of famous case here china supposedly operates as one singular enormous time zone the country spans five geographical time zones and though it chooses to run everything on Beijing time and tell you what that is good for business but kind of shit if you're a human trying to live by your sort of basic human functions of waking with the daylight and sleeping at night time and it's very worth noting also that Beijing is not in any way central to china it's about 150 kilometers inland from china's eastern coast there in the other direction it's like 3500 kilometers to china's western border regions against Afghanistan and Tajikistan and kyrgyzstan over there which is a fun point the chinese border with afghanistan has the largest jump of any border crossing anywhere in the world 3.5 hours difference on either side so that means that if you're on the chinese side of the border where it would be say 12 o'clock noon you have a lunch if you were to jump over to afghanistan it would be three and a half hours earlier in the morning so it would be what 8 30 and so you know that you've just had breakfast you're not ready for lunch yet so there you go a bit of a bit of a strange time zone that one apparently in Xinjiang which is the autonomous province in the west of china they sort of operate on two time zones officially they use Beijing time but informally they have their own time which is sort of two hours behind Beijing time evidently local authorities somehow use both side by side i don't understand at all how this works and local television will schedule different programs using different time zones based on their nature it seems this causes confusion especially between parties of different ethnicities han chinese individuals usually speaking in beijing time and oiga or kazakh individuals speaking in zhengjiang time so i don't really know how this all works i don't know what the different natures quote unquote natures of tv are like in zhengjiang the ccp chinese communist party from what i understand they keep a pretty tight ship on sort of media out that way chinese channels they get scheduled in beijing time we get and kazakh channels they get scheduled in zhengjiang time is what the wikipedia is what the wikipedia page tells me is what the wikipedia page tells me and that's all i sort of care to read into that to be honest with you the final point i want to talk about here is the international date line which has that big hook in it you know what i'm talking about if you don't know what i'm talking about you need to go to google maps right now and look at the middle of the pacific ocean you'll need to be in map view not in satellite view there should be a long line running from north to south poles with a big crooked hook pointing to the east this is the point where one day turns into the next cross it from east to west you go forward in time cross it from west to east and you go back to yesterday you know what i mean so i've always wondered what there's the reason for this big hook is so like it sort of goes back on itself there the reason for this is the proud island nation of kiribas you see as a british colony it existed only to the west of the international date line when it was granted independence in 1979 however it was also given control of the phoenix and the line island chains from the united states of america these islands lay to the east of the international date line meaning it was still yesterday there from the perspective of the rest of kiribas the phoenix islands we can sort of neglect sorry to the listeners from there but there's only like 20 of you so 20 people the the difference there or the you know the effect on them being in today or yesterday probably not huge but there are a few thousand people living in the line island portion that was part of the states now become part of kiribas and fuck did they want to do business right something that is not good for business however is being a day behind the larger commercial centers of your own country and you see being a day behind means that while you are trying to relax and enjoy your sunday in your village somewhere in the line islands people are already hard at work in the islands to the west of the international date line and when people are enjoying their saturdays in the islands to the west of the international date line you're still slogging it out on a friday trying to get some work done right having only a four-day overlap where business can be done on both sides of the international date line that's not conducive to productivity so the end of 1994 the international date line changed the island chains that had been lagging a day behind just dropped the day completely they went from what was friday december 30th to sunday january first meaning that december 31st 1994 never happened in those few islands which would kind of piss you off actually i don't know if they lost like the public holiday that usually comes with new year's eve or not i don't know if they celebrated that um how that went around but if you just lost a public holiday i could understand why that would be bothersome but that is why we've got the weird hook in the international date line in the middle of the pacific ocean there evidently from what i read maritime time zones remain unchanged so the ocean that surrounds these parts of kitty bus that is still the day behind but the land kitty bus they're in the future so there you go i was gonna talk a bit about swatch internet time but we've just coincidentally run out of time so i'm gonna thank you so much for listening once again to ordinary observations i hope you learned a little bit about time zones if you're still listening well done i understand this one's uh relatively dry compared to some of the other stuff we've spoken about before but yeah thanks once again this has been ordinary observations on k103 you'll hear from us next time uh in a couple weeks this last tune is jakob with bloke have a great evening out there you've just heard a podcast version of a radio show by k103 gothenberg student radio you'll find all our shows at k103.se follow us on facebook or instagram stay tuned