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Post by plane2catch on Mar 13, 2016 13:57:17 GMT
Just wondered if you folks down under got enough sleep?
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Post by Oz-T on Mar 13, 2016 23:03:52 GMT
Three weeks to go, plane2catch. Daylight saving ends in Australia on April 3 (for the states that observe DS). (can't wait for my curtains to stop fading...)
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Post by purvis on Mar 14, 2016 3:59:29 GMT
OZ: Well we here in Albert and most of Canada except Saskatchewan (the province to the east of Alberta) changed to day-light savings time today.. Can't for the life of me understand why people make such a to-do about the clock going ahead one hour. Most folks who do any amount of travel know that they will have to deal with time zones and do so ; so what's the problem. It seems to be a slow day for news when an hours time change is so newsworthy. Get over it folks. Purvis
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Post by Oz-T on Mar 14, 2016 10:55:19 GMT
Yeah, Purvis; maybe us world travellers are so accustomed to different time zones we adapt to daylight saving easily.
Here in Australia, two if our eight states don't observe daylight saving (Queensland & Western Australia). The main reasoning is that both are farming states, also with high latitudes which get more sunlight anyway. Farmers are particularly opposed to daylight saving as they argue that they already wake early enough without doing so another hour earlier.
The WA exemption to DS doesn't create as much problems as Queensland because the latter is an eastern state which suddenly falls out of line with its three eastern neighbours: NSW, Victoria and Tasmania.
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Post by Oz-T on Mar 14, 2016 10:58:17 GMT
And all this time zone talk reminds me of a little known fact about the USA that few Americans are aware of:
It is possible to be in an Atlantic state and be the exact same time as a Pacific state in the mainland USA.
Strange, but true.
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Post by californian on Mar 14, 2016 16:28:43 GMT
Ok, Oz-T, you got my attention! Probably because I lost an hour of sleep (LOL) but I don't understand about being the exact time in both sides of the continent. Your comment about the farming states in Australia remind me that in my native country of Argentina we all lived in permanent day light saving time, and the whole country has the same time zone, as is not a wide a the US for example, although it could very well have at least two zones. The funny part is, as in Australia, the farmers do not like the light saving time, so they have their unofficial "own" time, they call it "our time" oppose to "city time". Once in a while in the last few years they changed it for a summer or two, so the whole country became 2 hours ahead of the corresponding time zone.
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Post by Oz-T on Mar 14, 2016 23:38:07 GMT
Ok, Oz-T, you got my attention! Probably because I lost an hour of sleep (LOL) but I don't understand about being the exact time in both sides of the continent. Yes, Californian, you can certainly be in a state that borders the Pacific Ocean whilst talking to your friend in a state that borders the Atlantic Ocean and when you both look at your (accurate) clocks, they will say the same (official) time. If you can be on the same time on opposite sides of the country, it shows that the USA is full of possibilities.
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Post by Oz-T on Mar 15, 2016 1:07:18 GMT
I suppose I should explain all this.... When you look at a map of the USA (ignore Alaska and Hawaii for this discussion), it's divided into four time zones, each one hour apart. The following picture shows these zones: The green section in the west is Pacific Time (California, Washington State, Oregon etc). The next section (yellow) to the right of that is Mountain Time (Montana, Idaho, Utah, Arizona etc). Then comes another green section called Central Time and this includes Texas, Kansas, Illinois, Alabama etc. And finally, to the right is Eastern Time (New York, Maine, Michigan, Florida etc). Well, that's probably what most Americans already know and learned in school. But of course, there's plenty of interesting things they never teach you in school, and here's where the fun bit begins. Let's do a bit of web travel to a couple of states: Oregon and Florida - and to some counties that are a long way from their main cities. Florida first. The panhandle area of Florida is that part that slips under Alabama and has the Gulf of Mexico on its southern coast. The counties here are so far west of most of Florida, they have more in common with Alabama time - and that's exactly what they do. The Florida counties that are west of the Apalachicola River officially observe Central Time. In Oregon, a similar issue arises with Malheur County, which comprises the south-east corner of Oregon. Most of Malheur observes Mountain Time because it's economically associated with Idaho (especially Boise). So if you look at these two regions (circled in red in the following map), we can see that whilst they're in states that touch the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, neither observe Pacific or eastern time. One observes Mountain Time and the other, Central Time. So they're actually one hour of time distance apart. So having got them to within an hour of each other, how can I make the claim that these two areas can be on the same time? This brings us back to daylight saving. USA daylight saving ends at 2:00am on the first Sunday in November. Consider this scenario: At the Florida panhandle, when it's 1:59am on that Sunday, the time in Malheur, Oregon is 12:59am (an hour later). But one minute later, the Florida panhandle puts its clocks back from 2am to 1am. At the same time, Malheur advances to 1am. Both locations have the exact same time. But it won't last long. In one hour's time, Malheur has to put its clocks back too, so the two locations revert back to one hour time distance for another year. And that's how you can be in a Pacific state (Malheur county, Oregon) and be talking to somebody via phone in an Atlantic state (the panhandle of Florida) and as long as you pick the one hour of the year to do it, you're both on the exact same time. And as most people didn't know that, here's your chance to make a bet with somebody and make a fortune!
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Post by californian on Mar 15, 2016 1:56:47 GMT
LOL, interesting way of splitting hairs! Arizona never moves back and forth, so is Pacific time this time of the year, Mountain time in fall-winter. Many counties around the USA do no change either, but I can't remember where. The Florida time zone was made infamous during the 2000 election, the networks called Florida for Gore before the panhandle,where most of the military resides, had closed the voting process.
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Post by Oz-T on Mar 15, 2016 3:39:07 GMT
Ahhh, the 2000 Presidential election in Florida. I was disappointed that Hanging Chad never got elected....
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Post by californian on Mar 15, 2016 19:41:45 GMT
Ahhh, the 2000 Presidential election in Florida. I was disappointed that Hanging Chad never got elected.... Wasn't that the most ridiculous thing you ever heard or lived thru?
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Post by Tonnet on Mar 22, 2016 21:42:33 GMT
As a matter of interest, Western Australia does not observe Daylight Saving Time is the fact that the bulk of the population live west of the meridian of longitude from which our time is taken.
At #20 Morgan Street in Ravensthorpe, east of Perth, a plaque exists which depicts 120.041ÂșEast - exactly 8 hours ahead of UTC (Coordinated Universal Time). This is actually 16 minutes ahead of Perth so we do observe a small amount of Daylight Saving Time every day. Perth is located at 115.8589ÂșEast.
I have expressed the degrees as decimal as this is the manner of recording these days - seconds and minutes are no longer used, as you may have been taught at school. Modern surveying is extremely accurate and the instruments used are far more sensitive than those of the nineteenth century.
Our curtains fade naturally and the cows come in for milking when they are ready and not by the clock!
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Pauline
Full Member
Normandy, Brittany & the Loire Valley, WW1 Battlefields and Northern Spain in Sep 2023 with Insight
Posts: 210
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Post by Pauline on Mar 23, 2016 2:56:59 GMT
I could never quite get my head around the "curtains fading" argument but always understood the cows milking one
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