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  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@dog.topology.org>
  To  : glen.turner@adelaide.edu.au
  Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 11:57:30 +1030

Re: Daylight Savings Time

You think _Australian_ time zones are a disaster!
When I was living in Kentucky once, a bunch of
mathematicians and myself got into a car to drive to a
conference in Illinois or somewhere, and we
did our homework to find out the time zones of each state
that we went through. We dropped into a mexican
restaurant in Gary, Indiana, and ordered food
in a great hurry because it was getting close to
closing time of 5 p.m. We wondered why no one
was panicked about the closing time drawing near,
while we ate as quickly as we could.
Then it was 10 minutes past closing time, and
we asked about this. It turned out that Gary, Indiana
was _not_ participating in daylight saving time
that year!

I had a similar experience when I first arrived in the US.
There's was a gradual change in state time zones
to gradually incorporate much of the mid-West into
the eastern time zone. So my atlas was completely out.
And it seemed to me that there was no comprehensive
reference to tell me for each state and city, what time
zone they were in that year and that season.

But it's better than in the old days.
The US used to have local sidereal time at most
cities. So when trains started connecting up the cities,
they found that the clocks gradually changed a few
minutes at a time across the country. Each town differed
by a few minutes from its neighbours.

What surprises me is that the US is so advanced in so many
technological areas, and yet they still have
miles, ounces, fahrenheit and so forth, and highly
individualistic time zones.

Australia has just a couple of little towns (e.g. in
WA) which differ from their state time zones.
So jut be grateful that you live in such an orderly society!!!

Cheerio,
Alan Kennington.

PS.  Talking about time zones, I just wrote a little 
Perl/Tk script yesterday in 1 hour to show my favourite
7 time zones every second of the day inside a single
X window. It's at 
http://www.topology.org/src/perltk/clock1.pl
It continues to astonish me that I can think of
an idea for a graphical-interface application
and implement it in one hour.
It used to require intense motivational fortification
and a doubling of blood pressure ust to get
started on such an application with Xlib/C++.

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