Multi-timezone clock

[Oscar van Vlijmen]

The UN list of geographical divisions
<http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/m49/m49regin.htm>
has some peculiar entries.

The UN list is indeed very close to "geographical", but what is its intent?
If a person uses this list as an aid to get information about a country
FAST, a division by geographical coordinates simply doesn't work
efficiently.

Iran: why is this southern Asia and Iraq western Asia?
And why isn't there a more logical region Middle-East? I hear it daily on
the radio & TV.

Greenland: whoever thought this was North-American? It is a dependency of
Denmark (Europe).

It is a bit difficult for me to see some ex-Russian regions as European,
others as central Asian, and again others as western Asian. It would have
made more sense to cluster them together by ex-political status.

We've already discussed Cyprus. Greece is part of Europe, Turkey wants to be
part of the European union, the government of Cyprus expresses the wish to
be part of Europe, the British Forces in Akrotiri and Dhekelia are from
Europe, so why force this little nation into Asia?

Other peculiarities of Europe have already been noted by Clive Feather
(2005-06-12).

But, there seems to be no law against zoning oddities and the UN list is
close to some sort of standard.


By the way, Tunisia seems to be in a different time zone for more than a
month now. For several Europeans it is a holiday resort, so set your clocks
right; the TZ distribution (tzdata2005j) is still a bit off.

Oscar van Vlijmen
2005-06-13