[tz] Timekeeping in the news

Paul Gilmartin PaulGBoulder at AIM.com
Wed Dec 25 04:37:01 UTC 2019


On 2019-12-24, at 20:28:24, Tim Parenti wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 24 Dec 2019 at 22:03, Howard Hinnant <howard.hinnant at gmail.com> wrote:
> 11h...  Sure smells like a time zone issue.  Such as not taking time zones into account, or taking them into account incorrectly.  Fwiw, there’s an 11h difference between Cape Canaveral (launch site) and India (popular location for outsourced programming).
> 
> I have seen speculation on Twitter (unsubstantiated, of course) that it is related to the difference between Cape Canaveral (currently UTC-5) and the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan (UTC+6).  But anything of that sort would of course raise the question of why any local time is being used rather than UTC.
>  
One NASA convention is "Mission Elapsed Time":
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Elapsed_Time

... but they still have to get it right.

> It would be great to know the facts...
> 
> Indeed.  I've only seen the phrase "11 hours" in reports, but of course, if that's being used as an approximate figure rather than an exact one, there could be any number of other possible causes.
>  
In 1985 in Colorado, a fatal train wreck resulted from a scheduling error:
    https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Pages/RAR8602.aspx

Speculation at the time, not confirmed in the NTSB report, was that one
train on Friday picked handwritten orders for Saturday.

-- gil



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