![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrew_jorgensenIn Tunis, it seems that everyone speaks French, and if they don't speak French, they speak Arabic with accents out of the tenth arrondisement. I, misnamed as I am, do not, so communication could at times be dicey. I understood our cab driver when he told us (en Francais), as he whizzed an inch by the fender of the car stopped in the fast lane (they're all fast lanes), that he was the Schumacher of Tunisia, and was tuned-in enough to pun (in English) that I'd almost rather he be Willie than Michael. (Shoemaker, you see.) But I was much less confident that any understanding was reached when we asked him if he would return to the Bardo Musum at five o'clock. Partly this doubt was due to my confusion over whether our proffered "cinq heures" would lead him to arrive not at 5 p.m. but after five hours, but mostly I was worried that we should have mangled "dix et sept" instead as the twelve-hour clock might be to him nothing but a long-abandoned anachronistic chronometer.
See, I'd been reading Charles Stross's Singularity Sky, and I'd gotten to the bit where Martin Springfield is being held by the secret police for committing a political infraction the nature of which no one will tell him. Stross writes, "Outside the skylight, it was a clear, cold April afternoon; the clocks of St Michael had just finished striking fourteen hundred [ . . . ]" For some unlikely reason, my mind stretched back to the opening line of Orwell's 1984, which was always an eerie and ominous annoucement to this American reader, the clocks striking thirteen carrying a sense of otherworldly strangeness, plain wrongness, and invoking a hint of triskaidekaphobia. But had I grown up with the twenty-four hour clock, I may not have noticed any peculiarity.
I have no idea when the United Kingdom or the rest of Europe adopted the twenty-four hour clock for civilian time, so I have no idea whether Orwell intended the reference as a frightening anomaly, an allusion to the weird way they do things on the Continent, a symbol of the regimentation of Oceanic society, or an only slightly futuristic bit of realism. Britain, though, has a history of resistance to such government imposed rationalizations. Famously, for a hundred and seventy years it regarded as suspicious popishness. I remember as a child encountering generation-old Punch cartoons lampooning the opposition to decimalization of the Pound, and I think the metric system was rejected for some time as being too closely associated with the French Revolution. My ignorant impression is that the British, or elements of British society at least, look at government-imposed rationalizations as perniciously continental. Then a generation grows up with the new system, and people are incredulous that their elders could ever have been such paranoid, parochial provincials.
Over here in America, we have a civic ethos built on our inalienable right to be paranoid, parochial provincials. We're lucky that the Revolution took place after the UK adopted the Gregorian calendar, or we might have obstinately stuck with the Julian at least until the Red Scare. We still treat applications of the metric system as a Euro-weenification roughly tantamount to letting the UN land black helicopters on our front lawns and force us to listen to Robbie Williams. And though we've since relented, we initially regarded one of the most widespread government-imposed rationalizations as a Wilsonian internationalism as threatening to the American way of life as the League of Nations. I speak of daylight savings.
(Some will argue that the time zone, being legendarily invented by Benjamin Franklin, is thus quintessentially American; but one should note that of those usually called America's Founders, Franklin was the most urbane, the least agrarian, and personally the closest to France's revolutionary vanguard.)
I can get a little cranky on the subject of time zones and daylight savings. On the one hand, I'm as urbane and unagrarian as they come, and I like knowing what time to show up for things without reference to the longitude; Cleveland in particular is blessed with late but not outrageously late summer sunsets. On the other hand, part of me thinks the whole issue constitutes lying about where the sun is -- hell, I might reject even mean solar time if I didn't think analemmas were pretty. And when I see proposals to move Indiana, which is really too far west already for Eastern Standard Time, an hour ahead during the summer, or see that Congress is extending Daylight Savings well into March and November, I remember those early April days when I'd wait for the schoolbus in darkness. And when I go to Chartres at the end of June, and I have to wait until well after eleven at night for them to illuminate the cathedral because Paris believes there's some economic benefit to having the same time Berlin, I wonder whether or not there is some folly there. And then there's the case of Western China, where the face of your watch becomes a stand-in for ethnic resentment and complicity with colonial power:
According to today's New York Times, a similar split is cleaving Iran, where the cabinet of President Ahmadinejad has suspended the observation of daylight savings (instead opening schools and government offices an hour earlier, which sort of dilutes the righteousness of the stance). Though this seems to me that it's a clear example of agrarian populism at the expense of the urban elites -- playing to Ahmadinejad's base (with an added tension between the religious, who have to get up an hour before dawn to pray no matter what the clock says, and the secular, who get to sleep in) --
To fully disclose my bias, I feel a little possessive of Iran's use of daylight savings, as the day I arrived there, the autumnal equinox and the mid-point of the Persian year, was the day they went back onto standard time. No one had told us, or British Airline's schedulers, that this would be the case, and it took a while for us to figure out what was going on. The time displayed on BA's GPS map and the airport's computerized arrivals board was an hour behind what we had expected and what was displayed on the airport's analog clocks. I got into my first argument with my tour group's know-it-all (other know-it-all) after he said we should trust the analog clocks due to the possibility of computer error. Anyway, as London, the origin of our flight, would not go off of daylight savings for another month, we had arrived an hour before we were expected, and we spent a frustrating hour curbside waiting for our tour bus to arrive at the airport.
Returning to my most recent trip, I had a similar experience flying from Tripoli to Tunis; we had been scheduled to depart at 7 and arrive at 7:05, but were surprised to actually land, without delay, at 8:05. Tunisia had just gone on daylight savings, which Libya does not observe, and the people who wrote the schedule again didn't bother to confirm this fact. Of course confirmation may have been difficult; I had been entertained in that incongruous internet cafe in the middle of the Sahara by listening to an eclipse chaser try to browbeat the aggravatingly confused but endearingly bemused Libyan staff into telling her whether or not the country would shift into daylight savings that coming Sunday, as Europe would. But Tripoli is at the far western extreme of both its country and its time zone, and almost a thousand miles from Cairo, whose time zone it shares, and going on daylight savings time in April would mean that people might have to leave for work before the muezzin called.
But the Iranian situation is a bit of a revelation. I am used to groaning when I hear about daylight saving time being extended into early March, as a government imposition, or when I hear about Indiana going onto daylight saving, as a government imposition. But that I groan when I hear that Iran's government is imposing an abolition of daylight savings demonstrates that it's not so much the time saving scheme to which I object as it is the governmental meddling. I suppose I should take another page from Stross's Singularity Sky; the citizens of his future Earth, all staunchly libertarian, buy what little government they feel they need. Perhaps a capito-anarchist solution exists in which each individual purchases his or her time zone from a private contractor. Of course, this would mean that the rich would be able to purchase calendars with extra weekends and in which Spring Break seems to never end, while the poor would get stuck with all the Wednesdays; this may be indistinguishable from our current system. Moreover, time-shifting was a technology that trickled down from rich to poor as the VCR became progressively less expensive, and I know certain individuals who seem to test as spoiled who are able, through the purchase of DVD box sets, to compress what had been previously thought to be entire years, or at least from September until May sweeps, into a single weekend.
See, I'd been reading Charles Stross's Singularity Sky, and I'd gotten to the bit where Martin Springfield is being held by the secret police for committing a political infraction the nature of which no one will tell him. Stross writes, "Outside the skylight, it was a clear, cold April afternoon; the clocks of St Michael had just finished striking fourteen hundred [ . . . ]" For some unlikely reason, my mind stretched back to the opening line of Orwell's 1984, which was always an eerie and ominous annoucement to this American reader, the clocks striking thirteen carrying a sense of otherworldly strangeness, plain wrongness, and invoking a hint of triskaidekaphobia. But had I grown up with the twenty-four hour clock, I may not have noticed any peculiarity.
I have no idea when the United Kingdom or the rest of Europe adopted the twenty-four hour clock for civilian time, so I have no idea whether Orwell intended the reference as a frightening anomaly, an allusion to the weird way they do things on the Continent, a symbol of the regimentation of Oceanic society, or an only slightly futuristic bit of realism. Britain, though, has a history of resistance to such government imposed rationalizations. Famously, for a hundred and seventy years it regarded as suspicious popishness. I remember as a child encountering generation-old Punch cartoons lampooning the opposition to decimalization of the Pound, and I think the metric system was rejected for some time as being too closely associated with the French Revolution. My ignorant impression is that the British, or elements of British society at least, look at government-imposed rationalizations as perniciously continental. Then a generation grows up with the new system, and people are incredulous that their elders could ever have been such paranoid, parochial provincials.
Over here in America, we have a civic ethos built on our inalienable right to be paranoid, parochial provincials. We're lucky that the Revolution took place after the UK adopted the Gregorian calendar, or we might have obstinately stuck with the Julian at least until the Red Scare. We still treat applications of the metric system as a Euro-weenification roughly tantamount to letting the UN land black helicopters on our front lawns and force us to listen to Robbie Williams. And though we've since relented, we initially regarded one of the most widespread government-imposed rationalizations as a Wilsonian internationalism as threatening to the American way of life as the League of Nations. I speak of daylight savings.
(Some will argue that the time zone, being legendarily invented by Benjamin Franklin, is thus quintessentially American; but one should note that of those usually called America's Founders, Franklin was the most urbane, the least agrarian, and personally the closest to France's revolutionary vanguard.)
I can get a little cranky on the subject of time zones and daylight savings. On the one hand, I'm as urbane and unagrarian as they come, and I like knowing what time to show up for things without reference to the longitude; Cleveland in particular is blessed with late but not outrageously late summer sunsets. On the other hand, part of me thinks the whole issue constitutes lying about where the sun is -- hell, I might reject even mean solar time if I didn't think analemmas were pretty. And when I see proposals to move Indiana, which is really too far west already for Eastern Standard Time, an hour ahead during the summer, or see that Congress is extending Daylight Savings well into March and November, I remember those early April days when I'd wait for the schoolbus in darkness. And when I go to Chartres at the end of June, and I have to wait until well after eleven at night for them to illuminate the cathedral because Paris believes there's some economic benefit to having the same time Berlin, I wonder whether or not there is some folly there. And then there's the case of Western China, where the face of your watch becomes a stand-in for ethnic resentment and complicity with colonial power:
KASHGAR, China -- In this far western outpost, where a Muslim majority lives restively under Chinese rule, you can tell a lot about a man's politics by how he sets his clock.(Like they do in Cleveland.)
For the last half-century, China's Communist leaders have required the entire country to mark the hours by Beijing time, even though this far-flung city of veiled women, spice markets and donkey carts should be two, probably three, time zones behind. In Kashgar, in Xinjiang Province, really living by Beijing time would mean getting up in total darkness nearly 365 days a year.
So many local Muslims, defiant and increasingly disaffected, set their watches two hours behind Beijing, a nod both to nature and their separate identity. ''The Chinese want us to follow Beijing time, but most of us are unwilling,'' said a young soda vender named Abduljim, whose timepiece on a recent morning read 7:45, when the official time was 9:45. ''We are Uighurs -- Muslims -- we should follow Xinjiang time, our time, here.''
Time, like almost everything else here in Kashgar, has become suffused with questions of power, control and ethnic divisions -- between the dominant Chinese and the native Muslims, Uighurs who speak a Turkic language and are culturally related to the peoples of nearby Central Asia. And in recent years, those divisions have intensified greatly, as more Chinese move into the region and local Uighurs have fallen on economic hard times.
[ . . . ]
Then there is the issue of the time. Big stores, or those owned by Chinese, mostly quote opening hours in Beijing time, as if it were their umbilical cord to civilization. Those owned by Muslims, which tend to be small businesses, are two hours behind.
''We Chinese go by Beijing time,'' said a bartender named Wang, whose father was sent here to work 20 years ago. ''But the Uighurs do not.''
Of course, nature -- the sunrises and sunsets -- favors the Uighur point of view on this one, and in practice the Chinese here have had to make a thousand little adjustments in order to live formally by Beijing's clock.
Government offices wait until 10 a.m. Beijing time to open and stay open until 7:30 p.m. The state schools don't start until 9:30 a.m. for example, and even with that, some people grumble that in winter it is too dark for kids to go to school.
''Of course, they should start at 7:30 or 8 like everywhere else in China,'' said a Uighur man who gave only his first name, Imamu. ''But they can't do that because of the sun problem. You can't have children riding to school in the dark.''
According to today's New York Times, a similar split is cleaving Iran, where the cabinet of President Ahmadinejad has suspended the observation of daylight savings (instead opening schools and government offices an hour earlier, which sort of dilutes the righteousness of the stance). Though this seems to me that it's a clear example of agrarian populism at the expense of the urban elites -- playing to Ahmadinejad's base (with an added tension between the religious, who have to get up an hour before dawn to pray no matter what the clock says, and the secular, who get to sleep in) --
The public welfare minister, Parviz Kazemi, said the government had the country's 20 million farmers in mind when it decided not to move to daylight saving time. "They usually start their work with the daylight, and changing the time does not affect their lives," the daily newspaper Shargh quoted him as saying.-- the government is casting this in terms of conservation, claiming that the energy savings don't merit the disruption. Experts dispute this, saying that not going on daylight savings will "cost the government $3.3 billion in additional energy costs." Of course, when I was in Iran in 2004, gasoline was subsidized at seven cents a liter, and I suspect that energy inefficiency is national policy there; the more energy they are able to waste, the more realistic their claims that their nuclear ambitions are peaceful and in response to a genuine need for electric power might appear.
But opponents of the decision have contended that the government has ignored the benefits of the change for 18 million students and others.
To fully disclose my bias, I feel a little possessive of Iran's use of daylight savings, as the day I arrived there, the autumnal equinox and the mid-point of the Persian year, was the day they went back onto standard time. No one had told us, or British Airline's schedulers, that this would be the case, and it took a while for us to figure out what was going on. The time displayed on BA's GPS map and the airport's computerized arrivals board was an hour behind what we had expected and what was displayed on the airport's analog clocks. I got into my first argument with my tour group's know-it-all (other know-it-all) after he said we should trust the analog clocks due to the possibility of computer error. Anyway, as London, the origin of our flight, would not go off of daylight savings for another month, we had arrived an hour before we were expected, and we spent a frustrating hour curbside waiting for our tour bus to arrive at the airport.
Returning to my most recent trip, I had a similar experience flying from Tripoli to Tunis; we had been scheduled to depart at 7 and arrive at 7:05, but were surprised to actually land, without delay, at 8:05. Tunisia had just gone on daylight savings, which Libya does not observe, and the people who wrote the schedule again didn't bother to confirm this fact. Of course confirmation may have been difficult; I had been entertained in that incongruous internet cafe in the middle of the Sahara by listening to an eclipse chaser try to browbeat the aggravatingly confused but endearingly bemused Libyan staff into telling her whether or not the country would shift into daylight savings that coming Sunday, as Europe would. But Tripoli is at the far western extreme of both its country and its time zone, and almost a thousand miles from Cairo, whose time zone it shares, and going on daylight savings time in April would mean that people might have to leave for work before the muezzin called.
But the Iranian situation is a bit of a revelation. I am used to groaning when I hear about daylight saving time being extended into early March, as a government imposition, or when I hear about Indiana going onto daylight saving, as a government imposition. But that I groan when I hear that Iran's government is imposing an abolition of daylight savings demonstrates that it's not so much the time saving scheme to which I object as it is the governmental meddling. I suppose I should take another page from Stross's Singularity Sky; the citizens of his future Earth, all staunchly libertarian, buy what little government they feel they need. Perhaps a capito-anarchist solution exists in which each individual purchases his or her time zone from a private contractor. Of course, this would mean that the rich would be able to purchase calendars with extra weekends and in which Spring Break seems to never end, while the poor would get stuck with all the Wednesdays; this may be indistinguishable from our current system. Moreover, time-shifting was a technology that trickled down from rich to poor as the VCR became progressively less expensive, and I know certain individuals who seem to test as spoiled who are able, through the purchase of DVD box sets, to compress what had been previously thought to be entire years, or at least from September until May sweeps, into a single weekend.
Tags:
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-04-11 04:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-11 04:25 am (UTC)What did you think of Singularity Sky? I had trouble putting it down last week but now can no longer remember much of what happened. And I'm conflating it with Snow In August, which I read immediately subsequently, so I believe there was some bit where it turned out that the golem in Baba Yaga's hut was a telephone repairman.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-15 02:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-11 06:47 am (UTC)But most important: Welcome home to you & your mind!
The intersection of time demarcations & religion can be interesting. For all that "Jewish time" usually means arriving late, in many cases it has to do w/natural time. Candle-lighting for Shabbes & holy days is keyed to local sunset, i.e., the time the sun actually goes down, & doesn't come at the same time all across a time zone. So candles are lit a couple of minutes later in Manhattan than in Brooklyn, & a Jew just west of the border between time zones lights candles a minute later than 1 just east of it--but a minute less than an hour earlier on the clock. (I think. It's late, & I'm tired.)
I haven't had local time change on me upon arrival in another country, but on my one (so far!) eclipse trip, I went to Bolivia from NYC just before the US reverted to standard time, & the effect of the longitudinal shift was basically that it let me wait an extra week before setting my watch back.
"Perhaps a capito-anarchist solution exists in which each individual purchases his or her time zone from a private contractor. Of course, this would mean that the rich would be able to purchase calendars with extra weekends...."
First, "capito-anarchist" made me think of a button you might like; wanna know what it says, or would you rather find out by seeing it at Tahoe (assuming you're going, & assuming I'm going!)? Second, by the time I got to the point where the above quote ends, I was thinking--well, more or less the same thing you said at the end of the sentence: "Isn't that pretty much what we have now?" I'd like to buy the Mountain Time zone--then maybe I'd be in sync w/the one I live in!
no subject
Date: 2006-04-11 11:01 am (UTC)Tahoe is looking unlikely for me; you'd better tell me the joke now. It is a joke, right? Because if it's a purely informational button I'm going to feel a little cheated . . .
no subject
Date: 2006-04-12 03:21 am (UTC)The button is a joke, yes...you'll have to decide how funny it is. It says, "Anarcho-Capitalist for sale or rent." I now realize I was assuming that referred to the button's wearer, but I suppose another interpretation is possible....
no subject
Date: 2006-04-11 10:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-11 11:05 am (UTC)Ok, truth be told, I don't know that anyone, even the Belgians, outside of the military has ever spoken in 24-hour time; this would crucially undercut my thesis had I ever bothered to clearly express one.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-11 11:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-11 01:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-11 02:30 pm (UTC)I can remember what a mess it was in Missouri when St. Louis had daylight savings, but the rest of the state didn't. Drive 20 miles and the time would change. They've got that kind of headache in Indiana. I guess it's up to them to decide which way they want to go, be far east in the Central zone or far west in the East zone after many years of a mixure of three different schedules.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-11 05:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-12 02:13 am (UTC)Similar confusion exists at Hoover Dam, since Nevada time and Arizona time are the same in the summer and 1 hour apart in winter.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-11 04:35 pm (UTC)The sacrosaint modèle Québecois - social democratic decadence at its apogee – serves up a chacun son goût anarchy despite blanket attempts at government intervention and systemisation. By default, whatever system of measure seems most convenient falls into application. Therefore, outdoor temperature is expressed in degrees Celsius, but indoor temperature is better understood in degrees Fahrenheit (as is body temperature-fever). Francophones use the 24-hour clock to denote time officially (written communication, Radio-Canada) but will use the 12-hour clock colloquially; Anglophones never use the 24-hour clock, ornery beasts that they are;)
At the behest of the very Nationalist-friendly credit union group for which I work, the French version of the LotusNotes agenda management program was installed on my workstation. Under the Create a New Meeting option, the field “Spécifiez un fuseau horaire différent” caused us no end of grief; it took a fair amount of coaxing to make the software understand we weren’t actually in France.
invoking a hint of triskaidekaphobia
Being born on a Friday 13th, I tend to get a little defensive when people invoke this phobia. Thirteen is good, people! I mean, consider the baker's dozen...
no subject
Date: 2006-04-11 05:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-11 11:50 pm (UTC)Regarding Time Zones. Standard Time was invented by a Canadian, did you know that? I googled, and I found:
Time Zones
Time zones did not become necessary in the United States until trains made it possible to travel hundreds of miles in a day. Until the 1860s most cities relied upon their own local "sun" time, but this time changed by approximately one minute for every 12 1/2 miles traveled east or west. The problem of keeping track of over 300 local times was overcome by establishing railroad time zones. Standard time zones were first invented by Scottish-Canadian, railroad engineer, Sir Sandford Fleming in 1878, and universally accepted in 1884.
I knew this because our beloved CBC shows these little inspirational historical montages, or what Canadians have given to the wider world...and Sir Sandford was the subject of one of them.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-12 10:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-12 06:39 am (UTC)Ireland was 25 minutes behind Great Britain until 1916, "Dublin Time" being based on the meridian of Dunsink Observatory. In the wake of the Easter Rising of that yearthe clocks went back only 35 minutes in the autumn rather than an hour, thus putting Ireland on the same time as England, Scotland and Wales. In 1919 a couple of the early meetings of Dáil %Eacute;ireann, the revolutionary parliament, kept minutes in both standard and "Irish time", but this did not survive into the era of independence.
Once independence had arrived and the civil war was won, the Dáil got around to passing a new Summer Time Act in 1923. The debate, precisely 83 years ago today, featured proposals for going back to the old Irish summer time in summer only, and also for local councils to possibly opt in or opt out.
In the 1960s Ireland decided that it would be on Central European Time in the summer, and Central European Time minus an hour in winter. Completely different from the UK, which of course is on Greenwich Mean Time in winter and British Summer Time in summer.
The choice of time is obviously political in other parts of Europe. the entirety of the Benelux countries and almost all of France are west of the 7°30' longitude which should really be the cut-off point for Central European Time; most of Spain, indeed, is west rather than east of Greenwich, but they have all opted to go with the Germans, Swiss, Italians and neighbours further to the east.
The 45° line, which should give you three hours' difference from the UK, cuts through Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, but after independence all three kept the Soviet practice of putting the clocks another hour ahead anyway. After the 2003 revolution in Georgia, President Saakashvili moved the country an hour to the west, so they are now in line with Moscow and Iraq, and the shift at the Turkish border is only one hour instead of two. (This doesn't seem to have been picked up by on-line sources.)
There is a nice animation of world time zones here.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-12 10:36 pm (UTC)The animation (at which I can't seem to stop staring) really drives home how much people like to take shift their daylight later, associating their clocks with a meridian much to their east.