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125 Years of Longitude 0 0' 00" At Greenwich

Posted by kdawson on from the does-anybody-really-know-what-place-it-is dept.

An anonymous reader writes "This week marks the 125th anniversary of the International Meridian Conference, which determined that the prime meridian (i.e., longitude 0 0' 00") would travel through Greenwich, UK. One of the reasons that Greenwich was agreed upon 'was that 72% of the world's shipping already depended on sea charts that used Greenwich as the Prime Meridian.' Sandford Fleming's proposal of a single 24-hour clock for the entire world, located at the center of the Earth and not linked to any surface meridian, was rejected / not voted on, as it was felt to be outside the purview of the conference."

10 of 429 comments (clear)

  1. 125 MORE years until the US gets time... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I wonder how much longer it will take for the US to catch up?

    For example, we continue to teach date formatted in a completely nonsense format (MM/DD/YYYY) instead of either high to low (YYYY/MM/DD) or low to high (DD/MM/YYYY) like the rest of the world. Plus using AM/PM instead of 24 hour ("Military Time") again like the rest of the civilised world.

    Don't even get me started on our lack of metric....

    1. Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... by PhunkySchtuff · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yet you have a holiday called the Fourth of July...

      --
      Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
    2. Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      People in other English speaking countries say it correctly too (e.g. "[the] first of April two thousand and ten"). Americans say it wrong because they write it wrong.

    3. Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Saying "April 1st" feels more natural to English-speaking people

      Not to *this* English speaker. Some English speakers come from places other than the US.

    4. Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... by Thanshin · · Score: 5, Funny

      I always have to stop and think for a second when trying to remember how long "five feet" is,

      What's to remember? Five feet is the reach of your longsword.

      And I don't care where you live, you should always carry a longsword.

      And 30 feet of rope.

    5. Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... by 91degrees · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It was a good decision. There's no YYYY-DD-MM notation so it's not going to get confused with that. It also means a simple alphanumeric sort will sort the date correctly, a decent number of people in the world (Mostly in China and Japan) are already familiar with the notation, and it maintains logical consistency if you put 24 hour time after it (YYYY-MM-DD-hh:mm:ss)

    6. Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Saying "April 1st" feels more natural to English-speaking people than "1st of April" for the same reason that saying "blue car" feels more natural than "car of blue". It's because we put adjectives before nouns, while in e.g. French it's the opposite, and explains why they prefer to say "1er Avril".

      Are you trying to claim that Americans say "April 1st" because April is an adjective? April is a noun. The reason that non-American English speakers say "1st of April" is because it's the "1st [day] of April". When you put it like that, "April 1st" sounds weird.

      It boils down to the fact that what your used to is what sounds natural to you. There are many examples of very odd constructions in English that seem natural only because they are familiar.

      This is yet another "it's not what I'm used to hearing, therefore it's wrong/inferior" argument. (Fahrenheit versus Celcius springs to mind)

    7. Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... by niktemadur · · Score: 5, Interesting

      For example, we continue to teach date formatted in a completely nonsense format (MM/DD/YYYY) instead of either high to low (YYYY/MM/DD) or low to high (DD/MM/YYYY) like the rest of the world.

      While the AC got modded "Troll", he/she has got a point, expressed in narrow terms, which I'd like to expand at the risk of being Offtopic: Why is it so difficult to standardize things from place to place?

      - Video. The PAL standard is better quality than NTSC (Never The Same Color), so why did the Americas adopt an inferior option?
      - Voltages. Being asthmatic, my wife took her nebulizer on a recent trip to Europe and within ten seconds busted our converter. We busted another one before ordering a special-delivery converter for medium-sized devices, the whole escapade setting us back about 180 CHF.
      - Car filters. Working at a company that distributes car stuff, a trip to the warehouse is an eye opener, there's over 1,500 types of just oil filters, the difference between some of them being half a millimeter in circumference. Add windshield wipers (also windshields, for that matter), engine bands, tires (or tyres for all you Britons, cheers mate), fuses, and I wonder why no institution has put an end to this nonsense, like the API (American Petroleum Institute) did with engine oils (BTW, a shining example of standardization success).
      - Keyboards. Even in Western nations, configurations change however slightly, so that a QWERTY in the USA is a QWERTZ in Switzerland, then another thing in Spain, etc, which tends to REALLY slow down typing speed.
      - DVDs. Take away the PAL and NTSC thing, and you've still got to deal with the DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD+RW, DVD-RW, DVD-DL+R, DVD-DL-R, DVD-DD+R, DVD-DL-R, the majority not compatible with all burners, drives and/or players.
      - Steering wheel/Street flow. Some do it on the left side, some do it on the right side. WHY???

      Best comic strip I've read in the last few months is from Spain, shows some exhausted dude being compared to Sisyphus:
      - "Seven years of toil, but I've finally ripped, subtitled and uploaded all the world's DVDs to the Internet, with cover jpgs and all".
      Then the guy points a gun to his head as an off-voice says:
      - "Now stick them all up your ass, 'cause here comes High Definition, Blu-Ray, HDD and whatever the fuck else".

      End of rant.

      Back on topic, whoever ruled the Seven Seas first, got to do the homework and implement a practical system of navigation, and at the time it was the British, so I have to tip my hat to them, they did a bloody good job at it, as it still stands to the day and really needs no revision. Leave it at Greenwich, or as it's known in time circles, Coordinated Universal Time.

      Neil DeGrasse Tyson did a gentleman's job at explaining the concept during a lecture available on the web:
      - The Greeks named the constellations (while inventing the concept), so we still use the Greek names for them.
      - The great Islamic culture of a thousand years ago named the visible stars, so we still use the Arab names (Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka, Rigel and Betelgeuse, to name a few just from Orion). FWIW, my favorite star name is the tip of the Big Dipper's handle - Al Kaid, which means "leader of the mourning maidens".
      - The Brits invented the modern system of correspondence and postage, so their stamp is the only one that does not specify the country of origin, to this day.
      - The North Americans invented the Internet, so USA websites are dot-com, while the rest of the world uses dot-com-dot-suffix.

      All I'm saying is, in a modern world with thousands of pockets of eccentric engineers, it's comforting to find examples of global standardization, and the time zones is one of them.

      --
      Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
  2. Re:Happy birthday to 180th meridian too ! by Pieroxy · · Score: 5, Funny

    I recently flew from LA to Fiji. On the way forward, you land two days after departure, on the way back, you land at the same time you departed...

    It's pretty disturbing.

    --
    Write boring code, not shiny code!
  3. Re:It's because meters and feet are the same by BlueParrot · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Seriously, the metric system has a lot going for it in some ways, but is harder in others. For example, while 10 is a great multiplier (since we tend to think in base 10), it doesn't have a lot of factors.

    You miss the point. The advantage of using the same base across all measurements is not merely that it goes well with the digits we use, but it means different type of measurements work well together. A cubic meter works out to exactly a thousand liters, which when filled with water would weigh 1 metric tonne, which is 1 thousand kilograms. The pressure of 10 metres of water works out to 1 atmosphere, which is approximately 100,000 Pascal, which is 100,000 Newtons per square meter. At sea level the acceleration due to gravity is approximately 10 M/s so 1kg is roughly 10 newtons worth of weight. If you have a force of 1 Newton over 1 meter , you get 1 joule worth of energy, which is the energy drawn per second by 1 ampere of electric current at an electric potential of 1 volt.

    Now, lets say you have a pool of water that is 10 feet deep and 10x20 yards by the sides. You want an electric engine operating at 230V to drive a pump that can empty the pool through a pipe that has a diameter of 3inches. The drain is at ground level. You don't want to leave it on unsupervised at night so you want it to take no more than 2 hours. How many amperes of current will your engine draw? What's the total amount of energy necessary to empty the pool? How much pressure does the pump have to handle?

    I would STRONGLY suggest you convert to SI units before trying to solve that problem.