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Samoa and Tokelau Are Skipping December 30th

Posted by Soulskill on from the custom-week-crafting dept.

ocean_soul writes "Starting January 1, 2012 Samoa and Tokelau will be in time zone +13 instead of -11. This means there will be no December 30, 2011 in these countries. The decision to switch time zone was based on the changing international business relations of Samoa. Samoa had adopted the -11 time zone to make business with the U.S. easier. However, currently Samoa's most important trading partners are Australia and New Zealand. By switching time zone the work-weeks and week-ends on Samoa and Tokelau will be synchronized with those in Australia and New Zealand."

7 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. Re:SIgn of the "times" by InterestingFella · · Score: 5, Funny

    If you go to north pole and keep running around the pole in same direction, crossing timezones, you can go infinitely back or forward in time!

  2. Re:SIgn of the "times" by ceoyoyo · · Score: 5, Informative

    Until you hit that darn international date line.

  3. Not really, no. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    No, actually it's not.

    First, UT is a bit confusing. You have to specify which UT you mean: UTC, UT0, UT1, UT1R, etc...

    All these, except UTC, are based on celestial movement. Which means they will vary due to natural causes. A slight wobble in Earths orbit or a little bit of tectonic shift will cause seconds to be shorter or longer. UTC is based on 'artificial' timing (atomic timekeeping) and as such has slightly different seconds than the other UT's.

    So, no, UTC is not simply another UT without counting leap seconds.

    Timekeeping is hard. Really hard.

  4. Why not wait for leap day? by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 5, Insightful
    If they just waited two months until February, they could have just issued calendars that skipped leap day, and few people would have even noticed (until the work week suddenly became shorter).

    And they'd get to say that they were "leaping" over leap day....

  5. Re:Kill timezones already by hankwang · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Switch the entire world to UTC (and kill am/pm since they'll no longer correspond to morning/night in half the world). ... just the idea of eliminating "2pm your time or mine?" makes it worthwhile.

    That might be convenient for making appointments for telephone conferences, but it really sucks if you actually travel to such a timezone and need to schedule your daily program; then you will have to calculate the offset relative to your old place every time you wonder whether it is already lunch time, or whether the shops/offices are open. Not to mention that having the date and day of the week change in the middle of the day might also be rather inconvenient: what does "see you on Wednesday" mean?

    And as for appointments: calendar applications already take care of calculating the time zones while scheduling meetings.

    --
    Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
  6. Re:SIgn of the "times" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Just jump over it.

  7. Re:No the key change is the work-week. by SteveTheNewbie · · Score: 5, Insightful

    My goodness, three days ? let me draw you a little table.

    M - S
    T - M *
    W - T *
    T - W *
    F - T *
    S - F
    S - S

    The days with a * next to them are 'working days which coincide', you'll notice there are four of them. I'm quite amazed that you got modded to 4.