But if such a suggestion started to be considered seriously, the following three suggestions for further improvement immediately come to mind: 1) The first zone at the date line should be called zone 0:00, not tz
On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 17:22, David Patte <dpatte@relativedata.com> wrote: 1.
2) To ease the conversion from longitudes, all geographic longitudes should then be moved, at the same time, to the dateline, measuring all longitudes as positive from 0, as is done for most other astronomical measurements. 3) Finally, we should also mandate that all world clocks start to measure time in arcseconds, arcminutes and degrees instead of seconds, minutes and hours to insure that no one has to divide by 15 ever again. :)
Sounds like way too big a change for the very minimal advantage of having less negatively-number zones, though it might temporarily stimulate the economy for mapmakers, clock makers, gps vendors, geography teachers, and insurance companies, if that is the primary goal. :)
You'd also want to specify that the south pole is latitude 0 and the north pole latitude 180, if you want to get rid of negative numbers on maps and GPS devices.
None of which addresses the problems encountered by the fact that the date line isn't a line at all, but has several zigs and zags. :)