Earlier this year, Julian O'Shea released a short video detailing a peculiarity about the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, "How Daylight Savings Broke this $24 Million Building": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfzsBMUiGGQ The shrine, originally dedicated in 1934 to honor those who served in World War I, was designed with a small aperture in the roof. Each Remembrance Day (11 November) at 11:00am local time, the position of the sun would be perfectly aligned to shine through the aperture, allowing the light of its rays to fall upon an inscribed stone inside, thus commemorating the hour of the Armistice. The problem? Several decades later, in 1971, Victoria adopted DST, but of course the aperture had been tuned to the position of the sun at 11:00am AEST. So what do you do to preserve this meaningful element of an annual ceremony with important dignitaries, when it's effectively been moved an hour earlier to 11:00am AEDT instead? The answer involves a clever system of mirrors. (And the general public still gets to witness the light following its true path an hour later!) Since this is quite a grand physical representation of how we interact with our timekeeping, I've added this to tz-art.html, as well as a few fixups to unclosed HTML tags nearby. -- Tim Parenti
On 2025-11-10 16:00, Tim Parenti via tz wrote:
Each Remembrance Day (11 November) at 11:00am local time
In some sense the Melbourne sculpture was broken even when it was dedicated in 1934, as the World War I armistice took place on 1918-11-11 at 11:00 UT, so its Gregorian-calendar anniversary occurred at 21:00 Melbourne time in 1934 and will occur at 22:00 Melbourne time this year - i.e., about two hours after Melbourne sunset. It'd take quite a bit of mirror trickery to fix *that*!
On 2025-11-10 17:42, Paul Eggert via tz wrote:
On 2025-11-10 16:00, Tim Parenti via tz wrote:
Each Remembrance Day (11 November) at 11:00am local time
In some sense the Melbourne sculpture was broken even when it was dedicated in 1934, as the World War I armistice took place on 1918-11-11 at 11:00 UT, so its Gregorian-calendar anniversary occurred at 21:00 Melbourne time in 1934 and will occur at 22:00 Melbourne time this year - i.e., about two hours after Melbourne sunset.
It'd take quite a bit of mirror trickery to fix *that*!
Commonwealth countries commonly observe 2 minutes silence at 11:00 local, since 1919, and/or also commonly on the nearest Sunday (Remembrance Sunday) at 11:00 local, since 1939, often coordinated nationally with broadcast ceremonies (local timezone state/province/territory ceremonies in Australia and Canada) held at cenotaphs or war memorials, where the silence is preceded by the "Last Post", and followed by "Reveille", as in a traditional night vigil to guard and honour the dead. 🥀 Lest We Forget / Je me souviens [ ^ "Recessional" - Rudyard Kipling, 1897] -- Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis Calgary, Alberta, Canada La perfection est atteinte Perfection is achieved non pas lorsqu'il n'y a plus rien à ajouter not when there is no more to add mais lorsqu'il n'y a plus rien à retrancher but when there is no more to cut -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
On 11/10/25 17:42, Paul Eggert via tz wrote:
On 2025-11-10 16:00, Tim Parenti via tz wrote:
Each Remembrance Day (11 November) at 11:00am local time
In some sense the Melbourne sculpture was broken even when it was dedicated in 1934, as the World War I armistice took place on 1918-11-11 at 11:00 UT, so its Gregorian-calendar anniversary occurred at 21:00 Melbourne time in 1934 and will occur at 22:00 Melbourne time this year - i.e., about two hours after Melbourne sunset.
It'd take quite a bit of mirror trickery to fix *that*! ... <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliostat>
Should we now debate the choice among o Calendar Year o Mean Tropical Year o Sidereal year (used by a minority of astrologers) -- gil
participants (4)
-
Brian Inglis -
Paul Eggert -
Paul Gilmartin -
Tim Parenti