Theory - proposal to delete the reference to population
In reply to: [tz] Theory - proposal to delete the reference to population Tobias Conradi tobias.conradi at gmail.com Fri May 18 18:20:39 UTC 2012 http://home.tiscali.nl/~t876506/Multizones.html says "As soon as the territorial waters of a nation is reached, the clock is set to the local time of that (part of the) nation." Reply: Probably interesting to know: - What you referred to is my page (not interesting, but preliminary to the next). - The chapter about international waters is the result of a discussion on the TZ list a couple of years ago. So, that information is in fact peer reviewed. - The discussion was based on the renowned Bowditch publication The American Practical Navigator. In the chapter mentioned above a table and an algorithm can be found, that can be used to find a kinda logical time for an uninhabited zone. In my opinion: if an authority of an uninhabited island has defined a local time, the TZ database should have a zone designation, whether the island is uninhabited or not. The central place cannot be the largest inhabited place, but could be the geographic center of the island or a landmark of some kind (mountain top, abandoned station, etc.). The mere existence of an ISO code, a FIPS code, internet TLD, whatever, should be of no concern to TZ. Oscar van Vlijmen
OvV_HN wrote:
"As soon as the territorial waters of a nation is reached, the clock is set to the local time of that (part of the) nation."
Given this practice, I concur that we can accept local time to be well-defined for an uninhabited location. Whereas for inhabited locations we attempt to track what the inhabitants' wall clocks show, for uninhabited locations that have territorial waters we'd have to track what ships in those waters (that accept the use of such local time) set their clocks to. That's the closest available equivalent principle. I don't think this means we should entirely delete the reference to population in the Theory file. Population is still a relevant qualifying feature. We've identified a second qualifying feature (ships visiting territorial waters), which should be explicitly discussed alongside population.
The central place cannot be the largest inhabited place, but could be the geographic center of the island or a landmark of some kind (mountain top, abandoned station, etc.).
We'd also need to pick a location that has a well-defined and distinctive name, so it'll need to be a clear geographical feature, not just an arbitrary point. An entire island or a station would likely be top choice. Necessarily decided case-by-case, of course. -zefram
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Zefram