[LEAPSECS] h2g2

[Ian Batten]

On 2 Sep 2010, at 07:36, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:


> In message <4C7EE805.11354.3A7F29F0 at dan.tobias.name>, "Daniel R.  

> Tobias" writes

> :

>

>> If the time zone boundaries were drawn with any sort of logic with

>> respect to keeping the times close to the natural solar time in each

>> location, then France and Spain would join the UK and Portugal in

>> WET, rather than the UK shifting the other way.

>

> One of the major objectives of EU is to make trade easier and that is

> why they want as few timezones as possible, ideally only one.



I'm slightly surprised that no-one has suggested adopting the Indian  
solution (UTC+4h30m), which is ideal for political areas that are  
about 30 degrees east to west, and switching the EU to UTC+30m (plus,  
or not, daylight saving in both cases).  I suspect that if you take  
each EU country and multiply its population by the error between solar  
and civil time, and then minimise that function, you'd end up  
somewhere around that value.  Portugal has tried CET, but is currently  
back on WET, and the UK is muttering about CET: in both cases, UTC+30m  
would be a good compromise between solar time and consistency.  It  
would be a problem wrt the US, but India copes, and conversely it  
would make it easier with respect to India.

We could drift there by applying 1800 leap seconds, one a night for  
five years :-)

ian