New Square / שיכון סקווירא Time is:
Other places sharing this timezone:
When Kathryn was living in Providence, I used to joke with her about the idea that there was a 15 minute time difference between New York City and Providence. While in reality both of these observe the same time zone (Eastern Time), their times actually do differ if you account for "local mean time": the difference in time at which any given longitude experiences noon.
It takes about four minutes for the sun to pass by a degree of longitude (1 degree longitude = about 54.6 miles), which means that a location as near as 13 miles away has a different noon from you. Regular time zones in most cases cover 15 degrees of longitude (360 degrees of earth / 24 hours = 15), so there's a wide difference in apparent vs observed noons within a given time zone. It's not surprising that we get worked up about things like daylight savings time — there's as much as a 60 minute solar difference in when people experience a given clock time within a time zone! We're living in a gradient of time zones that is not acknowledged in how we keep time, and this means that everyone has to share a huge time zone, which sucks.
The narrative for why we abandoned hyper local time zones goes something like: we used to use sundials (pure local time), and then we developed mechanical clocks (a little less local), but then we developed trains and rapid intercity travel, which required more precise time coordination between medium distance places. So we gave up local times so we could travel more easily
This is reasonable. But most people use computers now, and computers are good at coordinating time precisely. There is a database on your computer called the tz database that records the boundaries of all time zones, and the history of every change a given time zone has had since 1970. What's interesting about this database is that it doesn't store information for wide time zones like "Eastern Standard Time". From IETF's Theory and pragmatics of the tz code and data, on the names in the tz database:
The naming conventions attempt to strike a balance among the following goals:
- Uniquely identify every timezone where clocks have agreed since 1970. This is essential for the intended use: static clocks keeping local civil time.
- Indicate to experts where the timezone's clocks typically are.
- Be robust in the presence of political changes. For example, names of countries are ordinarily not used, to avoid incompatibilities when countries change their name (e.g., Zaire→Congo) or when locations change countries (e.g., Hong Kong from UK colony to China).
- Be portable to a wide variety of implementations.
- Use a consistent naming conventions over the entire world
Setting aside the hubris, this is a pretty powerful system for representing differences in time. Computers identify time zones not by a broad time zone name but instead with the form "AREA/LOCATION, where AREA is a continent or ocean, and LOCATION is a specific location within the area". So: Africa/Cairo, America/New_York, and Pacific/Honolulu. This means that we're actually quite well situated to reinstate a true local mean time!
This calulator does just that: it's a set of permalinks for different local mean times around the world. You can click on the map or search to find other local times, and see other places which share the same longitude and local mean time. I hope this tool inspires people to have more longitudinal solidarity and embrace micro differences in timing.