Happy New Year From Jack

[Jack Williams]

Just a short message to wish all the members and any visitors a very happy New Year and do have a successful 2009 regardless of the present World Shambles. We are the first country to bring in the New Year and, while it's raining pretty solidly out there at present i am assured that it will fine up on the night(Wednesday local time.) In which case the outdoor JBLs will make an appearance and there are a whole bunch of fireworks (saved from Guyfalks) ready to go off. So i hope you all have a goodly amount of fun as we should be able to do.(weather or no!) Jack.

[Sarongman]

Och aye! Happy Hogmanay to ye all from the second country off the rank. I've seen enough previous ones so, being a boring old fart, I'll sleep through the (momentous?) change.

[crfriend]

Since so much of my life runs on UTC (nee GMT), I just tend to celedrate at 00:00:00 UTC and be done with. It also puts me in bed at a decent hour.

By the by, the turn of the New Year is being delayed by one second this time 'round. The IERS (International Earth Rotation Service) decided to insert a leap second to bring astronomical and atomic time back into loose step with one another.

[Uncle Al]

Since so much of my life runs on UTC (nee GMT),....snip....

Carl,

I know that GMT is Greenich(sp) Mean Time and not Giant
Monstrous Time.
Please explain the UTC verses GMT, also what UTC translates to.

Thanks!

Uncle Al
Duncanville, TX

[cessna152towser]

Happy New Year to all at SkirtCafe.
Here's hoping and praying for a better 2009.

[cessna152towser]

Happy New Year to all at SkirtCafe.
Here's hoping and praying for a better 2009.

[crfriend]

Please explain the UTC verses GMT, also what UTC translates to.

At the risk of going off wildly into the weeds, "UTC" translates into "Coordinated Universal Time" which forms the basis of civil time pretty much worldwide. It is closely related to the old "Greenwich Mean Time" (GMT) that had been in use for centuries. UTC, however, is subtly different from GMT in that it's derived from TAI (International Atomic Time -- from the French translation) which uses oscillations of Cesium atoms to define a "second" (some 9 billion per). GMT was based on direct astronomical observations of the Earth's rotation.

Now the problem arrives: the Earth is a rotten timekeeper -- it wobbles -- and the length of a day (86,400 seconds/24 hours) isn't always the same, and here's where another time standard, "UT1" (Universal Time 1) comes in, and that's one that astronomers use. UT1 and UTC tend to diverge slowly due to the general slowing of the Earth's rotational rate, and at certain times it becomes necessary to insert an extra second (or subtract one if the Earth is "speeding up") to keep the two systems within a second of one another. Today, 2008-12-31, therefore will have 86,401 seconds in it to step UTC back into line with UT1.

In normal years, the clocks will go (in 24-hour time) 23:59:58 ... 23:59:59 ... 00:00:00; today, however, the clocks will go 23:59:58 .. 23:59:59 ... 23:59:60 .. 00:00:00. I am not amused. 2008 was a rotten year all the way 'round. This just adds insult to injury.

[SkirtDude]

Deleted

[Sarongman]

All these time zones are going to be b*****ed up big time when the magnetic poles switch which, accorging to the pundits, is imminent. After a wobble (hopefully a tiny one) the planet could straighten and speed up! Anything more catastrophic----well we all hope for the best but, I wouldn't be holidaying in the vicinity of Yellowstone.

[Jack Williams]

Wow! That was very interesting. Actually we are on daylight saving(!) time here so add an hour to all that. Which means we should have been punctuating the air at one o'clock as it was only UTC+11hours our ''real'' time at midnight here.I was still up actually at 1am tho i think. Jack.

[AMM]

Also, if you set your computer to "GMT" (at least on a Linux computer) you get British civil time with daylight savings time changes. Sudden jumps in time bother some of our software so we keep all the production machines at work on UTC.

I suppose it depends on the computer.

In my work, we deal with timezones -- and people's conception of them -- all over the world on a daily basis. In my experience, for most of the world, "GMT" is basically another name for UTC. In the UK, though, when people say "GMT," they usually mean UK time, and they're a bit hazy about the term UTC. (But then, for the folks we deal with there, London is the centre of the world and British ways of doing things are the baseline from which everyone else's ways of doing things are but deviances.)

Most of our systems run Solaris (Sun Unix), and on them, "TZ=GMT" means UTC -- it's the default time zone on most of our systems, so we would notice real fast if it weren't. As far as I know, most Linux distributions use the same set of timezone files as Sun does. It's possible that distributions developed in the UK are different.

[AMM]

Och aye! Happy Hogmanay to ye all ...

Speaking of Hogmanay, to be a bit more on-topic, I rang this year in a bit differently from usual.

Usually, I do it in a kilt, at an almost-all-night (21:00 until somewhere around 4:30) Scottish dance ball in Philadelphia.

This year, I went to a contra dance that went until 1:00, and wore my new red satin skirt with a green shirt and socks (holiday colors, as someone at an earlier dance had recommended.) The contra dancers did not have the Scottish dancers' staying power, though -- about 2/3 of the people left right after midnight, and the remaining dancers were more willing than able to dance through to the end. (We also had a fair number of beginners, and even some of our regulars acted like beginners -- to see how they did Chorus Jig, you'd think they'd never seen Contra Corners! But that's a subject for a different forum....)

[SkirtDude]

Deleted.

[Jack Williams]

Nothing like stretching a few minds. Jack.

[crfriend]

Nothing like stretching a few minds.

Intelligent and inquisitive minds rarely mind being stretched a bit. It's the narrow, self-centered, and intolerant ones that get bent out of shape when faced with new and possibly novel concepts.

Fortunately, it looks like there's a place for "those people" now.