FoxClocks. Timely News.

At 7:00am GMT on December 9th 2007, Venezuelans set their clocks half an hour back as the country changed its time zone from GMT-4:00 to GMT-4:30. Venezuela thus joins Newfoundland and a wafer-thin slice of Labrador, Canada as the the only regions in the Americas to be ‘on the half-hour’. The change is certainly in line with Venezuela’s alternative stance on a number of political issues, and an indignant BBC report - ‘Venezuela creates own time zone’ - seems sceptical that the move is anything but showmanship; it cites anonymous critics who suggest that President Hugo Chavez ’simply wants to be in a different time zone from his arch-rival, the United States.’ (These critics are apparently under the impression that the US has a single time zone.) Of course, Venezuela has always had its own time zone, in that the rules governing local time are under Venezuelan jurisdiction. Whether the current rule changes make any sense is another matter.

Unusual Time Zones
The BBC report also takes a brief look at some of the world’s other ‘unusual’ time zones. Just how many of these half-hour time zones are there? It turns out that - with the above exceptions - there are none in the Americas, Africa, Europe or indeed the Antarctic. Asia, though, has six: Iran (GMT+3½), Afghanistan (GMT+4½), India and Sri Lanka (GMT+5½), Nepal (GMT+5¾) and Myanmar (GMT+6½). In fact if one were to accept Indian claims on Pakistani Kashmir, it would be possible to travel overland from the Turkish to the Thai border entirely on the half-hour.

In the Pacific, the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia are at GMT-9½ and New Zealand’s Chatham Islands are perpetually forty-five minutes ahead of New Zealand herself (GMT+12/13).

However, the remainder of the world’s eccentric time zones are Australian: South Australia (GMT+9½/10½), the Northern Territory (GMT+9½), the area around Broken Hill, NSW (as per S. Australia), and the W. Australian town of Eucla (pop. 50, GMT+8¾/9¾). Additionally, the Cocos Islands (GMT+6½) of the Indian Ocean and Norfolk Island (GMT+11½) in the Pacific fall under Australian jurisdiction.

And so the answer would seem to be that, as of this morning, there are sixteen such time zones in the world, if we include the outlandish offsets of Nepal, the Chatham Islands and Eucla, W. Australia (pop. 50).

—
Aside: whenever I read or use the term ‘it turns out’, I’m reminded of Douglas Adams, who had this to say of it:

“Incidentally, am I alone in finding the expression ‘it turns out’ to be incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the trouble of explaining what your source or authority actually is. It’s great. It’s hugely better than its predecessors ‘I read somewhere that…’ or the craven ‘they say that…’ because it suggests not only that whatever flimsy bit of urban mythology you are passing on is actually based on brand new, ground breaking research, but that it’s research in which you yourself were intimately involved. But again, with no actual authority anywhere in sight.”

On March 11^th much of the United States and Canada sprang forward into Daylight Saving Time (DST) three weeks earlier than usual. Because of this, as I write, DST is in force in both North America and Australia/New Zealand, while ’summer-time’ doesn’t start in Europe for another two weeks.

The US changes are a result of the US Energy Policy Act of 2005, while Canada as well as Bermuda, the Bahamas, the Qaanaaq (Thule) area of Greenland and the French collectivity of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon (the last remnant of New France) pragmatically followed suit. There is much speculation as to the havoc this change will wreak and the rewards we will reap with this first major change to North American DST rules since the advent of the personal computer. Worst-case scenarios draw parallels to Y2K, and it does seem fairly likely that, given the lack of lead time, some systems somewhere will fail. Calendaring applications seem particularly vulnerable, as do devices such as routers. According to a straw-poll at Computerworld’s Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference conducted on March 5^th, only about half of attendees had finalized system changes. Microsoft, apparently, was still issuing patches.

It seems remarkable that software should be so difficult to update: Sun’s Java has hard-wired DST rules, for example, as do earlier versions of Red Hat Linux, which require an update to a core system component (glibc). At best, the 2007 changes could be a wake-up call for software developers: DST rules change all the time. The US, for example, has made sweeping changes to its rules roughly once a decade until recent times, and state-wide (and even municipal-level) changes occur relatively frequently even now. On a global level, hardly a month goes by without a country-level change to DST legislation; some countries, such as Brazil, announce the start date of DST annually.

The benefits of an extra hour of daylight in the evening - and one less in the morning - may or may not include reductions in energy consumption, traffic accidents and crime rates (the explicit goal of the US legislation is to reduce energy consumption by 1%). David Prerau, writing in the New York Times, seems confident that the changes will provide these benefits. Others are not so confident. The California Energy Commission’s Demand Analysis Office’s paper Electricity Savings From Early Daylight Saving Time (pdf) concludes that “There is no clear evidence that electricity will be saved from the earlier start to daylight saving time on March 11, 2007…”. The University of California Energy Institute’s paper Does extending daylight saving time save energy? Evidence from an Australian experiment (pdf), which parallels an experiment in early DST in Australia in 2000 with the 2007 North American changes, is less optimistic still: “… while extending DST does reduce electricity consumption in the evening, the increased demand in the morning cancels this benefit out. We statistically reject electricity savings of 1% or greater at a 1% significance level.”

Cynics suggest that the DST changes are a poor substitute for a real energy conservation policy, and point out that more daylight in the evening means more shoppers venturing out to the mall in their SUVs.

St John’s, Newfoundland was hit by a major winter storm a couple of days ago (Feb. 19th-20th), and I had the privilege to arrive in its immediate aftermath. Here are a few images from St. John’s today, Wednesday the 21st.

40cm of fresh snow in the streets of St. John’s

Ploughed in

Virgin stairs

Wind-blown icicles

Snow-blown ads in a window

One of St. John’s many alleys

White, green and yellow

Signal Hill, closer to London than Vancouver

Another street-scene

FoxClocks should now work with Thunderbird 2.0 Beta 2, which was released on January 23rd.

If you upgraded to Thunderbird 2 Beta 2 in the last couple of days (January 23rd to 26th), FoxClocks was probably disabled. To re-enable FoxClocks in this case, go to Tools->Add-ons, right-click on the ‘FoxClocks’ entry and choose ‘Find update’.

Some Trivia
Afghanistan is 4½ hours ahead of Greenwich. Should you leave Afghanistan at its remote north-eastern border with China, though, don’t forget to set your watch 3½ hours forward to Chinese Standard Time (GMT+8). This is the greatest time change on the planet; jet-lag by foot, it seems, is possible.

Such a dramatic change is primarily due to the fact that China - uniquely for a country of its size - has a single time zone, convenient only for Beijing and Eastern China. Presumably this is something of a political statement by the Chinese Government. The time changes at China’s border crossings with Tajikistan and Pakistan - both GMT+5 - are almost as precipitous.

More fundamentally, it is remarkable that Afghanistan and China share a border at all. The narrow finger of Afghanistan reaching out north-east to touch China is known as the Wakhan Corridor (Google Maps, Google Earth). Its borders were established by a number of boundary agreements between the Russian and British Empires in the late Nineteeth Century to act as a buffer zone between British India and Russian Central Asia^[1]. These agreements ceded to Aghanistan territory between the Amu Darya to the north (the River Oxus of Antiquity) and the Hindu Kush to the south. East of Lake Sarikol, the supposed source of the Amu Darya, the northen edge of the Wakhan corridor was sufficiently remote that it was not demarcated until 1895. Afghanistan and China demarcated their border only in 1963^[2], although this must have been something of a formality, given the region’s major watersheds.

And so today, at the far eastern end of the Wakhan Corridor, on top of the Wakhjir Pass almost five kilometres above sea level, you can look east 210 minutes into the future.

A little more about the Wakhjir Pass
The Wakhan Corridor and the Wakhjir Pass in particular are remarkable for more than temporal peculiarities. The Wakhjir Pass is at the confluence of three of the world’s great mountain ranges: the Karakoram to the south-east, the Hindu Kush to the south and the Pamir to the north. It lays on what was once the main route between Yarkand and Kabul, one of the many Silk Roads; Marco Polo may or may not have crossed, but his namesake sheep still frequent the area. During the Great Game, Lord Curzon and Sir Francis Younghusband passed this way. Other visitors include HW Tilman, Sir Aurel Stein and perhaps the 7th Century Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang.

The pass may also be very close to the true source of the Oxus. Curzon and Tilman and were both of the opinion that the Oxus rises not in Lake Sarikol, but from a small ice-cave about ten kilometres south of the Wakhjir. It seems that the ice-cave still exists. Interestingly, Tilman writes:

“Wood’s great journey of 1838 and his discovery of the lake [Sarikol] to which he gave the name Victoria was thought to have settled the matter, and the Pamir river issuing from that lake was held to be the true parent stream. It was upon this geographical basis that the Boundary Agreement of 1872 with Russia was made.”

If this is the case, and the true source of the Oxus lies south of the Wakhjir Pass, huge tracts of the Wakhan Corridor should have fallen to the Russians, and Afghanistan and China would not share a border at all.

The Wakhan Corridor has seen few outsiders since the decline of the Silk Roads six hundred years ago and the Wakhjir Pass has been effectively closed since Mao’s Communists took power in 1949. Recent visitors to the region include the biologist and conservationist George Schaller^[3] (2004), John Mock and Kimberley O’Neil^[4] (also 2004) and Mark Jenkins, Doug Chabot and Greg Mortenson^[5] (2005). The accounts of their journeys are fascinating.

But it seems that no outsider has crossed the Wakhjir Pass for decades, perhaps since Tilman in 1947.

References and further reading
US Department of State. International Boundary Study: Afghanistan - USSR (1983, pdf)
US Department of State. International Boundary Study: Afghanistan - China (1969, pdf)
M Aurel Stein. Description of the route over the Wakhjir Pass in Ancient Khotan (1907)
National Geographic. Lifetime Achievement: Biologist George Schaller
John Mock & Kimberley O’Neil. The Source of the Oxus River: A Journey to the Wakhan Pamir & Across the Dilisang Pass to Misgar (2004)
Mark Jenkins. Afghanistan: A Short Walk in the Wakhan Corridor (Outside Magazine, Nov. 2005)

Addendum
Go Hirai of the Japanese Alpine Club reached the top of the Wakhjir Pass in 2001, but did not cross into China. You can read his account here (pdf), although the English is a little awkward in places; the description of the crest of the pass is tantalisingly vague.

As unlikely as it sounds, Mock and O’Neil have developed a tourism brochure for the Aga Khan Foundation-Afghanistan, called Wakhan & the Afghan Pamir, published in 2006. You can see a preview - and some fabulous images - at the photographer Matthieu Paley’s site http://www.paleyphoto.com. It’s not possible to link directly to the brochure - look under the ‘Books’ menu.

The Inquirer reports that Western Australia is introducing Daylight Saving Time for a trial period of three years on December 3rd. System administrators and farmers - among others, presumably - are not happy.

For gory details have a look at the Government of Western Australia’s Daylight Saving Bill (No.2) 2006 itself.

It’s unusual for a developed country to announce changes to time zone legislation with such little lead time; sysadmins really will be scrambling.

FoxClocks users needn’t fret, however. If you’ve enabled automatic updates in FoxClocks 2.0, you’ll pick up the Western Australian change before it goes into effect.

The Namibian night is full of stars. They take the edge off the darkness. But still, it’s very very dark, and cold too, at least in winter just before dawn.

Namibia is Southern Africa’s odd man out: Botswana, South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique are all two hours ahead of Greenwich, and Namibia is too, except in winter, when the country falls an hour behind. Drive into Namibia in winter, and you gain an hour.

A few winters ago we drove into Namibia from South Africa. No-one at the border mentioned that we might want to change our clocks, so during the next few days we were unaware that we were waking, driving, eating and sleeping an hour before everybody else. It didn’t really matter; Namibia has a lot of space and not many people; we felt on occasion that we were the only people on Earth.

We finally gained that hour one morning around 4am - though our watches said five - at the gates of Sossusvlei in the Namib-Naukluft National Park. We spent that hour, huddled in our Land Cruiser, like this: we sat patiently; looked a bit puzzled; became slightly frustrated; became irate; tried to wake up anyone in the gatehouse; developed hunger pangs; developed a sense of unease that ours was the only vehicle at the gates; pored through the guidebook; swore.

The up-side, of course, was that we were the first people through the gates and into the dunes that morning. Namibia is beautiful even in the darkness.

Now when I see GMT+1:00 I think of Namibia.

FoxClocks 2 is now available for download at addons.mozilla.org. Feature requests, bug reports and general gossip are very welcome in the comments, but if you’re having a problem, please check the FoxClocks FAQ and search the comments below for a solution before posting. Thanks!

Here’s what’s new in FoxClocks 2:

• Keep up-to-date: automatic time zone database updates
• Behind a firewall? update automatically from your LAN
• Choose the right time zone more easily: new Zone Picker
• Show your clocks in the statusbar/toolbar, just in a tooltip (mouseover), or both
• Style your clocks: bold, italic, etc
• Set your clocks to change colour: e.g. make your clocks green from 9 to 5 local time
• Sort your clocks by name or local time
• Move your FoxClocks settings between computers

Let us know what you think.