Damn, Spain and Morocco being UTC+1 is nuts. Even France and Algeria are stretching it a bit far for my liking. And it gets even more crazy for the European countries for over half the year when they play pretendy-magic-time and go to UTC+2.
France amd Spain being +1 is apparently a relic from the 40s when Germany occupied France and the Spanish government felt they needed to switch to appease Germany. It is kinda funny neither switched back.
Similarly, this holds for the BeNeLux countries. NED: GMT +0:19:32 / +0:20 since 1937, BEL and LUX used GMT since 1918
Germany changed it in occupied territories to simplify administration.
For some reason it never changed back despite being out of natural sync.
Portugal was understandably like "nah fuck you guys". Still like a bit lonely on a map though.
Different time zones are said to make business more complicated. I think that's why the CET/CEST time zone is stretched out that much.
The issue with the current time zones in Europe is that they are far from being natural... The more you go to the west the later the sun is raising and setting, the more you go to the east, the opposite. Current western European time zone is too large... There are initiatives to improve that but will it be done ?
For example: https://timeuse.barcelona/what-we-do/permanent-time-zones-eu/
That's ok, Spaniards are always late anyways
Look at culture map book/concept for the cultures different ways of handling personal time
Ukraine existed, but was part of USSR. Strangely enough that there were no official time zones for all parts of the USSR.
Exactly, UTC+0020!
While every surrounding country did use offsets in full hours, mind you!
Fun fact: The stereotype that Spanish people eat much later and stay up much later than most other Europeans comes from their time zone being synced to the EU, not to the sun.
Midday is around 1:30-2pm there.
If they had the "fitting" time zone for their geographical longitude, they'd eat and sleep at the same time as everyone else.
Actually every 463 meters.
40 075km is circumference of Earth. There are 24x60x60 seconds in a day.
40 075×1 000÷(24×60 ×60) =~ 463.8
Wouldn't it depend on latitude? It would be much less than 463 metres at the latitudes of Europe
Yes, distance of 1" on equator (463.8 m) × cosine of latitude longitude. This means approximately 350 m in Rome, 285,6 m in Berlin and 232 m in Helsinki. In reality a bit less, as I didn't take the ellipsoid shape of the globe into account.
"Time is an illusion anyway, who cares if noon isn't at 12?"
Looks at China: 1 time zone
"Maybe we oughta get our shit together just in case"
interesting, so if China did have time zones it would look like this
But since they are all in the green +8 time zone, that means the people on the far west side of China have to function at 5am the same way people are expected to function at 8am.
And when everybody's going to bed around 10pm, the far west of China has to go to bed at what is actually 7pm according to the sun.
Rightfully so. Always DST makes the countries that are already off their natural time even more off.