Why UTC is used as the acronym for Coordinated Universal Time
nist.gov
nist.gov
France wanted it to go through the Bering Strait or the Azores, and made the argument that the SI meter (introduced nearly 100 years before) was a truly neutral measure, being based on one ten millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole. Other delegates answered that its is still a French system, because it was France that took the measurement and introduced French error into it.
Ultimately practical concerns won out, as 70% of the world's shipping and charts were already using Greenwich as the meridian, and for any other place to truly be a meridian there would need to be an observatory there with telegraph links to the rest of the world.
Another gem is the part where the Spanish delegate expressed that he had been authorized to vote for Greenwich as the meridian, but was doing so in the hope that England and the United States will accept the metric system. The president replies that this is outside the scope of the conference, to which the Spanish delegate replies that they know this, and anyway protocol doesn't allow them to vote on "hopes" anyway, but he just needed to say it.
Although Greenwich was chosen, France was a holdout and didn't adopt it until 1911, and even then did not call it "Greenwich Time", but rather "Paris Mean Time retarded by nine minutes and 21 seconds." This was their official designation until they adopted UTC. The UK on the other hand still calls their time GMT legally, even though they are actually using UTC now, which is not precisely the same as GMT!
The proceedings make for some entertaining and enlightening reading: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17759/17759-h/17759-h.htm
Like time, mapping ends up being relative in the end.
As we reach out into the stars, we're going to need a better system for mapping than the one we have now. Should be interesting.
The difference (such as it is) is that GMT is a time zone and UTC is technically not: it is a time standard.
And I don't know the name of British DST (I used the american name), so yeah, bad wording but this was essentially what I was trying to communicate.
> The term GMT is now more commonly used to refer to the time zone at the prime meridian (0° longitude), in which case it is being used as a local representation of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and not UT1. However, UTC is adjusted with leap seconds to always be within less than one second of UT1, so either use of GMT can be considered equivalent to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) when fractions of a second are not important.
Use software which is driven by cities and uses the Olson database, Europe/London, Europe/Dublin and so on. This is unambiguous which means things will go wrong a lot less often.
You probably live in a city, and if you don't live in a city you there's a big one near you. You know what time it is there. Everybody knows what time it is there. If you're participating in an event where some people are far away they can do any number of things to find out when "14:00 Dublin time" is exactly and get it correct. They can even just call somebody in Dublin and ask. No confusion about "Um, GMT. I think? Is the timezone GMT? Or UTC? Or does it change?"
If you mean "use software" then this seems a little extreme.
Latin was never a part of the standard primary school curriculum.
"Puella in silva est" - "the girl is in the forest" was one of the first exercises that I remember to this day ;-p
Eddie Izzard, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1sQkEfAdfY&gl=GB
I took latin too, for seven years. I finally passed with a 7 - one better than an "F" (for "fail").
There was a certain ammount of "looking back to the peaks and we are but a shadow of the greats" meme well beyond they realized they surpassdd the Roman Empire with the use of the fallen in the west Roman empire and the use of Latin (amusingly paying no regards to the Eastern Roman empire aka Byzantium).
Now it is used for taxonomies still but the real reason for that is "Do you want to rename every system of classification and have to deal with two systems and names for thousands instead and avoid confusion in a vast body of work?". A resounding no and shudder would be the answer even if we had an undeniably "better" universal language for the purpose that didn't have any "politics" to it.
So not JavaScript?
It’s a good compromise and a compromise good.
Examples:
"Un homme grand" means 'a tall man', but "un grand homme" is more commonly 'a great man' (although it could also mean tall, depending on context or sophistication).
"Une voiture bleue" is the only correct way to say 'a blue car' ("une bleue voiture" would be grammatically wrong).
"Un petit homme noir" ('a short black man') is also correct, but "un noir homme petit" is absolutely wrong, as any other variation...
Generally, when both orders are allowed, emphasis is put on whichever comes first —the noun or its adjectives. Unless the sentence ends there, in which case the last word obviously resonates more.
Don't ask me why... It's logically as weird to me as it may seem to you. I only know from practice (like most French people I suspect) and I'm generally bad at explaining grammar (again like most, for it's really complicated). There's probably some rule somewhere about that, with three dozen exceptions, as usual in French.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They know everything. Just ask them.
Btw more than "knowing", it's the official institution that officially decides on linguistic rules and their evolution, for the French language in France. It's called "prescriptivism" (higher authority decides what's right and what's not, period) as opposed to "descriptivism" (such as the American English language, for which nobody gets to make these calls, and dictionaries merely follow usages by people).
Most adjectives dealing with the following will precede the noun: - Beauty - Age - Goodness - Size
It's not always correct but it's a good start...
”Latin word order is relatively free. Subject, Object, and Verb can come in any order; adjectives can go before or after their noun; a genitive such as hostium "of the enemy" can also be placed before or after its noun. A common feature of Latin is hyperbaton, in which a phrase is split up by other words, e.g. Sextus est Tarquinius "it is Sextus Tarquinius"”
Examples of adjective-noun order at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_word_order#Adjective_pos...
This was to avoid giving the appearance of favoring any of its four official languages (It would otherwise be "SE" in German, "CS" in French/Italian/Romanish).
The country was last invaded in the napoleonic wars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_mercenaries
Except the pope, being the pope got to keep his.
But it's true that English usage alongside Hindi as co-official has been extended indefinitely due to non-Hindi-speaking regions preferring to use English over Hindi when dealing with the central government. The Constitution was amended in 1967 to remove the phase-out period, partly in response to some riots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Hindi_agitations_of_Tamil...
* UT1 is really not a time, but an angular measurement - it measures the rotation of the earth. In UT1, a day (= 1 rotation) has 86400 seconds (= 1 rotation), but those seconds are not SI seconds.
* TAI is time since some fixed epoch, in SI seconds. In TAI, a day doesn't really exist as a primitive concept, but a day (=1 rotation) has a variable number of seconds, and those seconds are SI seconds. TAI and UT1 diverge over time, continuously (due to earth's rotational speed variations).
* UTC is sort of an amalgamation of them: it uses SI seconds (like TAI), but occasionally jumps a second to keep close to UT1. In UTC, a day has 86400 seconds, or 86399 or 86401, and those seconds are SI seconds. UTC and TAI diverge, and their difference is piecewise constant with occasional jumps. UTC and UT1 diverge, but at most a second continuously, and then with occasional jumps come together again.
Minutes (as can be see from their clearly Latin name, "tiny") and the second division of them (seconds) are brand new and AFAIK have always been of fixed length, a consequence of mechanical timekeeping.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Organization_for...
In official government speech words don't tend to get that long, instead they get split into multiple ("Bundesministerium der Finanzen" instead of "Bundesfinanzministerium").
Don't know why it's such a big deal to favour one language for an abbreviation and let others just deal with it. We dirty foreigners also have FM radios, hailing from the country of US(A) in the year 2019 AD (the era that follows BC).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.gov#International_equivalents
>France speaks French and the visitors to these sites speak French as well, why not use French names?
.gov is no less of a "French name" than .gouv. They're both (natural) abbreviations of "government" and "gouvernement", as they keep the same letters in the same order and form a sound that would naturally be recognizable as a contraction of "government/gouvernement".
It would be like if the US were the only English-speaking country to use .orgz instead of .org on the basis that "Hey, we have to use the z in the abbreviation to show that we're not contracting it from 'organisation' like those Brits." It's a remarkably petty way to distinguish the abbreviation your country is using.
no, Spanish speaking countries use "gob"
Also, what the other countries do doesn't matter much, because.gouv.fr is for websites for French citizens, not Irish or Australian citizens.
The thing is, you put yourself from an English speaking perspective, but France doesn't. English isn't a reference from the point of view of France, so there is no reason not to use French terms.
France also uses .asso.fr instead of .org, for example.
There’s no general rule that an abbreviation has to keep all letters; that’s what makes it an abbreviation. Nor do such contractions need to keep the same pronunciation as the corresponding parts: even the .com TLD is pronounced differently from the (unstressed) first syllable of “commercial” which it is a contraction of, “even though” it would sound weird to pronounce it like that syllable (as “come”).
French isn’t any different about allowing abbreviations to change the pronunciation: the “el” in courriel is pronounced differently from the él in courrier électronique that it corresponds to. And the French language authority endorsed that.
Where are you getting this rule that implies gouvernement can’t contract to gov, merely because it would look like it should sound different? It seems like that constraint is entirely made up, and not even adhered to in French, so I don’t see how it’s somehow confusing from a French perspective.
The only explanation is that it’s deliberately trying to be different.
>France also uses .asso.fr instead of .org, for example.
Which is also despite French having the word organisation already.
No, you can't abbreviate "ou" with "o", it's a different sound. Similarly in English, you don't use "t" for "th" in abbreviation (maths vs mats).
Time isn't really universal by its nature, but at human scale and in a relatively small place like Earth you can mostly pretend it doesn't matter, and UTC helps do that.
> Abbreviated NGC in Japan and GCN in Europe and North America.
So it was “GCN” for Europe as well. It could be somethings like “GameCube de Nintendo” in French and Spanish, “GameCube da Nintendo” in Portuguese, “GameCube di Nintendo” in Italian. Maybe they've decided that the European and Romance-langauge markets were more important for some reason?
Either that, or some entity has copyrighted “NGC” in the US or Europe.
Both are unofficial backronyms now: International Standards Organization, Universal Time Coordinates.
So we get an acronym that doesn't stand for anything.
It's OK with me... but I could do without the ITU existing at all. They cause nothing but trouble. Dammit, they should stop meddling with the definition of UTC.
With this the type (?) (universal) comes before the the purpose (co-ordination)
Despite the URL I don't believe this adjective order rule is limited to British English.
Replace "Fahrenheit" and "Celsius" with "English" and "French" and that's basically what we have here. We took the average of the two (CUT vs TUC).
Let's use an example
07:00:00+01:00 is equal with 08:00:00+02:00.
How could 7+1=8+2?
English 379.0 million native speakers, 1.132 billion total
French 76.8 million native speakers, 279.8 million total
It seems you might have mixed the French native speakers with a (high estimate of) the English total speakers.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...
And I'm steadfastly among the ranks of grumpy old farts who still use AD and BC.
It’s UT1 and UTC that differ by up to 0.9 seconds. GMT and UTC are equal unless you’re in a specialized field (navigation) where it is considered to be UT1. Otherwise, GMT is just the name of a time zone UTC+0000.
TAI measures seconds. UT1 measures the earth’s rotation. UTC combines these by using TAI plus a changing offset to keep within 0.9s of UT1.
I think that the bigger difference is that GMT is a time zone used in countries that observe daylight savings time. UTC applies universally, everywhere and always, but it's a little bit nonsensical to use GMT to describe events that happen during summer in the UK.
There's also a not-insignificant risk that the UK moves timezone at some point; if it stays in Europe it will likely be required to drop DST, and may end up on UTC+1. This would make GMT even more confusion-prone.