The great Polish Sea or We forgot Poland (2006) | Hacker News Reader

The great Polish Sea or We forgot Poland (2006)

devblogs.microsoft.com

132 pointsTomte31 comments

Not great, but nothing is worse than date calculations with the Swedish calendar between 1699 and 1753. They have a leap year with no Feb 29, a year with 30 days in February and 367 days in the year, 10 years where they used a globally unique calendar and a year where 1 March was the day after 17 February.

Quoting the entire thing:

> In November 1699, the Government of Sweden decided that, rather than adopt the Gregorian calendar outright, it would gradually approach it over a 40-year period. The plan was to skip all leap days in the period 1700 to 1740. Every fourth year, the gap between the Swedish calendar and the Gregorian would reduce by one day, until they finally lined up in 1740. In the meantime, this calendar would not be in line with either of the major alternative calendars and the differences would change every four years.

> In accordance with the plan, 29 February was omitted in 1700, but the Great Northern War stopped any further omissions from being made in the following years.

> In January 1711, King Charles XII declared that Sweden would abandon the calendar, which was not in use by any other nation, in favour of a return to the older Julian calendar. An extra day was added to February in the leap year of 1712, thus giving the month a unique 30-day (30 February) and the year a 367-day length.

> In 1753, one year later than England and its colonies, Sweden introduced the Gregorian calendar. The leap of 11 days was accomplished in one step, with 17 February being followed by 1 March

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_calendar#Solar_calenda...

Classic 'compromise worse than the alternatives' situation.

I assume the right way to deal with this is to have a name for each set of calander rules, and convert dates into and out of them.

Not labelling the calander your date is from is more understandable than timezones, even if most calanders have confusing names for months.

Thankfully, it's the month of 'Sol' in the IFC system right now, so no confusion. (Messidor in the French Republic calander)

A reference to G. W. Bush's remark to J. Kerry in a 2004 presidential debate:

"Well, actually, he forgot Poland."

https://debates.org/voter-education/debate-transcripts/septe...

It became a meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/you-forgot-poland

A former Foreign Minister of Poland (the equivalent of the Secretary of State) called it "slaving for the Americans".

It was all a part of a plan to ensure that Russia does not colonize the country again, together with things like the Giedroyc doctrine (Ukraine-Lithuania-Belarus doctrine, i.e. establishing strong, democratic buffer zones). Similar reasons caused another government of Poland to allow the CIA to torture people in black sites in north-eastern Poland.

All in all the strategy has worked pretty damn good so far.

Maybe not so well for the people tortured, or for the Iraqis, but yes, offering up someone else's pound of flesh does look like it's worked out well for Poland.

It also doesn't hurt if your foreign ministers wife becomes a prominent American pundit and everyone just acts like it's normal for a foreign politician to be published without a big disclaimer at the bottom of every column.

An 2006 article referencing 2004 memes, that would be missed by anyone born after the late 90s. Internet historians are going to have a hell of a time sorting out internet history.

I suggest you try walking around Hellenic or Roman sites with a historian of the appropriate specialization. At least if you want to experience utterly intimidating amounts of “ah that piece of stone is obviously from a temple to Athena because that indisinct lump on its side is clearly an owl’s eye” (and I’m picking a straightforward example because I couldn’t have remembered the genuinely impressive ones if I tried). If future historians find they have an interest in this particular detail, make no mistake, they are going to have a nice relaxing sip of coffee while they spend all of a half an hour to unravel it.

(If of course anything survives of it at all despite the usual MBA-hypercharged-link-rot reasons. insert grumbling Archive Team-inspired noises)

Side note: while watching that debate, I remember joking that "youforgotpoland.com" would be funny to buy as a gag domain. Maybe an hour later I looked it up and it had already been registered. That was definitely one of my early "whoa" moments in terms of how quickly these (obvious) memes would spread. And this was pre-widespread-social-media like the Twits and such.

For those wondering, the highlighting of time zones had to be removed because of geopolitics: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=42...

After the second stage of Russian aggression on Ukraine in 2022 the Yandex maps have removed country borders entirely. It is actually a very interesting map to look at:

https://yandex.com/maps

I believe it was in response to the annexation of territories/oblasts that Russia didn't even control (lol), when companies in Russia were forced to respect the new official borders of Russia.

I was never a fan of these maps for timezone selection anyway. MacOS clung onto it a bit longer, but they were too small - some areas are too dense with timezones and using the pointer to select an area on the map always seemed to get it wrong.

I think the reason this was never raised is because -- within a Polish sense of humor -- issues like this are hilarious rather than offensive.

Indeed, I'm a Pole and I found it hilarious.

Though given that my country actually did disappear from maps for over a century because of joint neighbor aggression, this is a bit of black humor...

I really hope that Microsoft saves Raymond Chens blog when he retire

They'll probably try. Either him or someone else migrates most of it every time that site changes, but it's already suffering from quite a bit of link rot.

Residents of Tasmania will have some sympathy for their fellow Polish submariners. They've been plunged to the depths of the Southern Ocean by amateur cartographers for years.

r/MapsWithoutTasmania

New Zealand has a similar problem

https://www.reddit.com/r/MapsWithoutNZ/

Poland seems to be generating these kinds of edge cases all the time.

For example, see also https://medium.engineering/the-curious-case-of-disappearing-...

I’m glad these blogs are still available but I wish they’d assign an intern to fix the internal links.

FWIW: "Highlighting on the time zone map had to be disabled"

Dead: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/08/22/54679.a...

Live: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=42...

Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20051218035638/http://blogs.msdn...

Toasting twenty years of Raymond Chen's blog. Cheers!

I believe that a reason why nobody reported it earlier back then, could be that most of computers had pirate version of Windows, and also, Internet was just starting to get wider adoption.

> I don’t know why all these changes were made, but I suspect political issues played a major role.

The specific change was in the moment of switching from daylight savings to standard time - previously it was in the last Sunday of September, since 1996 it's the last Sunday of October - this was done to align with the EU as part of the preparations to eventual accession.

I remember being confused as a child when daylight savings is observed because, well, it changed during my lifetime.

> Windows 95: (GMT+01:00) Lisbon, Warsaw

Is this a mistake or was Poland really in the same time zone as Portugal for a while?

Poland is not yet lost!

I think Poland is winning a lot of good will with Europeans due to their no bullshit stance on Russia's invasion if Ukraine.

While that may be true, it's hard to see how your point is relevant to the content in the article.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com