[ale] erasing a hard drive

[Pete Hardie]

Not to mention the astronomical day, which begins at noon, so that you
do not get date changes during nighttime observations


On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 16:55, The Don Lachlan
<ale-at-ale.org at unpopularminds.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 10:35:51AM -0400, Jim Kinney wrote:
>> In Ethiopia the day begins at dawn which of course varies slightly
>> throughout the year.
>> Yeah. Policy made by non-scientists that pertain to science.
>> On Aug 27, 2011 10:27 AM, "Mike Harrison" <cluon at geeklabs.com> wrote:
>> > I'm currently dealing with a (foreign) legal system that is defining:
>> > The last day of the month at exactly midnight, as the last timestamp of
>> > the day, and they want data readings timestamped '2011-09-01 00:00:00' to
>> > be what they think of as '2011-08-31 00:00:00' not groking that is the
>> > begining of that day, not the end of it.. at least as far as the OS
>> > (Linux of course) and MySQL are concerned.
>
> That the "day" begins 12:00P and ends 11:59P is just a convention. There's
> no natural law involved. As long as the "day" is approximately 24 hours,
> it's scientifically correct. This doesn't mean GNU/Linux will support their
> uncommon but scientifically correct calendar...
>
> And the US has plenty of unscientific conventions: Time zones are loosely
> based upon when the sun rises for that area and daylight savings is even
> worse, making one day as short as 23 hours and one day as long as 25 hours,
> accomodating the dramatic shift in sunrise.
>
> And as someone who had to patch systems for the modified Daylight Savings
> Time in 2007, I won't critique Ethopia's convention.
>
> -L
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-- 
Pete Hardie
--------
Better Living Through Bitmaps