It’s about time

Tokyo is an hour behind Saipan. Manila, two. Hong Kong, two too. That’s easy, but as for anywhere in the U.S. mainland (quick, tell me what time it is in Phoenix), time zone conversions have been a constant rock in my shoe. It doesn’t help any that the U.S. Daylight Saving Time insanity makes the conversions slide back and forth over the course of the year…and even this isn’t constant, given that the state of Arizona does not observe DST (are you sure about that Phoenix time, Bubba? Better re-check that calculation).

What a mess. This problem has dogged anyone making telephone calls from Saipan to the states, or vice versa.

Fortunately…after all these years…these cruel, miserable years…I have stumbled across a workable solution. Sometimes, you’ve just got to throw money at a persistent problem. So I did. I dropped a couple of hundred bucks on a wristwatch that displays three time zones at a time, and allows me to easily (that’s the key word, “easily”) read any time zone in the world.

The item at issue is made by Citizen, and is a line of chronographs called the “Skyhawk” that is designed for pilots. You don’t have to be a pilot to wear one, of course; nobody audits the customer lists. The only reason these aren’t more popular with international travelers is that conventional business attire favors dainty little wristwatches. I guess for dainty little fellows, that makes sense. But we Alpha males need not concern ourselves with that.

And as for Alpha females, I must report that there is no women’s counterpart for the Skyhawk. But if you’re pretty, I’ll let you glance at mine.

You can get downright foolish with this watch, as I have, once you start messing with the circular slide rule that runs around the watch’s perimeter. Pilots use such things to calculate fuel consumption and en route times, but anyone can use the feature to do multiplication, division, and, if you’re really good, square roots. There are times in small financial transactions when I don’t have a calculator at hand, so it’s a good excuse for me to mess with my watch dials; if nothing else it befuddles onlookers, thus reinforcing my air of mystery and intrigue.

I’m not aware of a local source on Saipan for these watches. One good Internet source is www. MarvGolden.com. And if you want to set a watch or clock to the exact time, the U.S. government has a great site at http://nist.time.gov.

Meanwhile, here is a piece of time zone trivia that still amuses me: The entire, vast nation of China is, by decree, one time zone. That’s one that I still can’t figure out. In much of China, then, astronomical noon and statutory noon aren’t even close. On the other hand, China (like Japan) doesn’t embrace the utter foolishness of DST (called “Summer Time,” incidentally, in Europe). Most places in the tropics, by the way, don’t mess with DST or ST, since seasonal variations in daylight are not as dramatic as they are in non-tropical latitudes.

While you and I are just trying to figure out what time it is in some distant time zone so we can place a phone call, scientists are sweating the difference between earth-based time and atomic-based time. The rotation of the earth is the most basic unit of time (i.e. a day), and all other measurements are based on that benchmark. That’s fine and dandy, except that the earth’s rotation is not a perfectly constant rate. Enter the atomic clock, which is a far more precise measurement of the passage of time. Thus, earth time and atomic time eventually diverge, and they have to throw in a “leap second” every year or two (as I recall) to jibe atomic time back into agreement with earth time.

Yes, such are the profound scientific thoughts that dance through my head while I push my watch buttons and spin my slide rule dials. On the practical side of things, though, it is about time that I solved the Saipan vs. the Outside World time problems. It’s not a large victory, but I’ll take what I can get.

(Ed Stephens, Jr. is an economist and columnist for the Saipan Tribune. Ed4Saipan@yahoo.com)