Although we\u2019re now in the thick of the month, I\u2019m going to look back at Nov. 2. That\u2019s the date that many clocks in the mainland had to be reset in order to fall from Daylight time back to Standard time. Europe, by the way, or at least some of Europe (I don\u2019t keep track of it) did the same thing in late October. Commonwealth clocks, as you know, aren\u2019t changed by this biannual boogie. <\/p>\n
If you\u2019ve ever been asked by someone in the mainland how to jibe their time with Saipan time, you might have needed a few aspirin afterwards. Well, I\u2019m going to dig into the matter today. I\u2019ll first offer some blah-blah-blah about the deal, then I\u2019ll conclude with my method of fielding this question in 10 seconds instead of in 30 minutes.<\/p>\n
The CNMI and Guam fall within Chamorro Standard Time. Yes, that\u2019s the designation of our time zone. All year around, Chamorro Standard Time is simply Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) plus 10 hours. <\/p>\n
Japan is GMT plus nine hours. Therefore, Saipan is always Japan time plus one hour.<\/p>\n
China is GMT plus eight hours. Therefore, Saipan is always China time plus two hours.<\/p>\n
Yes, it\u2019s that simple. And it stays simple because none of us are messing with Daylight time.<\/p>\n
But, of course, as I noted, other places, including most of the U.S. mainland, are moving targets for their GMT offsets, since they shift between Daylight time and Standard time over the course of the year. <\/p>\n
Anyway, shifting or not, the most sensible way to juggle time zones is to put everything in terms of one common baseline, and then move from there. By convention, GMT is the baseline. This is standard practice for pilots, mariners, and military members. It\u2019s not complicated, and it\u2019s probably worth knowing either for its practical aspects or even as a matter of general knowledge. So let\u2019s take a closer look.<\/p>\n
First of all, the \u201cG\u201d in \u201cGreenwich Mean Time\u201d refers to Greenwich, England. This is part of the London metropolitan area, and it\u2019s where the Royal Observatory is situated. <\/p>\n
This Royal Observatory is a quite the famous landmark. It\u2019s also where the Prime Meridian is, which is to say, the line of zero degrees longitude. Navigators all over the earth measure how far east they are, or how far west they are, by reference to this line. Saipan, for example, is about 146 degrees east of it.<\/p>\n
These two Greenwich realms, longitude and time, come together because of this fact: In the 18th century, when the British were a mighty sea power, they sought an accurate sea-going clock to facilitate calculating longitude. Solving the \u201clongitude problem\u201d was a big deal back then. The British succeeded, and their Royal Observatory became the time and longitudinal benchmark for the entire world. Hey, they had to put it somewhere, so why not keep it at home? <\/p>\n
You will be relieved to note that GMT does not bounce back and forth between Daylight and Standard times. Can you imagine the chaos such a situation would cause? But here\u2019s some wacky trivia: Since Greenwich itself observes Daylight time, there are spans of the year when clocks in Greenwich are not on GMT. <\/p>\n
Because of the way time zones were arranged, some old timers (including my pals and I) call GMT \u201cZulu\u201d time because Zulu is the phonetic alphabet designation for \u201cZ,\u201d which was the label for that particular time zone. <\/p>\n
Modern times have added another semantic twist, which is \u201cUTC\u201d for Coordinated Universal Time. This is based on atomic time, which might be a big deal for scientists, but for the rest of us, \u201cGMT,\u201d \u201cZulu,\u201d and \u201cUTC\u201d are essentially interchangeable.<\/p>\n
As for time zones, I don\u2019t know how the entire world looked at things, but as the U.S. railroads pushed westward, American travel was getting fast enough and going far enough to justify some attention. So in 1883 the U.S. divided itself into several formally-defined time zones.<\/p>\n
Since there are 360 degrees in a circle and 24 hours in a day, if you slice the world into 1-hour wide increments you wind up with slices that are 15 degrees wide. This would be the \u201cnatural\u201d width of a time zone, but, since time zones are statutory creatures specified by people, not by nature, various laws in various nations slice things up in various ways. <\/p>\n
Still, we can test fly the math, and, for us, it works tolerably well. You\u2019ll recall that Saipan is 146 degrees east of Greenwich. If we divide this by 15 degrees, we get about 10. Hey, 10 is the number of hours we\u2019re offset from GMT. Pretty slick, eh? So for a basic sanity check of the rough numbers, we\u2019re clean.<\/p>\n
Anyway, boiling things down to the most practical level, when I\u2019m asked how to reckon Saipan\u2019s time, I say that it\u2019s GMT plus 10 hours. If this doesn\u2019t do the trick, I\u2019ll helpfully offer that Saipan is also Tokyo time plus one hour. And if that doesn\u2019t do the trick, I have learned, from long and hard experience, that the situation will be hopeless, so I cut my losses and head out for a hamburger. After all, the most important time is lunch time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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