THE FOLD / CO-OP / THE BROADCAST / THE TIMEZONE DATABASE
THE TIMEZONE DATABASE
a fact about parliaments, not the Earth
1 WHAT IT IS · WHAT IT DOES · FACT OR FICTION
A time zone is not a fact about the Earth. It is a decision a parliament made, and can unmake, and the file recording those decisions ships with your operating system and goes out of date.
LIT verified live. the runtime knows 418 named zones. Asking each of them for its offset in January and again in July, they resolve to 37 distinct January offsets, and 128 of the 418 — 30.6% — change offset between the two, while 290 do not. A future appointment stored as a local time in one of those 128 is not yet a definite instant: it becomes one only when the rules for that date are fixed, and they are fixed by legislatures, not by arithmetic.
LIT verified live. the runtime knows 418 named zones. Asking each of them for its offset in January and again in July, they resolve to 37 distinct January offsets, and 128 of the 418 — 30.6% — change offset between the two, while 290 do not. A future appointment stored as a local time in one of those 128 is not yet a definite instant: it becomes one only when the rules for that date are fixed, and they are fixed by legislatures, not by arithmetic.
2 HOW IT WAS WEAVED · AI + HUMAN
The IANA time zone database is maintained from government announcements and updates several times a year; the 418 zones and their offsets here are read live from the runtime’s copy via
AVAN (AI) queried the runtime rather than embedding a table, so these numbers describe the machine the page is running on and will differ on a machine with an older database — which is the point rather than a caveat. The 290 zones with no seasonal change are the quieter half of the finding: most zones are stable, so a system tested against them will look correct right up until it meets one of the other 128.
Intl.AVAN (AI) queried the runtime rather than embedding a table, so these numbers describe the machine the page is running on and will differ on a machine with an older database — which is the point rather than a caveat. The 290 zones with no seasonal change are the quieter half of the finding: most zones are stable, so a system tested against them will look correct right up until it meets one of the other 128.
3 ONE DIMENSION
418 zones. 37 offsets. 128 that move.
4 TWO DIMENSIONS · INTERACTIVE
Walk the zones and see which ones change in July.
5 THREE DIMENSIONS + AVAN’S INVERSE
The green forward object.
AVAN’s addition (the inverse-companion): the forward reading is to store instants in UTC and convert for display. The inverse is that a future local time genuinely is not an instant yet, and converting it to UTC early does not preserve the appointment — it freezes a guess about a law that has not been written. Read backwards, the usual advice is right for the past and wrong for the future: what the user meant was ‘nine in the morning, wherever the rules land’, and only the zone name and the local time together can still say that.
LIT the runtime knows 418 named zones, and asking each for its offset in January and again in July they resolve to 37 distinct January offsets, with 128 of the 418 - 30.6% - changing offset between the two while 290 do not; a future appointment stored as a local time in one of those 128 is not yet a definite instant, and becomes one only when the rules for that date are fixed, which is done by legislatures rather than by arithmetic
FIG The IANA time zone database is maintained from government announcements and updates several times a year; the 418 zones and their offsets here are read live from the runtime's copy via Intl. AVAN queried the runtime rather than embedding a table, so these numbers describe the machine the page runs on and will differ on a machine with an older database - which is the point rather than a caveat. The 290 stable zones are the quieter half of the finding: a system tested against them looks correct until it meets one of the other 128.
FIG The IANA time zone database is maintained from government announcements and updates several times a year; the 418 zones and their offsets here are read live from the runtime's copy via Intl. AVAN queried the runtime rather than embedding a table, so these numbers describe the machine the page runs on and will differ on a machine with an older database - which is the point rather than a caveat. The 290 stable zones are the quieter half of the finding: a system tested against them looks correct until it meets one of the other 128.
◆ sealed .dlw.fold → folded to ROOT_0 · a sphere of THE BROADCAST · David Lee Wise (ROOT0), with AVAN