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Subject: [worldcruising] Re: Does anybody really know what time it is?
From: captmhunt (captmhunt@XXX.XXX)
Date: Sun Sep 01 2002 - 11:58:33 EDT
We can thank the French for the change of terms. I was still
delivering boats in the Med. when that came down and the story I seem
to remember running on Antenna 4 was that the French Scientific
community had come up with a way to co-ordinate all the different
atomic time standard clocks so they would all be telling the same,
corrected time and accurate to some rediculousn number of places
after the decimal point.
In their wisdom, the French decided to call THEIR system "Universal
Time Co-Ordinate" or UTC to distinguish it from the old but still
rediculously accurate Greenich Mean Time, or GMT or the more
military "Z" or Zulu time. I guess the Frogs just never could stand
the idea that it was the Brits who invented a standard world time and
used it for determining Longitude. It may have taken them 150 years
or so, but they eventually did get even. :-)
Reminds me of the old arguement about "Hertz" and "Cycles per Second"
captmhunt@XXX.XXX
--- In worldcruising@XXX.XXX wrote:
> FWIW, I just ran across this on a government wx page:
>
> <snip>
> "By international agreement, the term UTC is recommended for all
general
> timekeeping applications, and use of the term GMT, "Zulu," or "Z"
is
> discouraged."
> <snip>
>
> Good sailing,
>
> John
>
> "Keep yourself on the boat; keep the boat in the water; keep the
water out of
> the boat."
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