On 08/04/2015 04:06, Whitfield Diffie wrote:
So you intended a model in which the date line is not opposite the prime meridian, but on some border between two of your 24 time-zones?
I don't think the date line is even straight.
It's very far from straight, but Dan's model with 24 time zones perfectly spaced at pi/12 intervals seems to demand a straight date line. He didn't say explicitly where to put it; having read Keith Lynch's comments I thought putting it down the middle of a time zone (which is kinda-sorta where the real one is on average) would be (1) close to maximally simple, (2) morally consistent with reality, and (3) a wrinkle to make the puzzle tricky :-). (*Before* reading Keith Lynch's comments I had simply not thought about the date line, and therefore thought the answer was 47 hours. Which of course was the answer Dan had in mind.) I can totally see Dan's point, though; a date line that doesn't run along the boundary between time zones can be thought of as turning one time zone into two, so arguably saying "exactly 24 time zones spaced at pi/12 intervals" implicitly says that the date line is on a time zone boundary. -- g