pytz has so many timezones!

[Diez B. Roggisch]

>> who says that timezones have to be separated by one hour each?
> 
> The Earth says. It takes 24 hours to revolve.

Your kidding me, aren't you? Beside the fact that the earth does not 
revolve in 24h (leap seconds, if you like to google), even the 24 hours 
of a day are as arbitrary as you prefer. I'm writing this at 23:26, but 
I bet quite a few people call that 11:26PM. So - who's right?


>> Why aren't they separated by 30minutes, or 20, or 10? Or 2 hours?
> 
> Why isn't an hour defined to be 30 minutes?
> 
>> Or why don't we have a global time?
> 
> Like UTC?

Which I'm sure is the time you have on your wristwatch?


> Not the same way at all. The 25 timezones I speak of are
> not merely an abstraction, but related to longitude.

Again: BS. Deciding that the the actual noon (the time the sun is at 
it's highest point) is the 12:00 on my clock was defined by someone. 
It's sensible, but arbitrary. As is the decision about the width of such 
a timezone.

>> as are the 400 apparently in use by people all over the world
> 
> Where the correlation to longitude is much looser.
> Granted, it doesn't need to be for non-navigational
> purposes. And although governments can legislate things
> like DST, they can't legislate longitude.

They can. The greniwch meridian is nothing but a convention.


>> - and last time I checked, there was no
>> fundamental law in physics or such that limited the allowed or sensible
>> number of timezones...
> 
> Isn't there some law somewhere that says the circumference
> of a sphere is 360deg? Doesn't that same law mean that no two
> points on a sphere can be seperated by more than 180deg
> longitude? Doesn't that make GMT+13 non-sensible?


Others have given you reasons why it _is_ sensible to have GMT+13.

Diez