Muslims want to replace GMT with Mecca time
Thursday, April 24th, 2008You know why? ‘Cause Mecca is the “center of the Earth!” Yeah, even though it’s, in fact, no where near the actual center of the planet (that would be the molten core in the middle, guys).
BBC: Muslim call to adopt Mecca time
One geologist argued that unlike other longitudes, Mecca’s was in perfect alignment to magnetic north.
Magnetic north moves, geniuses. What are you going to do when magnetic north moves into “perfect alignment” with Cleveland or Tokyo or Timbuktu? You might want to think these asinine arguments through before you make them.
He said the English had imposed GMT on the rest of the world by force when Britain was a big colonial power, and it was about time that changed.
Be that as it may, there isn’t any city on the planet that would be any less of an arbitrary choice than Greenwich is, and I fail to see why it would be any more appropriate for you guys to impose your time standard on the world by force. All the cool kids are calling it UTC now, anyway.
But if you really, really want to coordinate your time zones from Mecca… what’s stopping you? Just make up your own special time standard, call it “Universal Muslim Time”, and use it among yourselves all you want. But don’t expect the rest of us to care.
2 Responses to “Muslims want to replace GMT with Mecca time”
-
JB says:
April 26th, 2008 at 2:07 pmThe reason for the exact placement of the Prime Meridian is based purely on the location of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. If I recall correctly, when they changed the telescope that they used for the purpose of sorting out the precise time, the Prime Meridian moved a few feet and the modern Prime Meridian is based upon the telescope in use when the observatory ceased to be used because Southeast London was becoming far too light polluted to be a good place to do astronomy.
I suppose there would be nothing wrong with the production of a map that shows Mecca in the middle. My understanding is that maps on the walls in Japanese schools show Japan rather than the Prime Meridian at the centre.
April 25th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
People in Islamic countries (and those who wish they were) always seem to think everything is controlled by some huge western (and probably shady) organisation, who get to decide what time system we all use, and spend their time designing and nefariously publishing nasty cartoons with the specific intention of undermining Islam. I guess it’s because it’s about the only way you can make a group of 1.8 billion people seem like it might be an oppressed minority. But it works against them, because it’s very hard to take people at all seriously when they have such a warped idea about the way the world works.
I’ve found it annoyingly impossible to find any real information about this conference. I want to see the list of abstracts. I bet it’s fascinating, and possibly hilarious.