Some time around last Tuesday or so I had this idea to make a wallpaper for my desktop that shows a map of the world divided in it’s time zones (having relatives all over the world and stuff like that). I’ve tried searching the web for something nice, but unfortunately I couldn’t find anything, so I just started doing it myself. I took a time zone map I found on the net and the started drawing paths of the time zone parts of the continents, and once that was done I drawed paths of the lines between the zones, and finally I added the legends. Hell of work, but it turned out more or less nice, at least better than all those maps I found on the net. What would be really cool would be an interactive desktop which shows the current time in each zone, but can’t have everything…

So of course while you’re staring at a map of the world for hours and hours, you start thinking about that stuff.

First of all you might notice that some of the lines are bending and turning and all kinds of stuff like that – those are islands. Totally simple. Some of the time zones which some of the islands are in don’t necessarily make sense, but whatever.

  • The American continents have 7 different time zones, surprisingly (not counting Hawaii).
  • That’s where I encountered the first funny one: Newfoundland has -3h30 of UTC/GMT (the one in England), and so does Suriname (or French Guinana?).
  • What also surprised me is that Brazil is only -3 GMT. I always sort of assumed it would be in the same zone as the east US.
  • Iceland is actually also GMT, so it’s the same as in Britain and Portugal.
  • The European Union is divided in only 3 time zones – one for Britain and Portugal, one for Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Greece (which is oddly enough also the one in South Africa) and one for the rest.
  • Russia is the country with the most time zones on earth – 11 to be precise.
  • Things are a little messy in the middle east – Iran has another one of those half zones with GMT +3h30 and Afganistan has GMT +4h30.
  • India and Burma also have those odd ones with GMT +5h30 and GMT +6h30, but what’s really weird is Nepal; GMT +5h45.
  • The Chinese dare to be different and instead of dividing their nation into time zones like other big countries did, they just have an universal zone for the whole country; GMT +8. Though China technically is spread over about 4-5 time zones.
  • And even the Aussies have one of those weird zones – the continent alone is divided in three zones – GMT +8, GMT +9h30 and GMT +10, all right next to each other. But why do they have that 9h30 one? I doubt that that really makes a lot of sense, wouldn’t it be easier to have it just be GMT +9?
  • Time zones keep changing a lot and of course there’s Daylight Saving Time and stuff like that in some countries, so don’t rely on all of this 😉

This is what my desktop looks like. If you’re interested in this wallpaper (1440×900) just leave a comment 🙂 Though I should mention that it looks better in this small version than in full size.