On Wed, 01 Jul 2015, Michael Brand wrote: > On Wed, Jul 1, 2015 at 8:27 AM, Eric S Fraga <e.fr...@ucl.ac.uk> wrote: > > On Tuesday, 30 Jun 2015 at 11:08, Nick Dokos wrote: > >> In what way are you losing information? > > > > Sorry, should have been clear: the time zone information itself. By > > reducing to UTC, you lose one bit of information. Whether that matters > > or not in practice is not clear but I'm always uncomfortable when > > considering data representations that lead to information loss. > > > > I've been trying to come up with an example that would illustrate the > > problem but I've failed so far. > > As an example for the above I suggest to consider a non-stop flight > with a duration of 1:31:00 from Salt Lake City UT to Phoenix AZ, both > cities in different time zones, here intentionally even the same basic > time zone but one with daylight saving and one without.
[...] > 2) When the Org file format would support time zones I would use > > * Flight from Salt Lake City UT to Phoenix AZ > <2015-07-01 Wed 10:55 MDT>--<2015-07-01 Wed 11:26 MST> > - *Advantage*: Visibility of the time zones where the event takes > place. Of course, this is even more complicated, as MST could mean UTC+08, UTC-07 or UTC+06:30. That said, lets not make perfect the enemy of the good. I've currently got emacs running under TZ="America/Los_Angeles" even though my machine is in TZ="America/Chicago" precisely because org mode can't yet handle this. I'd be willing to help out as much as I'm able, too. -- Don Armstrong http://www.donarmstrong.com I have no use for "before and after" pictures. I can't remember starting, and I'm never done. -- a softer world #221 http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=221
