relatively oblivious

So I have lived in a bubble all my life. There are a lot of things that I take for granted and many other things I am simply unaware of. Many things I don't understand on a national level, let alone an international level. There are rules and standards that apply globally and had to be decided by somebody somewhere. I was thinking about time lines today and wonder what global committee took it upon themselves to decide how and where the world would be divided into 24 different time segments? Did some guy just decide this is how it should be and then everyone else just said there is no point in arguing it? What about the International Date Line, who picked the Pacific Ocean? Was it voted upon or did was it just that that is how it was and it worked.

After doing a little research I found that there are actually 40 different time zones around the globe, and discovered several interesting things regarding global timekeeping. One such peculiarity is that the IDL is actually de facto, drawings on maps and charts are simply the construction of the cartographers who make them. There is actually a lot to time zones and international time keeping and can get rather confusing. For example, do to a jog in the IDL there are actually 3 different days being observed for 2 hours of each one revolution of the earth. So it turns out that there is (or was) an international committee that decided on a few necessary items- the International Meridian Conference of 1884. I wonder how many people made it to this conference in 1885 or how many different countries were invited/ represented. They were the ones that decided a ‘Universal Day’ would be midnight to midnight GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) and thus the start and end of this Universal Day with the IDL falls opposite this median.

Once again one little intrigue has lead to a myriad of trivial information to be regurgitated over and over in my little brain. Knowing things makes you smarter!