timeanddate.com's New Look

timeanddate.com now has a fresher, newer look and a more modern appeal. However, it still retains all the useful functions that it had before to help people find the information they need about times and dates around the world. The website’s new design was carefully planned and tested, with the goal of being more user-friendly and up-to-date . We will gradually make some more changes to the website’s design, as well as work on making the tools on the site more user-friendly in the weeks and months to come.

Read more about why timeanddate.com opted for a design makeover.

Please feel free to comment on timeanddate.com’s new design by sending an email to: webmaster@timeanddate.com.

Important Daylight Saving Dates

March and April are important months for daylight saving changes in many countries. Daylight saving time (DST) will either start or end, depending on where you live, for the following places:

• The United States, Canada and some of northern Mexico – Starts on Sunday, March 14, 2010.
• Most of Europe – Starts on Sunday, March 28, 2010.
• Most of Mexico – Starts on Sunday, April 4, 2010.
• Most of Australia and New Zealand – DST ends on Sunday, April 4, 2010.

For more countries with daylight saving schedules, you can check out the Daylight Saving Time Dates for 2010 on our website.

On another note, don’t forget to switch off your lights at 8.30pm (20:30) in your time for Earth Hour on Saturday, March 27, 2010!

All the Time in the World

by Allan Eastman

Allan Eastman left behind his successful career as a Film and Television Director and Executive Producer to travel the world. He has visited over a 100 countries on all six continents. He spends most of his time reading, writing and thinking about things. He is an amateur historian, a music archivist, a reasonable chef and a seeker after happiness .

When Are You?

In South Africa, one old Zulu sends word to his friend in a village 80 kilometres away that he will meet him by the Upside Down Tree at the Full Moon. His friend sets out, walks for 2 days over the tall hills and through the stony valleys of KwaZulu until he arrives at the ancient Baobao tree by the edge of the plain, its root-like upper branches scratching the twilit sky. The old man settles down on his blanket, lights his pipe and watches the stars begin to twinkle into view. His friend will arrive tonight, or tomorrow or the day after. No worry, he will contentedly wait until their rendezvous is fulfilled.

In Western Europe, the sharp buzz of an alarm clock awakens a woman executive precisely at 0545. Simultaneously, a timer turns on her automatic coffee maker. Finishing a light breakfast, she checks the clock on her Blackberry and starts to gather up her things. Twenty minutes later, in business suit and briefcase, she is standing on the platform as the commuter train pulls in at 0700. Two hours later, she buckles her seatbelt as an airplane pushes back from the gate precisely at 0900. Another two hours on, she steps out of a taxi at the office building of her major client, 400 kilometres away. She checks her Blackberry once again as the elevator rises towards the top floor. She is exactly on time for her bimonthly 11 o’clock sales conference.

Two human experiences occurring on the same day last week here on Planet Earth, two very different attitudes of the concept of Time. The first can be called Traditional, based on the flow of seasons and the endless cycle of sunlit days and waxing and waning moons, the second– let’s call it Modern - on the relentless ticking of billions of clocks, all linked to an agreed upon concept of what time it is anywhere in the World, all calibrated and quantified by the precise oscillations of cesium particles in Atomic clocks safely tucked away in prestigious Scientific Institutes.

In some ways, these two experiences encompass the entire History of the Human Race from our earliest moments of awareness as hunters-gatherers in the prehistoric forest right up to the frantic high tech present that more and more characterizes modern existence on our Planet every day. Each human’s life is deeply affected by Time and its measurement but what do most people really know or understand about Time?

What is Time, exactly?

That is what we will be exploring in this space on timeanddate.com, here in the newsletter section. Time is a huge subject but we will try to dissect it into manageable segments every month. We’ll be looking into the concepts of Time and how they have changed with new scientific discoveries and theories over the centuries, we’ll be searching into where our ideas of Time came from and all the apparently strange ways we have decided upon to measure Time.

We’ll see how Time affects and is affected by different Human cultures in the past and the present, we’ll explore the many ways in which we’ve tried to build devices to calibrate and describe Time. We’ll look at the way Time affects our language and our thinking, how it has become deeply engrained into all Earth cultures.

And this just gets us started. Time Paradoxes, Time Travel, Astronomical Time – and 100 other aspects of this strange and wonderful subject of Time. Few ideas are as deeply imbedded into the Human experience and psyche as Time and yet it is one of those ideas that the deeper we search into it, the more elusive it seems to get.

This will start off from my personal exploration, growing out of a lifelong fascination with the subject of Time but I hope that you, the reader, will become involved in the discussion and the discoveries here on the website. .

Read more of Allan Eastman’s article When Are You, found at our guest feature section All the Time in the World.