Here we are at the end of a decade, a year and a day. The New Year has come to Samoa and Christmas Island at 5:00am our time. I go to timeanddate.com to find out time things. I can see them in various ways. The Multi Time Zone Countdown and the Time Zone Map are my favourites. The world is laid out flat with UTC in the middle and the time zones are vertically colour coded - and red dots are places - so many in the middle of the oceans.
What intrigues me is that at the left side of the map is an overlap of starts - Samoa is in the New Year, but next door is American Samoa and it is 1 day, plus 17 minutes away from the New Year.
There's an answer to this in Wikipedia. The nation of Samoa observed the same time as the Samoa Time Zone until it moved across the International Date Line at the end of 29 December 2011; it is now 24 hours (25 hours in southern hemisphere summer) ahead of American Samoa.
Do you remember when we crossed the millennium? There was great discussion on when the 21st century started - it started with 2001. It took the attention away from the triple start. No worries this time as we are only crossing a decade and they begin with the 0th year. So we're on a double celebration with both the decade and year. How will it be marked?
What will the new decade be called? Do you know there's no agreement on what the name is for the last 10 years? It is expected that the twenty-tens will be used for it. Will we be the twenty-twenties? Sounds good to me.
Our pictures today are created using theIndia Ink filter by Flaming Pear. But I find out that the Tom Stoppard quote is not quite correct - too many variations on the internet. It should be:
"Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else." ~Tom Stoppard Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are dead
