Time Bandits

PZ Myers shows the proper level of snark that should be paid to this Telegraph story about officials in Mecca wanting to base the world's time on the largest clock tower in the world like some temporal Death Star in Saudi Arabia.

For the past 125 years, the international community has accepted that the start of each day should be measured from the prime meridian, representing 0 degrees longitude, which passes through the Greenwich Observatory.

A standard time by which other clocks were set was needed to organise global travel and communications, but in the Islamic world the idea that it should be centred on a part of London is seen as a colonial anachronism.

As Mohammed al-Arkubi, manager of one of the hotels in the complex, put it: "Putting Mecca time in the face of Greenwich Mean Time. This is the goal." 

Myers keeps it in perspective.

It's an arbitrary standard, get it? Building a giant clock in the desert will not suddenly attract time to line up with it. Although it does sound like a perfectly kitschy and annoying clock, with bright lights that can be seen 18 miles away that will flash and blink in colors to let people know it is time to pray. I suspect they're also trying to standardize the web back to 1995 html, too.

Needless to say, it's almost amusing watching the wingers go apoplectic on a hotel manager like he was bin Laden on a Zombie Tyrannosaurus with a giant Time Vacuum.