I’ve always loved this example. I implemented the Monte Carlo pi estimation on a LEGO Mindstorms NXT back in high school. Totally sparked my interest in programming, simulations, etc. Also the NXT’s drag-and-drop, flowchart programming interface was actually a great intro to programming logic. Made it really easy to learn real programming in later on.
> If you know your metric longitude, you know the local time shift, and vice versa.
I've also thought that setting time using longitude could make sense. Especially since I and many people tell time, schedule meetings, etc using a device with a GPS. This article [0] makes an interesting point about the effect that time shift based on longitude would have on computers in the same data center.
> At the equator, the position directly underneath the mean Sun travels west at about 463 metres per second. That means a standard rack unit is about one millisecond wide. ...
So, strictly speaking, continuous time zones mean that clocks on machines in different parts of the same data centre — neighbouring racks, even — will need to be set to different times, depending on the exact positions of those racks.
It concludes that you would have to choose a single reference point to represent the time of a machine and that:
> We might even consider applying this consistency across all machines in any given data centre. This would simplify tasks such as e.g. collating accurately timestamped log entries from multiple machines. We would ignore the real longitudes of the various machines and set all of their clocks to the same local time. The interior of the facility would become an area of uniform time; a "time zone", as it were.