As I was waiting for a call yesterday, a whim inspired me to check out the National Institute of Standards and Technology Official U.S. Time page — time.gov. (Does its existence upset certain people? That the federal government is trying to monopolize time itself?)

Anyway, it’s been a while since I looked at the page, and it’s been redesigned. Used to be fairly drab, but now it’s got spiffy color-coded time zones and digital clocks of the zones ticking away. There used to be a single clock, and you had to toggle between the zones. The new version isn’t just good enough for government work, I’d say, but better.

Remarkably, I happened to capture an image at exactly 4:00:00 Central, or x:00:00 to be more inclusive.
I see that Arizona is still contrary when it comes to Daylight Saving Time, though for now it’s in sync with MST. Except that it looks like the Navajo do going along with DST — but the Hopi do not.

Though I cut them off in my image grab, to the side of the main map the NIST also provides the time in Puerto Rico (UTC-4), Alaska (UTC-9), the Aleutians and Hawaii (UTC-10), American Samoa (UTC-11), and the time used by the Chamorros (UTC+10), which I assume is both on Guam and the Northern Marianas.

In a slightly Orwellian touch, the NIST web site reaches out and calculates how far in error the clock in my laptop is, compared with the official time. At nearly 4 yesterday afternoon, at least, I was behind by 0.807 seconds. I think I’ll just have to live with that.