Daylight Savings Time

[Vita Curator]

I would like to both snark and rant about daylight savings time.  I cannot stand the thought of it becoming darker an hour earlier.  I don't understand why we do it anyway.  What is the purpose?  Is it supposed to save energy?

Now, it will be dark both going to and coming home from work.  Being in a state of continual darkness is depressing.  I know several people whom suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and need to use phototherapy or bright light therapy (in order to suppress the brain's secretion of melatonin) to deal with this seasonal disorder.

This time change also causes a shift in our "biological internal clocks" or circadian rhythm.   This can cause our biological clocks to be out of "step" with our daily schedules.   I know that I can really feel a difference.

The only good thing is that you get one extra hour of sleep tonight, other than that it is a lose-lose-lose situation as far as I can tell.  I hate it!

[goat starer]

I agree and spare a thought for me having to do this

http://freespace.virgin.net/barry.press/home/time/official.html

through university to keep time in order to keep time on an even keel!

[Vita Curator]

So, you are a true Mertonian?  How very cool.  Let's hear it for the counter-revolution!  If you are not allowed to carry the glass full of port whilst walking backwards, best drink it quickly before the next refill (might also keep you a tad warmer)!

[Griffin NoName]

Therefore free chronicles will fall, while virtual particles will float.

Anxiety about free radicals. What the hell happens to them?

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

I agree totally with the idea to scrap the "spring forward, fall back" system.

Pick one way or another and leave it there!

I usually leave at least 1 clock set to "normal" time, as a reference to what time it really is ...

[Griffin NoName]

I usually leave at least 1 clock set to "normal" time, as a reference to what time it really is ...

This is customary in my household too. And not necessarily only one clock.

More importantly it also saves time. Not only is time saved from being wasted on resetting in the one instance, it saves time when the clocks change again. The compound time saved over many years and several clocks is simply amazing. Taking my clocks into account, I am years younger than I was.

This matter goes far beyond daylight saving.

[Sibling Lambicus the Toluous]

It's a conspiracy by clock manufacturers.

They know that the more often you use the buttons, wheels and switches to change the time, the sooner the clock will wear out and you will have to buy a new one.

Bob and NoName, are you astronomers?  Since folks don't use Daylight Saving Time for astronomical observations & calculations, astronomers tend to do things like what you describe.

Though it should be pointed out that we've gone back to "real" time.  The Daylight Saving Time in the summer is an hour ahead of the "real" time... once you're getting up in the dark, there's no need to have it shifted forward an hour any more.

BTW - question for the Australians here: do you have Daylight Saving Time?  If so, are you just starting it now?

[beagle]

Any other Brits see that documentary on Windsor Castle a few weeks ago? (Admit it, I know you're all BBC2 watchers).  There was a bloke in that (Keeper of the Queen's Clocks - something like that) who has to change about 300 clocks all over the castle and outbuildings twice a year. Takes all weekend, and no possibility of swapping them for radio-controlled ones without someone important noticing that the Tompion or Harrison has been replaced by something made in China.

I was told we have Daylight Savings Time to keep the Scottish farmers happy. Seeing as nothing but heather and conifers grow north of Northumbria, this seems hard to believe.

Anxiety about free radicals. What the hell happens to them?

In another twenty years they become conservative Labour ministers. Look at Peter Hain...

[goat starer]

So, you are a true Mertonian?  How very cool.  Let's hear it for the counter-revolution!  If you are not allowed to carry the glass full of port whilst walking backwards, best drink it quickly before the next refill (might also keep you a tad warmer)!

Some of those 'rules' are a bit new for me. In my time you took a bottle of port and swigged from that.

[beagle]

Ceremony, schmerony, you don't fool me. This was just a ploy to distract the porters while you smuggled the women over the back gate, back in the days when heterosexual sex was still banned at Oxford.

[goat starer]

worked too!

[beagle]

Was anyone who accidentally cycled clockwise with the port handed a loaded revolver and expected to know what to do?

[goat starer]

these are the countries intellectual elite (well they are supposed to be. most of the ones I met were overprivilaged blathering fools built in the Boris Johnson mould). Surely going anti clockwise even when drunk can't be too much of a challenge?

[beagle]

Really? I'm shocked. Of course one hears rumours about Oxford...

[Bluenose]

In most of Oz, we switched over to daylight saving time last Saturday night.  This leads to the old joke that now Queensland is twenty years and one hour behind the times.  (Ducks various projectiles lobbed by angry Queenslanders).

Personally, I would be more than happy to leave the clock set forward one hour all the time.

As a navigator in a former life, time is an important thing to me, but I do not confuse what the clock says with "real" time.

"Real" time in any locality can just as easily be determined by the local mean time.  Every place would have its own time determined by its longitude - it is noon, local mean time, when the sun is directly over a point on your meridian (line of longitude).  This is why mariners take a noon shot, to determine the local mean time, relative to Grenwich Mean Time, and thus calculate the longitude by the simple aritmetice of 15^o of longitude for every hour before or after Grenwich Mean Time.  BTW, that was the importance of Harrison's clock, it enabled seafarers to keep accurate time and thus solve the problem of determining longitude at sea.

Of course this would lead to chaos, so the idea of Standard Time was invented.  Thus the world is divided into 15^o (more or less) segments (time zones) and the time in each segment is set to the local mean time of the middle meridian of the segment.  It is an entirely arbitrary setting.  The time could just as easily be set to the west most meridian in the segment or the east most one, or some other.  By using daylight saving we are simply choosing another arbitrary setting.


What the point of this is it's a question of how we fit in our human activities with the daylight hours.  By setting our clocks ahead one hour in summer time we get the "official" day over with one hour earlier and so we can enjoy additional daylight at the end of the day.  At my lattitude (in Melbourne) in the midlle of winter it is dark when I get up to go to work and dark by about 5:30 pm, well before I get home.  I would much prefer it if daylight saving was kept all year round then I would at least see some daylight every day.

Just my personal opinion, of course.

Nick