Late this morning I turned on my local FOX TV station and tried to figure out why it was showing a Televangelist rather than the NFL pregame show. It took awhile for me to realize that it must be the end of Daylight Saving Time. I had incorrectly thought that the new Daylight Savings law took effect this year, but it takes effect in 2007:
Extending Daylight Saving time through Halloween only makes sense, thus reducing childhood accidents. But we should consider an extension more radical than just adding a month to DST in 2007.U.S. Daylight Saving Time Schedule
2005: April 3 - October 30
2006: April 2 - October 29New Federal Law In Effect
2007: March 11 - Nov. 4
2008: March 9 - Nov. 2
(I have long been interested in Daylight Saving Time. My very first op-ed was an essay on Daylight Saving Time that I delivered on NPR about a dozen years ago.)
With the recurrent energy shortages, I am surprised that there is such resistance to the sort of conservation that really works, such as using Daylight Saving Time to adjust our wake and sleep cycles to the sunlight.
It is pleasant traveling in France in the summer, which based on longitude should be on Greenwich time along with England, but instead is an hour ahead of London; the sun often goes down after 9:30pm. In effect, France and Spain are on double Daylight Saving Time in the summer and single Daylight Saving Time in the winter. This is similar to much of Texas, which should (by longitude) be mostly in the Mountain time zone instead of the Central time zone.
I would recommend that the US generally adopt the practice employed in France, Spain, and much of Texas: moving toward what (based on longitude) would be Double Daylight Saving time in the summer and single Daylight Saving time in the winter.
This site has more on Daylight Saving Time.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Extending Daylight:
- Extending Daylight Saving Time.--
(I know that time zones, etc., are already set by law, but why make it more meddlesome than necessary?)
In fact the author insists that the "energy savings" over DST has not been proven conclusively. *shrug* I heard him interviewed on radio and he convinced me.
Thanks for the cite to the book against DST. There is also one that is more positive by David Prerau.
The US government estimates energy savings from DST, and that would seem to make sense, given that many people do not get up until after sunrise in the morning, but almost everyone goes to bed after the sun sets in the evening.
I'll have to read the book you recommend to see the case he makes against energy savings.
Slacker,
Your proposal would be my second choice: DST all year round.
Jim Lindgren
But really, where I live, the darkness in the morning has been pretty bad lately. The problem isn't one of choosing the hours, the problem is one of 3 dimensional geometry. We live north of the tropics and the Earth tillts 23.5 degrees. There's less daylight in the winter (what a shock!) and dealing with it leaves no good choices.
How would your plants get less morning light? Your plants will get the same amount of sunshine before the sun hits its zenith regardless of what time it says on your clock.
I think this is a joke too...
Every other year or so we have "leap seconds" added to our clocks because the rotation of the earth isn't in a constant state. Wouldn't it be better to devise a measurement of time based off of something a bit more constant like an electron? We could call it Standard Time, or ST.
I'd rather have a timezone-like setup where each day is determined beforehand to start and end at a measured moment (say, instead of the "day" starting at 00:00, it would start at sunrise--which was measure to occur at precisely 0820 ST). It seems to me that it would be much more logical to schedule things this way (i.e. show up at work, "20 clicks after sunrise").
Regardless, I seriously doubt we'll have the issue of how to properly measure time settled in my lifetime.
Decoupling, to some extent, sun time and civil time is the only sensible solution. Whether that mandates daylight savings time (and if so, what form) is another question altogether.
Pushing daylight later in the summer just means people get home from work while it's hotter, so they have to run their (inefficient, small) home air conditioners more.
AC burns a lot more power than lighting these days. Saving power with DST is a fairly obsolete notion based on the way the world was sixty years ago.
Also, when the day is short in fall and early spring, DST just means people are running their lights in the morning instead of the evening, it just shifts the ligthing power to a different hour on the clock.
Meanwhile, there are huge negative effects to pushing sunrise later on the clock. People's circadian rhythms are set to the sun cycle, which is why it is very hard to be awake and alert before the sun rises every day. Driving to work in the morning dark into november will contribute to a lot more accidents and lost productivity as sleepy people struggle with nature telling them it's not yet morning while they're behind the wheel and at their desk.
DST is a dumb idea to begin with. The clock should stay consistent. If any adjustment is necessary, businesses should adjust which hours they are open on a consistent clock, instead of changing the clock itself. Have an "official standard work day" from 9 to 5, but change that to 8 to 4 in the summer, instead of changing the clock itself.
The example I gave was just a demonstration of how time--decoupled from astrological phenomenon--could be tied to our society. Instead of showing up at work at 9 (irregardless of the position of the sun), we could show up at work at some arbitrary event that coincides with our ability to work (the sun being up). If you work closer to a pole where such astronomical ties could be detrimental, then you'd just have to show up at work the old fashioned way: Irrespective of the position of the sun =)
Not a joke. I'm not talking about the hassle of having to reprogram your own personal alarm clock, etc. I'm talking about companies having to retool their manufacturing processes. Lots of products are built to automatically account for daylight savings, and a lot of software would have to be reprogrammed. That costs money, as programmers have to be paid and so forth. So there are real costs involved in making the transition. IIRC, this is one reason legislation changing daylight savings time was dropped in the past.
The book I linked to is by an author who in truth is for DST, he admits this, not against. The book just tracks down the history of every justification for and against DST. Energy savings being just one of the justifications that allegedly is debunked. The author of Spring Forward simply prefers other justifications for DST than "energy savings".
The New Republic did a pseudo-review of the Spring Foward and related it to the then-debate earlier this year Congress had to extend DST 61 days.
2) What is so darn wrong to simply instruct the Federal offices that between such and such dates the operating hours will be between such and such time?
3) Where, oh where is the Constitutional authority to meddle in the affairs of time?
All in all, DST is just another example on how the thugs in the Central government like to flex their muscle just because they can. And they love the feeling of power that comes with it.
You see, we are just too dumb to make decisions on our own. The enlightened ones must make us see the light.
Oh, wait. I just remembered that France in their "grand" revolution attempted that. I think it failed.
Never mind. (I hope that no government bureaucrat reads this)
I am learning this week that it's hard to get a 2 year old to adjust his internal clock before he can read one.
I see IdahoEv said the same thing, suggesting it even for the current practice. Makes sense. And like you said, cooling takes more energy than lighting (although heating takes even more.) Though I live far enough north (Boston) that even though the days are really long in the summer, I can usually get by without home air conditioning.
It is kind of neat to get up before dawn sometimes. Keeps things interesting.
Whoops. I need emoticons so I can pick up on these things. ;-)
Look, if you don't want to get up when the sunrises...fine I don't care, but if 12 noon, is supposed to be noon, then for crying out let let it be, with all the DST and what not, you can't just look at the sun and say, hey looks like 4.
Starting with the second question. I think that no one would dispute that standard time has been a success. The use of local solar times would be very inconvenient in an era of super-highways and cell-phones. We should therefor stick with standard time.
On the other hand, we should get out of bed, send the kids to school and open our businesses when the sun is up. What time that is is a local question.
I live on the western edge of the eastern time zone. The sun rises and sets about 40 minutes later here than it does on the east coast. We should begin our day a bit later than they do and we will be better off. In summer when our sun sets at 9 pm, we should get up sooner. We don't need to reset our clocks to do this we need to adjust our local institutions such as schools and businesses.
OAH, South Florida which has the same longitude that I do, is far enough south so that the effects of the annual cycle of the sun are muted. They might go through the year without changing school opening times.
Of course once we have delinked local appointments from standard time, we can recognize the completely arbitrary nature of standard times. If we are going to use them, wouldn't they be even better if they were national? We could use GMT everywhere, but we would have to change the calendar day at 4 pm PST on the west coast, which would be very inconvenient.
The most convenient thing to do with standard time would be to put the entire country on CST (GMT+6) and leave it there. Date changes would still occur after the sun went down, but when calling LA or New York, we would always know what time it is there. Alaska and Hawaii would probably still want their own time zone.
Once we have delinked that which is local from that which
David Chesler: I am also a programmer but I wake up at 5AM and go to the office, roughly, from 7AM to 4PM. A coworker says that I am an aberration ... for a programmers :)
DST to me, in a personal way, means that in the morning I am always in the dark.
Does this DST violates my Constitutional rights? I am being harmed because I like to wake up early.
Early riser unite!
Most of Western Australia is on GMT + 8 hours
South eastern Western Australia and south western South Australia is on GMT + 8 hours 45 minutes. (This time zone doesn't actually have force of law, but it is shown on road maps and is what is used locally. This part of Australia is so empty that it only applies to a few thousand people, although that is a large physical area).
The rest of South Australia is on GMT + 10 hours 30 minutes.
The Northern Territory is on GMT + 9 hours 30 minutes
Queensland is on GMT + 10 hours.
New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania is on GMT + 11 hours.
That's right. Even though one would expect there to be only three standard time zones in Australia, the time can be any one of six different things depending on where you are.
And does it cause any trouble? No, not much at all.
There are lots of arguments in favor of extending DST but this isn't one of them. Halloween is partially about running around in the dark. Very young children go out just after the sun sets. Older children, a bit later. It's got nothing to do with what it says on the clock. Extending DST through Halloween will simply mean that trick-or-treating starts at 7:00 in the evening instead of 6:00.