When daylight savings was introduced, that "more useful part of the day" was earlier in the day. That doesn't hold today, though - as TFA says, most people work indoors under artificial lighting, and shifting daylight hours earlier into the day just means they're wasted while we're behind desks. What we really need is more daylight in the evening, so we can make productive use of our leisure time playing catch with our kids, practicing with the football club, drinking beer on the porch etc.
Still, killing daylight savings would probably be better than "reverse daylight savings", and more politically feasible. Certainly more feasible than crazy ideas like moving to UTC (and probably better for the average person anyway).
My pet peeve, though, is leap-seconds. Life would be a lot easier if you could rely on days always having 86400 seconds.
Daylight Savings time happens during the summer, not the winter. Winter time is unadjusted and tracks a true solar day. Summer time is adjusted, and indeed it's adjusted in the direction you favor (to provide more daylight hours at night).
That really depends on where you are in the time zone. If you're right at the edge, you may be closer to tracking a true solar day in the summer.
Certainly by my body clock, a "true solar day" is when I'm on DST.
Is this sarcasm? The only time I've ever noticed leap seconds was the story about a bug in the Linux kernel's handling of them.
Most people's local time isn't synced with the solar time anyway (that only happens in the middle of a time zone, and only if there's no crazy stuff like DST going on).
The only people who care about that are probably the astronomy guys, and they already need to adjust their time with other stuff for most observations.
Isn't that the only reason for them?
Is that truly a problem in your daily life, or just when you deal with computers? In the latter case, just make those computers follow TAI instead of UTC.
For the foreseeable future, I'm certain that humans will prefer the time that the sun stands highest in the sky to be called 12:00. Even though it's pretty far in the future when it will be noticeable, I think it's pretty presumptuous to burden our progeny with something else.
I don't get why people inherently need 6am to be the early morning, 12pm being "high noon", and 6pm being "early evening". I'm sure different regions would adjust quickly to just having different hours correlate to different states of the sun wherever they live. Time should be measured the same around the globe, not with arbitrary divisions.
You know, we could also get rid of the AM/PM arbitrariness too and switch to a 24 hour clock. Wouldn't it be nice if time made sense.
Different time zones make it much easier to establish common meeting times with people around the world - even if it makes parsing log files a bitch.
That's why I recommend UTC for Log files from day one, but I'm happy to have Time Zone when working with people.
A nontrivial amount of my time is wasted responding to emails with "3pm pacific or mountain?". Asking "does 23:00 work for you?" avoids the variable.
This is twice as bad if you ever have to work with anyone in Arizona during the summer, as they already skip DST.
Fortunately calendaring software does a decent job abstracting the insanity away, but that doesn't help much with the process of scheduling things across companies, as you can't see their calendars. I suppose within a company that has offices in multiple timezones it's less painful.
A web service where everyone has a "profile", profiles can be grouped by company, by office, by all sorts of things. Every profile keeps information on the persons location and the relevant timezone. If someone needs to arrange a meeting they select the relevant profiles ("SF office, NY office, contractor #14") and it provides all the relevant timezones, maybe even with the options to "automatically" calculate the best time to arrange a meeting for all the parties involved. Tie-ins with google calendar and the like.
We use Skype and so I rely on Skype to tell me what time it is locally for the employees I'm interested in, it works but it's far from elegant.
Maybe I should build this.
In Istanbul, they go to clubs late at night, not early like in Dublin. In Italy, nobody is in the sun at noon. In San Francisco, many of the locals start work around noon. In Spain they siesta. In Japan, they have 12 hour work days. In India, some people work US schedules. In Finland in high summer, its not unusual to see kids out late into the "night", as the sun never goes down.
None of this is accounted for by DST or local times, and you always need to augment your time information with local understanding.
The logical extreme of local timezones is to have your gps-equipped mobile automatically adjust the time so that the sun is highest in the sky at or shortly after noon. Of course, that would create chaos.
Of course this is sadly never gonna happen, like we never gonna get UTC, because the majority of people never have to deal with computers and/or people in other countries. As a expad and programmer I of course get annoyed by this almost every day...
I got quite disoriented once going to the southern hemisphere because my northern hemisphere-trained instincts though that the sun should be towards the south at noon, when it's actually to the north.
In Sweden, I had to really adjust my calculations based on the season. If it's summer then the sun sets almost in the north. In the winter, sunset is much closer to the south.
That said, I agree with you. It's easier to say "in the US, if the time is 12:00 then the sun is roughly south" than to have to localize it for the different UTC times for noon in Hawaii through to Florida.
All I see in every response is just politician-speak from random government officials. Typically they acknowledge the submission and then wave it off with no specific action to fix it.
In fact, they are worse than useless, because they channel energy that would otherwise be useful into such a feckless means.
If you care about something, write your reps in congress, your senators, and the president. Clicking a button on on a whitehouse.gov petition is as useless as liking a political post on facebook.
No no, they channel slacktivism, which is always useless, no matter where it is channeled.
But, slacktivisim has such a low barrier to entry, I expect this is going to go on for a good long while. If not forever.
I would imagine that the public would find the Death Star response to be distasteful and patronizing, but it is apparently well received. The petitions themselves might be useless, but they are a great public relations channel for the white house.
With a response it is acknowledged that you have been heard, likely by people very high up in the administration. That's about all you can hope for for such a simple way of gathering support.
This is a good thing. Otherwise Piers Morgan would have been deported for pissing off right wingers. What do you really expect from 25, 50, even 500K people signing an online petition? Do you want that to create law? Introduce a bill?
If you want to effect change, you need a lot more people than this, you need an organization, you need lobbying, you need to demonstrate voter support and influence...
These petitions are useful for getting some level of acknowledgment and demonstrating some level of interest in the issue. I consider them a very positive development. When people complain, they should consider what exactly it is they expect instead.
This would imply two dimensional time zones (one per state?) with a non-trivial conversion function between zones. Once everyone's watch is GPS and Internet enabled this should be straightforward.
And in the winter, the sun rises at nine in the morning, and sets before three in the afternoon.
Your suggestion is hilariously myopic. Go live in Alaska for a year, and then come back and tell me if you've re-evaluated it.
With two dimensional time zones, each region could choose the strategy that works for them. If the slew rate is too great at peak, it could be smoothed.
Note that I am not suggesting that the hours in a day change (much), or length of an hour, or an attempt to keep both sunrise and sunset constant; sunrise would always be at seven, and sunset times would change. This way you maximize sunlight time while still going to bed at the same time each night. They would seem valuable for Alaaka.
To be honest, though, tus sounds a lot like an argument that humans are not naturally adapted to live in the arctic. Perhaps there no time system makes sense.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Athos#Date_and_time_recko...
The nature is not equal every day. I see no point in trying to make it so.
Is there any actual evidence of this? what about all the non- morning-people who seem to like to wake at noon?
beyond that, following bold suggestion exist; 1) the 'second' time unit must be quicker to match average human heart rate. 2) time zones maybe abolished totally and 1 single time zone maybe used.
Personally, I prefer DST simply because it gives a longer block of sunlight in the evening, when I can be active, at the expense of daylight in the morning, when I am asleep anyway. I'm not sure my sleep would improve with the extra light in a non-DST world.
I'm not sure if we can just unilaterally say "All our timezones are +1 now, forever" though.
Computers pick up on published timezone databases automatically (there was a big mess a couple years back when someone tried to copyright it or something, and they ended up backing down), so any software that can handle any form of DST should have no problem with a permanent shift - and probably by any amount.
The argument would be a lot more convincing if sources or studies were cited for claims such as increased air conditioning costs, etc.
I just started this discussion on the topic:
This also explains the lopsided calendar of DST. It corresponds with the warmth and outdoor activity, not daylight. That's why we start it near the spring equinox and continue it into early November (a month and a half from the solstice). That would make no sense if it were about daylight: it's not symmetrical. It's also about weather. Daylight wise, October and February are roughly equivalent. However, October is warm and has pretty leaves, and February is cold and snowy. When it's warm, we adjust the clock to have an additional hour of light in the evening. When it's cold, we adjust it back to have daylight in the morning (most of us will be leaving work in the darkness regardless of DST, so let's at least treat ourselves to a couple hours of light in the morning).
So long as my life is semi-constrained by others' marking of time, I'll be in favor of DST. I realize that it's a ridiculous hack that exists because the sensible time to wake up (for me, 30-60 minutes before sunrise) shifts around in terms of clock time, but it's a ridiculous hack that works.
