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Extra Daylight Savings May Confuse the Gadgets
CrimeDoggy writes "In the energy bill to be signed by the President today (August 8), changes are to be made that extend daylight savings time. The bill would start daylight time three weeks earlier and end it a week later as an energy-saving measure. Many devices such as VCRs, cell phones, and watches would still operate on the previous schedule, potentially causing problems."
Hopefully this will cause more states to take the good example of Arizona and just do away with the daylight savings sillyness altogether.
Just to clarify, it's "daylight saving" time...No "s".
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
...Daylight Saving Time, not Daylight Savings Time...
If you adopted this system you would be two steps behind China. They've had this sytem for a while now...
And I wish the world were so nice that we could all use metric things and other 10-based units to match our number system.
Dr Superlove 300ml. I use my powers for awesome
in the 1700's Ben Franklin rightly surmized(sp?) that by increasing the use of daylight during the summer, less candles had to be made, transported, and used thus there was a fairly good bit of savings.
In early 1900s, if more daylight led to less electric light use (a sizeable portion of the electric bill) then there would be significant savings.
In modern times however, it is but a blip on the monthly electric bill, with AC units, refrigerators, freezers, TVs, etc all demanding almost constant power draw. Lights simply aren't a huge area of savings anymore.
Even more so this could actually INCREASE our electric costs: I have a programmable thermostat, that I set to be warmer in the summer when I'm not home, then turn on so it's cool when I return from work. Now I'm home more hours during the hottest part of the day which in turn uses more power for my AC unit which is wildly more expensive to run than a few lightbulbs.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
How is this going to save energy?
How about this?.
In AZ we don't observe the current daylight savings time, so I expect we'll ignore the new one too. So my gadgets and gizmos will all continue to work, ignoring DST as usual. I'm sure there are other places that ignore DST too, feel free to move there if AZ get full.
You can lose something that is loose, so tighten the loose item so you don't lose it.
call me dumb, but i don't understand how. if it's cold, i'm still going to turn on the heat, if it's dark i'm still going to turn on the lights.
OK, you're dumb. (Sorry, I had, too).
It's a simple idea, really. Let's say most people go to bed at around 11:00. At dusk, everyone turns on their house lights. With daylight saving time (DST), dusk is 8:30, so lights are on for 2.5 hours. Without DST, dusk is an hour earlier, so lights are on for 3.5 hours. (What is really happening with DST is that we are sleeping through less daylight in the morning. In the winter there is no daylight to waste in the morning so this doesn't work).
Having said this, I'm not sure the savings works out as well as the above would suggest. DST means that people like me have to run our AC's an hour longer at the hottest part of the day, wasting more energy than we save. (Presumably, the other place I would spend that time is work, at that will have AC running whether I'm there or not).
But explain to me the significance of daylight savings time. I mean really.
... The idea was proposed by Benjamin Franklin (known for his strong work ethic), that if the clocks were moved earlier towards the dawn in the summer, then there would be plenty of daylight in the evening after work, and thus countless candles and barrels of oil could be saved.
In the pre-electricity "modern" era, families that stayed up after dark would light their homes with candles and oil lamps, which could get quite expensive
Extrapolating that to today, there is still a chronological swing to the usage of energy... in the bulk power industry, this is called a "load curve", and basically follows a sine wave... there's a valley in usage over the early morning period when everyone is asleep, and as people wake up, the load increases in the "morning ramp", reaches its peak in the afternoon, and drops off in the late evening as people head to sleep.
Now, moving the clocks to line up with the daylight periods would shift the energy usage one hour earlier in the day. In the morning in the summer, the sun is already up, so you're not going to save much electricity. However, by shifting the evening clocks forward, it removes some of the "lighting" time in the evening, which lowers load on the system, allows the generators that match load to drop their output lower earlier, they burn less fuel, and the economy as a whole saves money on imported fuel.
"OK, what time *EST* do we have the next call".
Which will still confuse the people that know that "EST" does not mean "Eastern" but "Eastern Standard Time," and the only state that is on EST right now is Indiana. Everyone else is on CDT or EDT. (CDT and EST just happen to coincide at the moment).
What?
The base 60 numbering system goes back to (at least) Sumeria, which is most likely where the Babylonians got it from. Changing to base 10 time would not be so easy, since many units in the metric system depend on the current definition of the second. I'm not sure why when the French created the metric system they didn't change the second too, but they didn't, and unless we want to change the whole metric system, the second will have to remain. Of course, the U.S., which still hasn't adopted the metric system, could just make its own new measurement system with decimal time, and units based on that, and leapfrog from having the most obsolete system of measure in the world into the avant-garde.
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