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Is Daylight Saving Shift Really Worth It?
Krishna Dagli writes "Two Ph.D. students at the University of California at Berkeley say that Daylight Saving Shift will not do any good or create any energy savings. We are already spending money for software upgrades in the name of saving energy and after reading following article I wonder has congress really studied the impact of DST shift? " I also read some back story on the concept; OTOH, I found TiVo's suggestions that I manually change everything on my Series 1 device to be somewhat...insulting.
I already work 7:30 to 3:30. Having DST at all is really just a nuisance to me.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
According to the SANS Incident Handler's Diary, various issues have been reported in Cisco VOIP phones, Blackberrys, Veritas aka Symantec BackupExec, and Watchguard firewalls.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
Even if the DST dates are not hard-coded there is still the problem of upgrading all the units out in the field.
They're not built in random directions, the roads are. The house simply faces the road.
Yup, I heard the story on NPR. It was an interview with Michael Downing, author of the book "Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Savings Time". He said there's not much energy savings, but more shopping because of DST.
y Id=7779869
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor
Fortunately, WWV includes a DST flag so that at least those so-called "atomic clocks" (actually radio clocks) automatically changed at the right time.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
"I take a camping trip at the end of March every year and it will be SO nice to have that extra hour of daylight to get camp setup, cook dinner, and enjoy the park."
When I camp I get up with the sun and set up camp around sunset regardless of what the clock says. DST doesn't give you more daylight.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
In the US, it was changed federally in 1918, 1920, 1942, 1945, 1966, 1974, 1975, 1985, 1986 and 2007. That averages out to about once per decade. Up until 1966, many individual states also fiddled with the times. Even today, states are allowed to opt in and out of DST altogether, and Indiana just recently changed its rules.
Here's the real loss:
If you live in the northern US and are doing the responsible thing and turning your central heating down overnight, then getting up an hour earlier means you're turning the heat back up earlier. Why is this wasteful? Because on sunny days in March there's significant solar gain once the sun's up. In my house that can be enough that the heat doesn't even need to be turned on in the morning - unless we get up too early.
In the evening, both the house and the outside environment lose their heat relatively slowly. The darkest hour isn't literally just before the dawn, but the coldest hour is. It's much better to spend the coldest hour under the covers - from an energy use point of view - than to get up during it or right on its tail and turn the furnace up to compensate.
Of course, if the government just looks at electrical use, this may not show in areas that don't primarily use electric heat. The increase in oil and natural gas use though, from this idiocy, will be real and significant.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
On /. we obey the laws of thermodynamics. You are absolutely, 100% using more energy running your headlights in your car. ALL of the energy used by your car comes from the gasoline that you put into it (with the small exception of any charge already in the battery when it was installed). Therefore, you are using more gasoline with your headlights on than you would if they were off. It might be too small to easily measure, but the difference is there.
If you want some tangible proof of this, find a small hand cranked generator and hook it up to a blinking light bulb. You can actually feel the crank get harder to turn when the light is lit and become easier when it goes off. So the more electricity used by your car, the more gasoline you use or your battery goes dead.
Finding other idiots on
Now if only they used it. I've got an analog radio clock that doesn't even display the date, but for some reason they decided to read the date bits and do some calendar calculations (or hard code the next X years of DST dates) to calculate DST rather than reading the flag.
I don't understand why you wouldn't use the flag -- it seems easier to just read the flag than to calculate the start/stop dates. There's even a countdown so you can miss several days of syncing before the switch and still know when it should happen. Apparently not all clock designers share my hatred for calendar calculations.
FYI: Common radio clocks use the 60kHz WWVB signal not the 2.5-20 MHz WWV signals. They both contain the digital timecode information, but WWV and WWVH also include frequency information (440 Hz, 500 Hz, 600 Hz, 1000 Hz and 1500 Hz beeps) and vocal timestamps, and reports about the weather, GPS health, and solar/radio conditions. In general WWV/WWVH are intended for manual use (all the time information is available in a format useful to human ears) and use outside the WWVB range, but WWVB is more accurate where available (better straight-line propagation) and less complicated to decode electronically due to the extremely low bit rate (a standard serial port can decode directly from an AM amp).