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Slashdot Asks: Is It Time To Dump Time Zones In Favor of Coordinated Universal Time? (nytimes.com)
Last Sunday, those of us in North America, Europe and some areas of the Middle East rolled back the clock an hour in accordance with Daylight Savings Time (DST). The tradition -- first imposed in Germany 100 years ago -- has been around for so long that many of us fail to question its significance. What is the importance of Daylight Savings Time? Is it still relevant in today's world? Is it time to dump time zones in general? James Gleick makes the case via the New York Times for switching to Coordinated Universal Time, or U.T.C.: When it's noon in Greenwich, Britain, let it be 12 everywhere. No more resetting the clocks. No more wondering what time it is in Peoria or Petropavlovsk. Our biological clocks can stay with the sun, as they have from the dawn of history. Only the numerals will change, and they have always been arbitrary. Some mental adjustment will be necessary at first. Every place will learn a new relationship with the hours. New York (with its longitudinal companions) will be the place where people breakfast at noon, where the sun reaches its zenith around 4 p.m., and where people start dinner close to midnight. ("Midnight" will come to seem a quaint word for the zero hour, where the sun still shines.) In Sydney, the sun will set around 7 a.m., but the Australians can handle it; after all, their winter comes in June. The question has been posed before, but given the timeliness of Daylight Savings Time, we think the question may evoke some new, heartfelt attitudes and beliefs: Is it time to dump time zones in favor of Coordinated Universal Time?
Let's go back to local time. Have the day start at sunrise. Noon is when the Sun crosses the meridian. The day ends at sunset. What happens at night, stays at night.
Not entirely. I've been working in the military weather business for 25 years, and while I mostly think in terms of UTC I still have problems with mapping UTC to local "events" like noon and midnight (although these days it's *mostly* a consequence of DST messing up the offsets). If I still have trouble with it, people who've used local time (with a 12hr clock) their entire lives are going to have a hellish time adapting.
And midnight is particularly problematic... having the hour increment throughout the day and only rollover when most people are asleep is actually conceptually simple and convenient.
Log in or piss off.
Changing everyone to use UTC all the time in order to obviate the problems with Daylight Saving Time is offering a cure rather worse than the disease. Nothing is all that wrong with the system of timezones, defined so 12 Noon is more or less in the middle of the day for everyone. By itself and for certain technical purposes UTC is a good choice, in the same way that base-16 number encoding is, but for everyday civil use it doesn't do the job well. Local time and base-10 works much better there.
If the Daylight Saving is the problem then the solution is to get rid of that then? Stay on local solar time as the existing timezone stipulates, and do not turn the clocks one hour back and forth every few months. The easiest solution is the negative one, in that it means not doing the stupid thing anymore.
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
shifting the clock by 1 hour doesn't do a damn thing other than cause headaches
And heart attacks, as a recent study shows. They measured a statistically significant spike on the few days after the clock is turned forward.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
It's my understanding that elections on a Tuesday were chosen because at the time, they were the weekday on which employees were least likely to receive a weekly paycheck, reducing the risk of employers withholding an entire week's pay as a penalty for voting. Using a weekday instead of a weekend day also avoided preferring the Sabbath regulations of one religion over those of another. And nowadays, if elections were on a Sunday, people would have no way to get to the polls in cities that lack the funding to run their public transportation on Sundays.
Hardly pointless: http://www.popularmechanics.co...
I see your article and raise you another.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There are some benefits to DST, but the preponderance of medical and energy policy research I've seen shows that DST has a net negative effect.
We have also been living with DST so long, that I'd wager that most businesses have adjusted their hours to open later than they would have otherwise, so the extra hour of daylight after work has effectively been nullified. I have not been able to find a good source of numbers for business opening/closing times before DST was implemented, but according to Snopes (http://www.snopes.com/science/daylight.asp) "far fewer businesses stayed open into the later evening hours, so most people tended to rise and retire earlier than they do today, negating the practicality of shifting an hour's worth of daylight away from early morning." You can't fool the body with a clock change alone. People's circadian rhythms follow light, not a clock. I suspect that a fair portion of the reason that people stay up "later" these days is that the clocks are wrong.
If Ben Franklin wanted to have more daylight, he should have just set his own alarm clock ahead and left the rest of us the hell alone!
I'd like this a lot...
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.