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Posted By: grelber Changing the clock redux - 10/16/16 01:49 PM
Achtung / Attention / Берегитесь / Figyelem / Giv akt / Uwaga / Huomio, artie!

To forestall any existential angst, such as occurred a year ago in this forum — Changing the clock — DST goes bye-bye in 3 weeks' time (Nov 6), more than enough time to allay any fears about missing appointments. tongue smirk
Posted By: jchuzi Re: Changing the clock redux - 10/16/16 02:06 PM
Originally Posted By: grelber
Achtung, artie!

To forestall any existential angst, such as occurred a year ago in this forum — Changing the clock — DST goes bye-bye in 3 weeks' time (Dec 6), more than enough time to allay any fears about missing appointments. tongue smirk
I think that you mean November 6. Either that, or we're in for a lot more angst. grin
Posted By: grelber Re: Changing the clock redux - 10/16/16 02:51 PM
Originally Posted By: jchuzi
Originally Posted By: grelber
Achtung, artie!
To forestall any existential angst, such as occurred a year ago in this forum — Changing the clock — DST goes bye-bye in 3 weeks' time (Dec 6), more than enough time to allay any fears about missing appointments. tongue smirk
I think that you mean November 6. Either that, or we're in for a lot more angst. grin

Duly noted ... and repaired.
(A typical slip of the mind and fingers ... in which perhaps something like conflation of Guy Fawkes Day and Pearl Harbor coursed down the same axon. However, I refuse even to think about Aricept®.)
Posted By: Virtual1 Re: Changing the clock redux - 10/24/16 04:18 PM
Wasn't this causing some problems here with forums showing everything unread or something like that awhile back?
Posted By: grelber Re: Changing the clock redux - 11/06/16 06:45 AM
DD-Day (Daylight Delete Day) is here!

Those on DST, crank it back. Those not, as you were.
Posted By: Virtual1 Re: Changing the clock redux - 11/08/16 02:55 PM
random thought... imagine if we went on a "rolling daylight savings time", where days were longer or shorter throughout the year?

But then I was thinking more about this... and if we just QUIT doing DST, noon would still be noon. So maybe instead of adding or removing seconds per day, they'd have to shrink and expand the number of seconds per minute, or minutes per hour, so that we always had 12 hrs of light and 12 hrs of dark.

((chaos ensues))
Posted By: grelber Re: Changing the clock redux - 11/08/16 04:51 PM
Alternatively ...

Time to Dump Time Zones
Posted By: artie505 Re: Changing the clock redux - 11/08/16 05:06 PM
I wonder if that's a good idea?

Zulu time works just fine in its place, but in today's global world it would be an awful PIA trying to figure out what time it REALLY is in Tokyo when Japanese clocks read the same "noon" as ours, whereas it's easy with time zones.
Posted By: grelber Re: Changing the clock redux - 11/08/16 05:39 PM
That's what Sir Sandford Fleming, Canada's foremost railway surveyor and construction engineer of the 19th century, thought when he proposed international standard time in l884.

By the bye, he also designed the first Canadian postage stamp, the 3-penny beaver, issued in 1851.
Posted By: artie505 Re: Changing the clock redux - 11/08/16 08:53 PM
Originally Posted By: grelber
That's what Sir Sandford Fleming, Canada's foremost railway surveyor and construction engineer of the 19th century, thought when he proposed international standard time in l884.

I don't follow that.

It wouldn't have made an iota of difference in 1884.
Posted By: grelber Re: Changing the clock redux - 11/08/16 10:09 PM
Apparently it did vis-à-vis railroad schedules, especially in North America. It was a time when every place had their own time (based on local sun position) and a lot of people missed their trains. Standard time got around that for the most part.
Posted By: artie505 Re: Changing the clock redux - 11/08/16 11:21 PM
OK, same as with planes today; I didn't think of that. blush

I once saw an old map of the US that displayed the "real" time for every city, regardless of time zone; seeing the minute, even second, differences from place to place was kinda fascinating.
Posted By: joemikeb Re: Changing the clock redux - 11/09/16 12:19 AM
The human relationship to time is complicated and perhaps even more complicated by its use in commerce. Greenwich Mean Time was and ingenious and relatively simple way for mariners to know their longitude. Even in today's high tech world of GPS most aircraft, ship, and even train movements are scheduled and logged using Coordinated Universal Time which is the time at Greenwich England. That time is converted to local time at the point of departure and arrival for public consumption and to prevent confusing the uninformed.

Time zones were established to serve the needs of commerce, and in particular in establishing and regularizing business hours. This accounts for the odd ball time zones and sometimes wildly snaking time zone boundaries. Without time zones to regularize work hours, it would be necessary either to know the time offset and business hours for every person and business you do business with or most business would have to be open 24 hours a day.

Daylight savings time was an invention based on the idea of having more daylight hours after work for recreation and shopping. (Some pretty fantastic arguments about energy savings were made, but those have not proven themselves in actual practice.)

Medical researchers are finding more and more evidence indicating messing with the diurnal cycle by the use of artificial lighting (including glowing computer screens) and changing work schedules is deleterious to individual and public health. Apple is aware of this and has added features to iOS such as Nightshift that changes the color value of the screen at local sunrise and sunset, and Bedtime an addition to the clock app that encourages a regular sleep pattern with specific sleep and wake times and a really peaceful alarm of bird song. (I wish those would show up in Sierra as well, particularly the Nightshift feature.)

IMHO Daylight Savings Time was an unsuccessful experiment that needs to be put quietly and permanently to rest (a wooden stake through its heart and the heart of its advocates comes to mind}.

Time zones are useful and probably could be regularized, but the politics doing that would be phenomenal and would probably outweigh any gained benefit. One possible alternative would be to adopt the 15 military (NATO) time zones which are regularized. There are excellent reasons to use Coordinated Universal Time, especially in business and activities that regularly regularly span multiple time zones, and using C.U.T. for local time would take a lot of adapting and relearning for everyone in the world except those living in England, Scotland, Wales, and Greenland. Who knows it might be better for everyone's health in the long run.
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