Daylight Saving Time

[1995hoo]

Of course in the real world there are some major religious objections from people who feel there's something sacred about the concept of a seven-day week.

It wasn't that that got the French to change their minds - it was that humans are suited to 7 day work-rest cycles, not 10 day ones. They changed to decades for religious reasons, being religiously (and viciously) against even the hint of religion. But the decades were scrapped entirely after 10 years, even though the calendar remained for another 3, because the decades did not work. The Soviets (for similar religious reasons) tried similar overhauling the 7 day cycle, only to find out that the best results occur with 7 day cycles...

I didn't say that was what caused the French to scrap the ten-day cycle. Notice I mentioned the unpopularity of having one day off every ten days instead of one day every seven. My reference to religious objections was in the context of the various proposals that still circulate for calendar reform.

People who dislike DST as being illogical ought to support calendar reform efforts that would even out the months and have a standard calendar for every year (say, every year starts on Sunday and ends on Saturday, including leap years).

I'm sorry, that makes no logical sense as an argument...

I don't think it's illogical at all. It seems to me that if someone thinks the simple changing of a clock twice a year is an illogical thing, then having a calendar with a mish-mash of months of uneven lengths and years that start on different days every year should be something such people would find even more illogical. Other than tradition, there's no real reason why February should have 28 days instead of 30 (those days coming at the expense of two of the 31-day months, of course).

Theoretically, if the months were all the same length it would do away with the nuisance of turning the date ahead on your watch several times a year, though I suppose the use of a "blank day" would result in having to turn the day and date backwards once a year....

[oscar]

Of course in the real world there are some major religious objections from people who feel there's something sacred about the concept of a seven-day week.

...

People who dislike DST as being illogical ought to support calendar reform efforts that would even out the months and have a standard calendar for every year (say, every year starts on Sunday and ends on Saturday, including leap years).

I recall reading (hard copy book in a library, ages ago) about one such proposal, which used one (or two, in leap years) "zero days" each year, not assigned to one of the traditional seven days of the week, to keep the calendar stable from year to year.  Much of the book recounted the author's futile arguments with some religious leader, who felt that tampering with the traditional seven-day weekly cycle meant that people would no longer be able to respect the Sabbath on the same day of the week every year, since their religion could not let them ignore the "zero days". 

Of course this would be potentially confusing for people whose birthdays or anniversaries change dates, but the same thing happened with the shift to the Gregorian calendar and everyone eventually adjusted OK. (Thomas Jefferson's birthday was April 2, 1743, Old Style, and he insisted on that date appearing on his grave marker, yet for some reason the University of Virginia observes Founder's Day on April 13, which was his birthday New Style. George Washington's birthday was February 11, 1731, Old Style, but until the Monday holiday law, the US government observed his birthday on February 22 because the New Style date was February 22, 1732.)

Didn't hurt that Pope Gregory put his imprimatur on the changeover.  But that didn't work with Orthodox Christians, who didn't pay attention to the Pope in Rome, and continued using Old Style.

[1995hoo]

Of course in the real world there are some major religious objections from people who feel there's something sacred about the concept of a seven-day week.

...

People who dislike DST as being illogical ought to support calendar reform efforts that would even out the months and have a standard calendar for every year (say, every year starts on Sunday and ends on Saturday, including leap years).

I recall reading (hard copy book in a library, ages ago) about one such proposal, which used one (or two, in leap years) "zero days" each year, not assigned to one of the traditional seven days of the week, to keep the calendar stable from year to year.  Much of the book recounted the author's futile arguments with some religious leader, who felt that tampering with the traditional seven-day weekly cycle meant that people would no longer be able to respect the Sabbath on the same day of the week every year, since their religion could not let them ignore the "zero days". 

....

This is similar to how Tolkien's "Shire Calendar" worked (see below). During the 1950s the UN supported a proposal that would have used days outside the seven-day weekly cycle, but some religious groups' (Christian, Jewish, and Muslim, at a minimum) opposition helped doom the effort.




The French Republican Calendar had a number of other problems aside from those already mentioned in this thread. Among other things, the first day of the year was to be the vernal equinox in Paris; related to that, because the vernal equinox doesn't fall on the same day every year, figuring out when leap year was supposed to happen was a messy endeavor, to the point where the law establishing the calendar actually conflicted with itself!

[english si]

People who dislike DST as being illogical ought to support calendar reform efforts that would even out the months and have a standard calendar for every year (say, every year starts on Sunday and ends on Saturday, including leap years).

I'm sorry, that makes no logical sense as an argument...

I don't think it's illogical at all. It seems to me that if someone thinks the simple changing of a clock twice a year is an illogical thing, then having a calendar with a mish-mash of months of uneven lengths and years that start on different days every year should be something such people would find even more illogical. Other than tradition, there's no real reason why February should have 28 days instead of 30 (those days coming at the expense of two of the 31-day months, of course).

Nope, still a massive non sequitor, even ignoring the straw man reason that you give for why DST is not liked*. I don't know how you got from "don't change the clocks" to "radically overhaul the calender", from "clock time match solar time" to "every month equal length", from "I don't like getting up in the dark in October" to "dates shouldn't change day of the week from year to year". The arguments are, at best, unrelated, at worst, totally the opposite.

*Those who hate DST changes because it is a change are nearly always, IME, pushing for year round DST, not pushing for Standard Time year round. Mostly as they stupidly think that DST is the default time.

[1995hoo]

You are certainly entitled to your opinion!

[english si]

I, myself, have no beef with the concept of DST, just the implementation lasts for too long, with March being about a week too early (or three weeks in the case of North America) and October being about 5 weeks too late (November about 6 weeks too late). DST is fine when the morning time isn't being used, but when dawn is at 0742 (last day of BST in London this year), that hour is being used. 0644 (first day back on GMT) is bad enough, but nearly 8 o'clock dawns makes mid-late October feel like December-without-all-the-lights around here.

You are certainly entitled to your opinion!

Is this a way of saying "I have no logical explaination of the conclusions I came to"?

[1995hoo]

You are certainly entitled to your opinion!

Is this a way of saying "I have no logical explaination of the conclusions I came to"?

No, it was a way of saying "we will agree to disagree." I find what I said perfectly logical. The fact that you think it isn't does not change my position on that.

[kphoger]

Getting up at the crack of dawn is supposed to mean getting up unusually early. Oh! that I were so lucky, to get up at the crack of dawn. I was just starting to, and then DST pulled the rug out. Spring break is next week, and I arrived to work in full darkness this morning. What poppycock!

[Pete from Boston]

Getting up at the crack of dawn is supposed to mean getting up unusually early. Oh! that I were so lucky, to get up at the crack of dawn. I was just starting to, and then DST pulled the rug out. Spring break is next week, and I arrived to work in full darkness this morning. What poppycock!

I look at it this way: you've already got a pretty sweet life if you get to sleep late.  Don't be greedy and also take the morning light from those of us who don't.

[Road Hog]

Now Texas is looking at a legislative move to scrap DST.

http://m.mysanantonio.com/news/politics/texas/article/Lawmaker-hopes-to-end-Daylight-Savings-Time-in-6125661.php?cmpid=twitter-mobile

Essentially this means the entire part of the state in the Central Time Zone would shift to Mountain time in the summer, and the little sliver that includes El Paso would become a PDT island. This proposal needs some serious thinking-through.

[02 Park Ave]

I would like New Jersey to abandon DST to show its independence from New York and Philadelphia.

[Pete from Boston]

I would like New Jersey to abandon DST to show its independence from New York and Philadelphia.

It has a constitution that already accomplishes that.

[Laura]

I wish they would pick one or the other (I don't care which) and stick with it. Now I have to spend the next six weeks waiting for my internal clock to sync with the external clock.

Maybe not six weeks, but people who act like a one hour daylight savings time jump is the same thing as getting in a car or plane to drive to another time zone don't get it.

It's substantially harder to execute your current, daily routine and have it shift by an hour than it is to do something different in another time zone. I work 8 to 5 Monday through Friday and am pretty hard wired to get up at 6:50 AM every morning, etc, if I am at home in my own routine. Shifting everything backward by an hour is hard. If I drive to South Dakota, I'm off the routine so I don't even notice an hour time change (typically if traveling, I can go up to three hours in either direction without really noticing a difference, 7 or 8 before I'd consider myself "jet-lagged"), but an hour change at home is hard.

You nailed it.  I have no idea why I'm the first person to point this out after 100 posts. I tell people every time change that it was easier for me to adjust 12 hours when I went to Vietnam than it is for me to adjust one hour. When there is a huge shift from traveling, your body has to compensate and adjust quickly, which is easier to do since your routine is thrown off anyway. But with a one hour change, it's near impossible for me to adjust because it's not too far off from my typical routine, but enough to be annoying.

I usually go to bed around 11 pm. Or at least I did last week. Now it is 11:15 and I'm still up because my body thinks it is only 10:15. So I won't be able to sleep until 12 midnight DST to line back up with 11 pm EST.

However, I still have to get up at the same time, 7 am. So now I am getting only 7 hours of sleep instead of 8. I won't be able to get back to eight hours of sleep until I get sleep deprived enough to fall asleep early, which probably won't happen until next week.

I, myself, have no beef with the concept of DST, just the implementation lasts for too long, with March being about a week too early (or three weeks in the case of North America) and October being about 5 weeks too late (November about 6 weeks too late). DST is fine when the morning time isn't being used, but when dawn is at 0742 (last day of BST in London this year), that hour is being used. 0644 (first day back on GMT) is bad enough, but nearly 8 o'clock dawns makes mid-late October feel like December-without-all-the-lights around here.

This, this, this. I'm fine with DST when it is properly aligned. However, due to bullshit lobbies, we now have unnecessary weeks where it's dark in the morning when it doesn't need to be.

iPhone

[NWI_Irish96]

I know a lot of people don't like this, but I wouldn't mind if DST stuck around all year. Yeah, it would get light later in the morning, but the fact that the sun is still high in the sky makes me happy.

Getting light later in the morning is great, if you don't care at all about millions of kids at higher risk for accidents and attacks while waiting for school buses in the dark.  But that's insignificant compared to adults wanting more daylight in the evening.

Site stats proving that.

For the most part, the majority of attempted luring incidents occur in the afternoon as kids come home from school, which are almost always in daylight, year around.

Here is a site http://www.hoosiersforcentraltime.com/archives/oldweb/index.html that has done a lot of research into the risks of later sunrises

[NWI_Irish96]

I know a lot of people don't like this, but I wouldn't mind if DST stuck around all year. Yeah, it would get light later in the morning, but the fact that the sun is still high in the sky makes me happy.

Getting light later in the morning is great, if you don't care at all about millions of kids at higher risk for accidents and attacks while waiting for school buses in the dark.  But that's insignificant compared to adults wanting more daylight in the evening.

Then change the school sessions then.

BTW Daylight or Standard time kids in Orlando go to school in the dark!

During the shortest days of the year, you are not going to be able to avoid school travel in the dark, but the rest of the year you can. 

In South Bend, sunrise on Monday 3/9 was 8:08 a.m.  That just seems ridiculously late to me.  If you want to change school sessions to avoid kids waiting for morning buses in the dark then you're having schools start at 9am and possibly later. 

My school district does have the elementary schools start at 9am to avoid kids being out in dark mornings, but due to bus transportation the different levels require staggered start times so the middle schools start at 8:20 and the high school at 7:40, so there are buses out in the dark during the majority of the school year.

[J N Winkler]

It is real, but the disruption of having to change schedule in place (as opposed to being off one's normal routine while travelling) is easy to exaggerate.  What would you do if you had to catch an early morning flight and wanted to be sure you had enough sleep beforehand?

[kphoger]

^^ Id est, what would you do when your normal routine is disrupted for travel? ...

In answer to the question, when I need to leave early (for me, it's been by car and not by plane for the past eight years), I usually end up going to bed later than usual. Besides packing in the evening, my mind also is usually racing with details of the trip and, ironically, worry that I'll sleep through my alarm. But that disruption is easier to overcome than simply having to wake up an hour earlier every day. Even when I've traveled to Europe, the jet lag was gone after the first day of tiredness. Even when I've traveled to Mexico (long trip, same timezone) and our schedule has meant getting up an hour earlier than usual every day (as it often does), that's easy to adjust to because the setting is different. But suddenly switching from getting up with the sun to getting up in the dark while all other cues remain the same makes me groggy in the morning for weeks. Part of it is that I'm groggy when getting up in the dark no matter what, and had just gotten past it with the coming of spring, but part of it is that my mind takes some time to stop thinking of my night as "shifted" rather than "shorter".

[formulanone]

Maybe not six weeks, but people who act like a one hour daylight savings time jump is the same thing as getting in a car or plane to drive to another time zone don't get it.

It's substantially harder to execute your current, daily routine and have it shift by an hour than it is to do something different in another time zone.

See, I don't find it terribly difficult because I have a rather limited routine when it comes to waking, eating, working, sleeping. This occurs while dealing with (usually) time-zone differences about every week or two, then maybe I'll have some in the same time zone. I fly home every weekend and catch back up to my time zone; with kids and social expectations, you're kind of forced back into things. I might wake up early one week because the operating hours I'm at are an hour earlier (or later), and I might work one hour later one day and not the next. I might have a four-hour day or a twelve-hour work day, it depends on scheduling and circumstances, or travel requirements. The gaps between awake - eat - work - eat - work - play - eat - work/play/lazy - sleep vary almost every day.

It's a routine because I do pretty much the same things, but they're always shifted 1-2 hours away regardless of time zone, just the circumstances I find myself in for work. It doesn't really seem to bother me much although there's times I'm up at 3am for an early flight, later for a later flight the next week. So my sleeping patterns are a bit off, but I shake if off after two cups of coffee; I generally sleep well, unless I'm ill or at an extremely noisy environment. I was never the picture of perfect health, but I personally don't feel as out of sync with an hour time change, and I haven't been told by a doctor that I'm making things much worse. My job does wear some people out, and some people like having routine, because they know when they can expect leisure, familiarity, and their gut tells them it's preferable; we're hard-wired to seek comfort and in our hierarchy of needs, that sort of environment helps.

Personally, I like the extra light in the evening, because that's when I can make more use it. I think I'm happier for that; it's a nice feeling to see the sunset and nature's colors from someplace other than your office window, or knowing you've made something out of your work day.

[Crazy Volvo Guy]

Personally, as someone who has to be at work at the reasonable hour of 8 am, I welcome the "extra" daylight in the morning.

Personally, as someone who drives for a living with no specific schedule and suffers mildly from SAD (that's Seasonal Affective Depression - though never formally diagnosed, I'm reasonably certain) I welcome extra daylight in the evening.  I am definitely a supporter of year-round DST.

And as for those of you with 8-5 jobs, you're either going to go to work in darkness or come home in darkness, but you're not going to do both.  Logically I would think you'd want a little daylight after work if at all possible, since that's when most people are going to do leisure things.

[kphoger]

We do outdoor leisure activities during the warmer months, when the days are getting longer anyway. In the winter, it can get dark at 2:00 PM for all I care, because we're only going out if we need to, and who needs sunlight to run errands by.

[Pete from Boston]

I don't know anyone with a regular day gig that gets home with enough time to put a lot of daylight to use in the non-DST part of the calendar, and much/most of that stretch is not super conducive to short-term outdoor activity anyway.  Those of you in warmer climes may disagree.

I just don't see the tremendous utility of late daylight during Standard Time that folks champion.  I would say, if you're bundling up and getting outside during the cold winter months (which lots of us do like to do) already, fine, let's talk about how later daylight would help.  But if the weekends are any basis to judge, most people aren't out there doing daylight-dependent things after November anyway.  It keeps coming back to the desire to simply "see the sun."

[Duke87]

It keeps coming back to the desire to simply "see the sun."

This is not simply some easily dismissed as irrelevant desire, though. Lack of seeing the sun is well known to negatively impact people's moods, although different people are affected to different degrees. Some can shrug and not think much of it. Others get depressed every winter to the point where they need medication to treat it. I am not at either extreme but it does noticeably affect me.

[vdeane]

I also suffer from mild SAD.  It's depressing when you see mostly artificial light (and working in an office, the only daylight you see in winter is the morning commute).

[The Nature Boy]

DST has no effect on my ability to wake up. I don't have a window in my bedroom (or my office for that matter).

[Pete from Boston]

It keeps coming back to the desire to simply "see the sun."

This is not simply some easily dismissed as irrelevant desire, though. Lack of seeing the sun is well known to negatively impact people's moods, although different people are affected to different degrees. Some can shrug and not think much of it. Others get depressed every winter to the point where they need medication to treat it. I am not at either extreme but it does noticeably affect me.

You're right, and I think the meager gains at either end of a workday–particularly stuck in a car–make little difference in this.  Naturally-lit indoor workplaces should be a goal when possible.  And as much as people shun the elements, bundling up and getting a walk or something in goes a long way.  I recognize the reality of the workplace, but mopy workers aren't usually such great workers.