Why I like DST
March 10th, 2013 at 8:34 pm by Dr. Drang
I know I’ve said some of this before, but if bloggers didn’t repeat themselves where would their content come from?
I like Daylight Saving Time, and the advantages it brings more than make up for the slight disruption in my schedule. In fact, the most annoying thing to me about the DST changeovers is hearing people complain about them. The “lost hour of sleep” is especially rich. Who are these hothouse flowers who always get exactly the same amount of sleep except for that terrible day in March? To hear them talk, you’d think they never stay up late watching a movie or reading a book. Only prisoners have such regimented lives.
I am sympathetic to parents with small children, because their changing sleep patterns can mess up your day. That problem, though, is worse when we change back to Standard Time in the fall. On what my wife calls The Day That Never Ends, the kids get up according to their internal clock but insist on going to bed according to the clock on the wall. Still, that lasts only a day or two. (Special note to Jason Kottke: If your kids take two weeks to adjust to the change, you’re doing something wrong.)
So what’s good about DST? Go to this page run by the US Naval Observatory, enter where you live, and look at an entire year’s worth of sunrise and sunset time given in Standard Time. Here’s what I get for Chicago:
o , o , CHICAGO, ILLINOIS Astronomical Applications Dept.
Location: W087 41, N41 51 Rise and Set for the Sun for 2013 U. S. Naval Observatory
Washington, DC 20392-5420
Central Standard Time
Jan. Feb. Mar. Apr. May June July Aug. Sept. Oct. Nov. Dec.
Day Rise Set Rise Set Rise Set Rise Set Rise Set Rise Set Rise Set Rise Set Rise Set Rise Set Rise Set Rise Set
h m h m h m h m h m h m h m h m h m h m h m h m h m h m h m h m h m h m h m h m h m h m h m h m
01 0718 1631 0703 1706 0625 1741 0533 1816 0447 1850 0418 1919 0420 1929 0445 1909 0517 1824 0548 1732 0623 1645 0659 1621
02 0718 1632 0702 1708 0624 1743 0531 1818 0445 1851 0418 1920 0420 1929 0446 1907 0518 1822 0549 1730 0625 1643 0700 1620
03 0718 1633 0701 1709 0622 1744 0530 1819 0444 1852 0417 1921 0421 1929 0447 1906 0519 1820 0550 1729 0626 1642 0701 1620
04 0718 1634 0700 1710 0620 1745 0528 1820 0443 1853 0417 1922 0421 1929 0448 1905 0520 1819 0551 1727 0627 1641 0702 1620
05 0718 1634 0659 1711 0619 1746 0526 1821 0442 1854 0417 1922 0422 1929 0449 1904 0521 1817 0552 1725 0628 1640 0703 1620
06 0718 1635 0657 1713 0617 1747 0525 1822 0440 1855 0416 1923 0423 1928 0450 1903 0522 1815 0553 1723 0630 1639 0704 1620
07 0718 1636 0656 1714 0616 1748 0523 1823 0439 1856 0416 1924 0423 1928 0451 1901 0523 1814 0554 1722 0631 1638 0705 1620
08 0718 1638 0655 1715 0614 1750 0521 1824 0438 1857 0416 1924 0424 1928 0452 1900 0524 1812 0556 1720 0632 1637 0706 1620
09 0718 1639 0654 1717 0612 1751 0520 1825 0437 1858 0416 1925 0425 1927 0453 1859 0525 1810 0557 1718 0633 1635 0707 1620
10 0718 1640 0653 1718 0611 1752 0518 1826 0436 1859 0415 1925 0425 1927 0454 1857 0526 1808 0558 1717 0634 1634 0708 1620
11 0717 1641 0651 1719 0609 1753 0516 1828 0435 1900 0415 1926 0426 1926 0455 1856 0527 1807 0559 1715 0636 1633 0708 1620
12 0717 1642 0650 1720 0607 1754 0515 1829 0434 1901 0415 1926 0427 1926 0456 1855 0528 1805 0600 1714 0637 1632 0709 1620
13 0717 1643 0649 1722 0606 1755 0513 1830 0432 1902 0415 1927 0428 1925 0457 1853 0529 1803 0601 1712 0638 1632 0710 1620
14 0716 1644 0647 1723 0604 1756 0512 1831 0431 1903 0415 1927 0428 1925 0458 1852 0530 1801 0602 1710 0639 1631 0711 1620
15 0716 1645 0646 1724 0602 1758 0510 1832 0430 1904 0415 1928 0429 1924 0459 1850 0531 1800 0603 1709 0641 1630 0711 1621
16 0715 1646 0645 1725 0600 1759 0509 1833 0429 1905 0415 1928 0430 1923 0500 1849 0532 1758 0604 1707 0642 1629 0712 1621
17 0715 1648 0643 1727 0559 1800 0507 1834 0429 1906 0415 1928 0431 1923 0501 1847 0533 1756 0606 1706 0643 1628 0713 1621
18 0714 1649 0642 1728 0557 1801 0505 1835 0428 1907 0415 1929 0432 1922 0502 1846 0534 1754 0607 1704 0644 1627 0713 1622
19 0714 1650 0640 1729 0555 1802 0504 1836 0427 1908 0415 1929 0433 1921 0503 1844 0535 1753 0608 1703 0645 1627 0714 1622
20 0713 1651 0639 1730 0554 1803 0502 1837 0426 1909 0416 1929 0433 1920 0504 1843 0536 1751 0609 1701 0647 1626 0714 1622
21 0712 1652 0637 1732 0552 1804 0501 1839 0425 1910 0416 1929 0434 1919 0505 1841 0537 1749 0610 1700 0648 1625 0715 1623
22 0712 1654 0636 1733 0550 1805 0459 1840 0424 1911 0416 1929 0435 1919 0506 1840 0538 1747 0611 1658 0649 1625 0715 1624
23 0711 1655 0635 1734 0549 1807 0458 1841 0423 1912 0416 1930 0436 1918 0507 1838 0539 1746 0613 1657 0650 1624 0716 1624
24 0710 1656 0633 1735 0547 1808 0456 1842 0423 1913 0417 1930 0437 1917 0508 1837 0540 1744 0614 1655 0651 1623 0716 1625
25 0709 1657 0631 1737 0545 1809 0455 1843 0422 1914 0417 1930 0438 1916 0510 1835 0542 1742 0615 1654 0652 1623 0717 1625
26 0708 1659 0630 1738 0543 1810 0454 1844 0421 1915 0417 1930 0439 1915 0511 1834 0543 1741 0616 1653 0654 1622 0717 1626
27 0708 1700 0628 1739 0542 1811 0452 1845 0421 1915 0418 1930 0440 1914 0512 1832 0544 1739 0617 1651 0655 1622 0717 1627
28 0707 1701 0627 1740 0540 1812 0451 1846 0420 1916 0418 1930 0441 1913 0513 1830 0545 1737 0619 1650 0656 1622 0718 1627
29 0706 1702 0538 1813 0449 1847 0420 1917 0419 1930 0442 1912 0514 1829 0546 1735 0620 1649 0657 1621 0718 1628
30 0705 1704 0537 1814 0448 1848 0419 1918 0419 1930 0443 1911 0515 1827 0547 1734 0621 1647 0658 1621 0718 1629
31 0704 1705 0535 1815 0419 1919 0444 1910 0516 1825 0622 1646 0718 1630
Add one hour for daylight time, if and when in use.
Sorry about the need to scroll horizontally; that’s just how the results are formatted.
If we stayed on Standard Time throughout the year, sunrise here in the Chicago area would be between 4:15 and 4:30 am from the middle of May through the middle of July. And if you check the times for civil twilight, which is when it’s bright enough to see without artificial light, you’ll find that that starts half an hour earlier.
This is insane and a complete waste of sunlight. Good for a nation of farmers, I suppose, but of no value to anyone in our current urban/suburban society except those people who get up and go running before work. And I see no reason to encourage them.
DST haters often point out “studies that prove” that the DST changeover costs us billions of dollars in lost productivity. There are three problems with these studies:
- First, they’re obvious bullshit and, like all bullshit studies, undermine the public’s confidence in real science and real research.
- Second, do these “studies” ever look into the productivity of people who can’t get a good night’s sleep from May through July because the sun streams into their bedroom at an ungodly hour and the birds start singing outside their window at three-fucking-thirty in the morning? No, they do not.
- And finally, even if it did cause a net loss of productivity, so what? Everything of value in life causes lost productivity: eating, drinking, talking with your friends, playing with your children, looking at the stars, everything.
If, by the way, you think the solution is to stay on DST throughout the year, I can only tell you that we tried that back in the 70s and it didn’t turn out well. Sunrise here in Chicago was after 8:00 am, which put school children out on the street at bus stops before dawn in the dead of winter.1 It was the same on the East Coast. Nobody liked that.
People complain about the complications DST causes in scheduling, especially in our connected world where international phone calls have to be arranged between people in countries whose time changes occur at different points in the calendar. This is a real problem, but only because our vaunted technology has let us down.
The set of rules for calendars, time zones, and clock changes is exactly the sort of thing computers should be good at handling for us, but because of programmer arrogance and incompetence, we end up with problems that shouldn’t exist. In the past few years we’ve had Zunes that wouldn’t boot, Playstations that wouldn’t play, and iPhone alarms that wouldn’t alarm (again and again and again).
Because the rules are already in place, programmers only have to learn what they are and implement them. This is where the incompetence and arrogance come in. Programmers don’t bother to learn the rules and think they can be tossed off in a few lines of code. We end up with devices that promise to keep us on track but are less reliable than a paper calendar and a windup alarm clock.
So instead of signing a stupid petition, agitate for better programmers. And then go have a nice walk after dinner tomorrow; it’ll still be light out.
-
And if you’re wondering why I’m not accounting for predawn light in this case, it’s because winter skies tend to be more overcast and don’t provide as much twilight as summer skies do. ↩
March 10th, 2013 at 9:49 pm
I strongly disagree with you on this issue.
I strongly suspect you are going to have to lock comments on this page before too long.
Anyway, I don’t see why we need to screw up clocks to wake up an hour earlier or later in different parts of the year.
“School hours: M–F 8:30am–3:30pm (9:30am–4:30pm Nov.–Mar.)”
There, done. Get the TV stations to agree to move their programs off by an hour too (not that it matters anymore in the age of Netflix), and we’ll have all the good of DST with none of the bad.
March 10th, 2013 at 9:54 pm
You know what I’m starting to think? Time zones were a premature optimization. In the olden days, it would be very difficult to make a time table for a train if each city has its own time system. Nowadays, all that junk can be figured out automatically by computers. And if people in two different towns need to coordinate a meeting, they can just use UTC. I say lets abolish DST and let every smartphone tell time based on its GPS as well!
March 10th, 2013 at 10:36 pm
You don’t go far enough, Carl. All businesses should have their hours determined by the number of hours before and after the local noon. With the tremendously reliable software we have now, opening and closing times could be changed on a daily basis, not just twice a year.
Even better, we could go back to a system with twelve hours of daylight and twelve hours of night, with the length of the hour changing every day. Analemmas for everyone!
March 10th, 2013 at 11:10 pm
“Only prisoners have such regimented lives.”
Or students.
March 11th, 2013 at 12:02 am
@Shelly
Really? I thought students led the least regimented life of any adult, unless you mean primary/secondary students, who have enough energy to survive DST.
I agree with Drang; the better nighttime and daytime hours improve life in Ottawa immensely.
March 11th, 2013 at 12:50 am
If we’re going to discuss arrogance, let’s discuss the arrogance of assuming that you know that developers are incompetent when you clearly have no idea about the complexity of DST. Even the Wikipedia article touches on some of the complicating factors, and it doesn’t even begin to scratch the service. If it’s so easy, why is it that there are so many problems with the time change? Occam’s Razor tells us that it’s not as simple as you make it out to be.
It’s not just that there’s some “set of rules for calendars, time zones, and clock changes”. Anyone who’s actually worked on an application that’s impacted by the time change knows that there is no “set of rules” for all countries on the planet (or all states/provinces/territories/whatever within those countries). For example, for those primarily Muslim countries that do observe DST, several of them stop observing DST during Ramadan. The dates of Ramadan aren’t fixed, and as of this writing, the 2013 date hasn’t even been determined. (The primarily-Muslim countries that don’t observe DST usually cite Ramadan as a major reason in doing so.)
Further, it’s not just technology. There’s actual humans involved in all of this, even when our technology does take care of updating the clocks for us. Those of us who work with international teams (or have friends/family overseas) get used to a rule of thumb for when we can communicate with them. That rule of thumb gets broken twice per year, for a few weeks each time, when people accidentally book meetings outside of working hours (or simply didn’t reschedule a recurring meeting that is now outside of working hours for a few weeks) because they forgot about the difference in time changes between their location and yours.
I am amused that you dismiss arguments about the impact of DST on children for those who dislike DST, but then use an argument about children having to wait at bus stops in the dark in your argument to keep it.
March 11th, 2013 at 1:13 am
You laugh, but I was thinking about that too! Why not? It wouldn’t be the most radical rearrangement of the time system.
What’s the point of having a time system? Why did the ancient world invent clocks? So they could force people to work for certain hours of the day and coordinate when certain activities will happen. Well, if we still have the second defined as N vibrations of a Cesium atom, we can still measure durations accurately, and if we still have UTC, we can still coordinate activity across the world.
March 11th, 2013 at 1:53 am
I sometimes have problems falling asleep. As a result, I have a pretty tight sleeping schedule. My phone actually reminds me to go to bed at a specific time. Obviously, I can ignore it from time to time. If I do, I go back to the schedule the next day. That’s very different from completely changing the schedule by an hour twice a year.
Also, studies show that schools should start later than 8am anyway. http://www.cehd.umn.edu/research/highlights/Sleep/
March 11th, 2013 at 1:56 am
Reluctant to chime in, as I see that things are already getting heated. It’s partly rhetoric, people—leave aside the personal attacks.
A couple of years ago I was firmly in the “DST is stupid and we should end it” camp. And Dr. Drang convinced me (on Twitter and his previous blog post) that it did have some practical value. Now I’m more on the fence. I still think the “saves energy” argument is stupid, but doing an adjustment to put daylight at rational hours makes some sense to me. That being said, I am living abroad this year, and the (lack of) international coordination is a pain.
But I mostly wanted to respond to two things:
Calendar on Mac OS X handles this fine, in theory. If you enter an appointment in a particular time zone, then it does the conversion. I have a bunch of recurring meetings. Whether they moved this weekend or not depends on which time zone I used to enter them. (Ireland changes to “Summer Time” on March 31.) But no one thinks about this when they enter an appointment in their calendar. And even if you were to try, there are too many dependencies. I wound up leaving some meetings unchanged for my colleagues in the US, but others had to change on the US side because of hard constraints here. It is difficult to see how to solve this problem with software.
Not really true. The rules in the U.S. most recently changed in 2007. We have a car with GPS that supposedly changes to DST automatically, but we had to turn that feature off because it is programmed to the old changeover dates, with no mechanism for a software update. The rules are still in flux, it would seem…
March 11th, 2013 at 2:07 am
I’m not against DST. I’m against a stupid idea of resetting clocks twice a year. Make DST permanent - just like Russians did. It’s not about waking up early - it’s about stupid time manipulation.
We all should use one global universal time (London, Chicago or Timbuktu - it does not matter). I can wake up at 4am or 1pm or 8pm - it does not change anything.
March 11th, 2013 at 2:19 am
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/eliminate-bi-annual-time-change-caused-daylight-savings-time/ShChxpKh
March 11th, 2013 at 2:29 am
TesTeq hit my thought, which I’ve certainly had before. Since this isn’t a nation of farmers anymore, biasing the sunlight hours toward the evening year-round makes perfect sense to me.
March 11th, 2013 at 4:11 am
I live up at 56 degrees north, here in Edinburgh. For historical reasons like most of the western world, we use DST too (playing by EU rules, not US ones). Using the good Doctor’s aforelinked tabulator, I see our UTC sunset stretches beyond 9 o’clock in summer; which BST then makes 10 “at night”. Add civil twilight and there’s little time a sun averse Drang might get to sleep here, as the birds twitter loudly from 3 in the morning, in any case, in the subsequent gloaming of the bright night. No wonder our northern cousins in St. Petersburg call midsummer the “white nights”. Nautical twilight never ends so there’s scarcely any stars.
And then in winter, kids are herded into school in near complete darkness and barely leave it again before the sun’s back down once more, well before 4 o’clock. High latitudes seem to ask for more than merely one hour of adjustment throughout the year, or to abandon the approach entirely. As indeed Russia has.
As for morning runners: a similarly minded outdoorsman was DST’s leading proponent in Britain, for the greater convenience of his beloved summer golf.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#History
Lastly: software.
Remember the iPhone mute switch kerfuffle? I was reminded of it by the latest Ihnatko Almanac. The problem addressed by that switch is one of user intent. When is mute really mute? Apple made an assumption, which turns out not to be true for newly equipped iPhone users in attendance of symphonic orchestras led by haughty and irascible conductors who will in fact stop the entire performance unless all phones are silent, and said user is too new to realise he even has an alarm on his iPhone, which was placed there by his secretary and so great awkwardness ensues. Pity. Andy likes the Android way, were the user can install his own system extension or whatever they call it, and fiddle away. Great if the user is a nerd who finds the process entertaining, but untrue for normals.
In short: there are problems no amount of intelligent code alone can fix. Appointments arranged across time domains (by people with better things to do than learn about the worldwide regimes in use) are one of them.
March 11th, 2013 at 5:23 am
I have an alarm clock that sets itself according to some radio signal and auto-adjust to DST… except that I live in Hawaii, one of the few sane, DST-less states in the US. Which means that twice a year I have to manually fix the time on my self-time setting alarm clock. :-/
March 11th, 2013 at 7:32 am
Nadyne,
I’m not sure why you interpret “the set of rules” as “the set of rules for one country that also apply to every other country.” That certainly wasn’t my intent. If you reread the passage that has you upset, you’ll see that my complaint was with programmers who oversimplify time and date rules.
As for Ramadan, the problem isn’t one of complexity, it’s of impossibility. When a date is set by proclamation rather than by algorithm, then, by definition, no algorithm can predict it. My father used to say impossible problems take the least effort because you shouldn’t even try.
As for incompetence, you should follow the links to the examples I gave. Those errors are not the result of complexity.
Allen,
I admire the hubris, if not the intelligence, of the makers of your GPS. Permanently programming in dates that can be changed at the whim of both federal and state governments takes guts. My intent was to limit my complaint to devices that are network-connected and can adjust to these changes. I should have included that caveat.
(Does your GPS get updated with new maps? Maybe its programmers expected to make algorithm changes during those updates.)
Jasper,
I don’t know what can be done for people who live practically in the Arctic Circle. I’m surprised, though, to hear you mention sunlight at 10 pm; from what I’ve heard, Scotland sees constant rain, and the sun is just “that spot where the clouds are a bit brighter.”
PAUL S,
First, stop shouting. Second, a comment that’s nothing more than a link to a page that’s already linked to in the original post is generally considered worthless. Normally, I’d take pity and delete it, but I’m feeling feisty this morning, so I’m going to leave it up. It’s the blogging equivalent of sticking your head on a pike outside my castle walls.
March 11th, 2013 at 7:53 am
That’s just whingeing: our one true national past time. Slap a couple of rainy days together and suddenly everyone’s united in grumbling about how “awfy dreich” the season is. By the time it really has been pouring down for a week, it’s usually August and we have the reassuring sight of the surge of tourists in town for the Edinburgh Festival; getting drenched. There’s nothing more Edinburghian than consoling visitors that it’s always as bad as this. It’s not. We’re just evil for holding it a month after it should be.
Our weather’s sort of like yours in the Midwest, only less extreme in winter (down here in the Lowlands) and more predictably dank, when we get a bit New England instead. It’s no coincidence Scots settled in that corner of the Americas a little more willingly than somewhere as sunny as we say we want, like Jamaica.
March 11th, 2013 at 7:53 am
“Only prisoners have such regimented lives.”
Or parents.
March 11th, 2013 at 9:07 am
Wait, you claim DST time complainers who complain about lost hours are wrong because they don’t keep a strict sleeping schedule anyway, but yet you want to keep it because you can’t bring yourself to get up early?
Then you claim the productivity studies are BS, but in your argument you stake a lost productivity claim on getting up early. Ever stop to think that maybe people might go to bed earlier to compensate?
You also never seemed to have heard of blinds for your bedroom window.
And since when is our productivity tied to daylight anyway? Make your own schedule that works for you.
March 11th, 2013 at 9:39 am
I love your diatribes because they bring out the stupidest smart people around in the comments. It’s amazing how they can draw some of the most harebrained conclusions by slicing and dicing the text in ways other than how they were composed. Also, they apparently do not follow links or read the entire article.
March 11th, 2013 at 9:48 am
@Gabe
Newspaper editors have always known that the headline is enough. (And when the article doesn’t quite reach the conclusions you want it to: let the headline say otherwise!) Plenty of people just read the headlines, then “skim” the prose; if that. Doesn’t matter a jot what was in fact said, their conclusions are already in place.
@Gustav
The whole point of clock time is to coordinate events with other people. Like showing up at work. So there are consequences to fiddling the hour, as long as people agree to bide by it. I hear this is not such an issue on the Pacific coast, however.
March 11th, 2013 at 9:51 am
The standardisation of the changeover times was actually going quite nicely (last weekend in March/October for most of Europe), and then for some reason, the Yanks decided to move AWAY from these dates so that we now have an additional 6 weeks of confusion during the year.
The further you are from the equator, the more it makes sense to have DST for the reasons described in the article.
March 11th, 2013 at 10:14 am
All I get from this is that you don’t want to invest in better curtains, so the rest of us should screw up our schedules twice a year. How about we take a collection, buy you some better curtains, and move on with our new, more-rested lives? I’m in for $5.
March 11th, 2013 at 10:26 am
Didn’t we fix this this problem back in the ’90s when we all switched to Swatch Internet Time?
I’m not knowledgeable enough about how time works to understand the connection, but if the alternative is hourly anal enemas, I’ll stick with DST thankyouverymuch.
March 11th, 2013 at 10:29 am
Ah, just remembered something else: software DST switches aren’t just an issue of “smart programmers”. There’s the very real problem that one particular hour occurs twice in a row every year, while another one is missing.
This can cause all kinds of unintended side-effects, like running certain jobs twice in a day when they should only run once, or not at all because they were scheduled to run during the hour that didn’t exist.
This is something all programmers have to consider at all times. If you’re writing banking software, for example, making a mistake can have real monetary effects (e.g. you don’t want to charge people twice because something occurred during that double-hour).
If you’re writing hospital software, it’s even worse. For example, you don’t want to automatically give people injections twice, or forget to give one. This stuff has real-world consequences. Just complaining about stupid programmers won’t help the person who got screwed up because somebody made a mistake.
March 11th, 2013 at 11:05 am
I agree. Our notion of a subdivided day and the clock itself is a human construct to serve us. We should always implement whatever changes that make our arbitrary designs as productive and self-serving as possible. Having sunrise at 4:15 am is preposterous. Move the time.
March 11th, 2013 at 12:13 pm
A friend of mine recently quoted this old Native American quip on the subject: “Who else but a white man would cut a foot off one end of a blanket and stitch it to the other side and believe he’d made it longer.”
March 11th, 2013 at 12:56 pm
@Drang - I’m not sure why you’re presuming that I’m upset, but then I’m still unclear as to why you presume that errors caused by the complexity (and ever-moving target) of DST are the cause of arrogance and incompetence. I also didn’t interpret your statement about a “set of rules” as being a set of rules for a single country; sets of rules can be complex and cover a lot of ground (in this case, “a lot of ground” is “the whole planet”). And that’s the point: the set of rules regarding DST is complex. At some point during the year, there is guaranteed to be a change in date of DST somewhere in the world, and the news of that change doesn’t always filter back to every single software developer who will need to update their code because some tinpot dictator decided to change the date of DST in their country, or because you didn’t know when a country which does observe DST would stop observing DST in the middle (and not even trying to handle DST correctly for those countries is not an option). Given the complexity of DST, it’s fertile ground for mistakes. Blaming those mistakes on arrogant and incompetent developers when you clearly don’t understand the complexities of dealing with this in your code every single year is at least as arrogant as the arrogance that you ascribe to developers at companies as diverse as your examples of Sony, Apple, and Microsoft.
March 11th, 2013 at 1:50 pm
Here in Phoenix, AZ we don’t change our clocks. The sun rises at 5:20 am at it’s earliest in late June and 7:32 am at it’s latest in mid-January. In the summer the sun sets as late at 7:41 pm in early July and as early as 5:18 in mid-December.
I lived in California last year and I was surprised at the shock to my system that came with the time changes. The spring change was a little easier to deal with than the fall one. I remember being surprised at the number of accidents during rush-hour as the well-lit ride home was now completed in darkness.
Personally, I’m glad I live in a place without the time change. Life feels better this way.
March 11th, 2013 at 2:14 pm
Alex: It’s not about making the blanket longer; it’s about making the blanket more effective. If the blanket slowly slides up each night until it’s covering my face but my feet are cold, then cutting off the top foot and attaching it to the bottom is the perfect solution.
March 11th, 2013 at 2:39 pm
It’s much simpler to know that summer means longer days than to keep track of this DST bullshit. Oh no, we like some stupid number to wake up. We don’t care about anything else. It’s winter and we want to wake up late. But instead of just waking up late, we’ll also change the time on the clock to make up feel like we’re not waking up late. How stupid.
March 11th, 2013 at 2:58 pm
Most of what I would have to say has already been said (notably by Nadyne), but I’ll add one thought:
8am sunrise in December sounds fine to me. Dangerous for school kids? Start school later. For everybody else, this sounds like a good compromise to me. Make DST permanent, end the switchover, one less problem to solve.
March 11th, 2013 at 3:05 pm
How resistant we humans are to change!
As I read this article I was struck by the author’s argument that DST should apply because he didn’t want to get up earlier at certain times of the year. However, on going back and checking the time variations between sunrise according to the chart I can see why certain other commenters have noted that when far from the equator the use of DST makes sense - certainly a 3-hour difference is larger than a one-hour difference.
For me, it’s the compression of the change into a single evening that hits me hardest, not the change itself. If we were to follow the natural rhythms of the seasons, then according to the above chart the maximum rate of change for the author is 52 minutes in one month - which is still substantial but nowhere near as confronting as 60 minutes in one night. There are natural therapy techniques that can (apparently) assist with handling the shock of the change, but to insist that it’s entirely due to fitness may be a bit misleading.
As we move to a world where our technology assists us in leading lives of our own choosing (working the hours we want, with compromises that let us participate effectively in teams however they may be geographically located), I see fewer and fewer reasons for the clumsy adjustment that is DST and would much prefer to return to patterns that we as a species have evolved to deal with over millennia.
Regimentation has its benefits, but as my mother always told me: too much of any one thing is bad for you. :)
March 11th, 2013 at 3:46 pm
DST actually kills people, so I disagree with you entirely:
http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-daylight-saving-time-health-dangers-20130311,0,2861449.story
March 11th, 2013 at 3:51 pm
Sing it!
March 11th, 2013 at 4:18 pm
Interesting to see the US debate on this issue. Here in the UK we have our own ‘dialogue’ regarding British Summer Time and the arguments run on largely the same lines. For us it is a clear split north and south - Scotland (where I live) generally benefits from BST for all the reasons that have been mentioned in comments above due to distance from the equator. South England? Well, they just like something to complain about ;)
March 11th, 2013 at 5:00 pm
Petition signed.
March 11th, 2013 at 5:27 pm
Brade, yes, there is a slight uptick in risk of heart attacks when moving to DST. However, there is a corresponding downtick in risk of heart attacks when moving back to standard time. And we generally don’t get rid of everything that kills people, unless the benefits don’t outweigh the drawbacks. Considering that the slight increase in accidents can be attributed to getting an hour less of sleep, maybe we should also ban New Year’s Eve parties, late television programs, great video games, caffeine…all things which can lead people to stay up later than normal and get less sleep.
March 11th, 2013 at 6:41 pm
Count me as on the fence, although I do wish the government would quit mucking with the start and stop dates. (The change in 2007 meant reprogramming roughly 5000 VCRs, for me.)
It’s worth noting that, for historical reasons, many parts of the US have time zones that are completely messed up. Houghton, MI is on EST, in spite of being west of Chicago; in January the sun doesn’t come up until 8:40 am. I went to college there, and let me tell you, it’s very hard to convince yourself to get up at 6:30 am for a 7:30 lab when you know that it’s -15F outside and won’t be light for another two hours. The reason for this, apparently, is that when copper mining was big in the area, the companies that ran the mines wanted them on the same schedule as the eat coast financial markets.
It just goes to show you that all timekeeping is political, and the people it’s designed to benefit are the ones with lots of cash in the game.
March 11th, 2013 at 6:42 pm
If the whole world had the same time zone, how would I know whether it was too late/early to call my friend in Austria?
As for changing the school schedule, how is that easier than changing the time? Parents still have to get to work after they drop off the kids—should we change work/shift hours too? Again, easier to change the time.
Time zones are supposedly adjusted according to the rotation of the earth. Can’t change that.
March 11th, 2013 at 6:55 pm
Much of the technical problem comes from failing to distinguish between “true time” and “local time”. My biggest DST problems came from forum software that (for some idiot reason) was configured to run on local time. As such, and living in the southern hemisphere, I was forced to process each DST changeover twice, once when my local DST kicked in and a second time when the host’s DST kicked out (or vice versa in 6 months).
I find the easiest solution for consumer gear is to run the back-end clock in “true time” with local offset and provide the consumer with a simple button to engage and disengage DST.
March 11th, 2013 at 7:03 pm
No, Daylight Saving Time is EVIL and contributes to Global Warming by adding an additional hour of sunshine every evening.
I may or may not stand behind that final statement.
March 11th, 2013 at 7:22 pm
Far off-topic now, but your readers might appreciate the Flanders & Swann version of the “Song of the weather” nursery rhyme (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eT40eV7OiI), with its wonderfully pithy (and usually accurate) description of July:
In July, the sun is hot. Is it shining? No, it’s not.
March 11th, 2013 at 7:27 pm
People suggesting radical changes should note that this is a country that has not yet shifted to the metric system.
March 11th, 2013 at 8:00 pm
The trick isn’t so much the Daylight Savings as when it’s changed each way. If you get it right, you should be wanting it to change. NZ played around in the 00s with moving around the time of switch—too early in spring and it’s getting up in pitch black, leave moving back too late and the same thing.
March 11th, 2013 at 8:02 pm
Oh, and as someone who lives just south of Scotland (and used to sleep with the curtains open year round in NZ as we’re far closer to the equator), I hate waking up in the middle of summer for it to be daylight at 4am. The thought of that 4am being 3am makes me shudder. (Conversely, winter is just horrible but there’s not much I can do about that aside from get a UV lamp).
March 11th, 2013 at 8:21 pm
Nadyne,
I didn’t presume you were upset, I inferred it from your first comment. That inference was strengthened by your second comment.
And although this is definitely the right room for an argument, you must understand that an argument is an intellectual process. Ignoring the reasoning of the other party and repeating yourself goes nowhere in establishing a proposition. I’m sorry, but your five minutes is up.
March 11th, 2013 at 8:38 pm
Now that I have young school aged children I hate DST. However when I lived in Canada and it got dark rather early in the evening it made a lot of sense.
However honestly the big issue is less DST than it is different places with different rules. UK changes on a different date than the US and then there’s Arizona. Knowing when a business somewhere is open is kind of a losing proposition at times. That’s hardly DST’s fault. It’s more a scheduling issue.
But then I lived next to Newfoundland who had a time zone exactly on half hour off of ours.
March 11th, 2013 at 9:38 pm
As someone who grew up in Indiana (before DST) and lived in Arizona - moved on to spend 10 years in the lower latitudes of California - and has spent the last 10 years in Canada…
You can take my DST when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
Anything that gives us the chance to better enjoy the 3 months of decent weather that we get, if only for one hour a day, is worth every single minor hassle that might come with it.
March 11th, 2013 at 9:45 pm
I recently moved from the UK (with DST) to Perth, Australia (no DST) and I completely agree with every point! Sunlight in the mornings is painful, I’d much rather have an extra hour of sun after work.
March 11th, 2013 at 10:22 pm
Another way of extending your daylight is to live at the western edge of a time zone.
For example: Sunset today in Connecticut was at 6:55. Sunset in Cincinnati was at 7:42.
It people in each place wake at the same time in the morning, then those in Cincinnati will have more sunlight in the evening.
Sunrise times are similarly shifted, so if you’re more of a morning person, you probably want to be on the eastern edge of a time zone, to get the earliest sunrise.
March 11th, 2013 at 11:56 pm
Surely the best solution to the whole DST thing is to get rid of all timezones. Everyone on UTC and be done with it.
Then everyone and every location can work out hours of operation as they please.
Right?
PS: I’m a major advocate of DST for the reasons outlined above. The current anti-DST crowd should be as supportive of the above recommendation as they are of opposing DST.
March 12th, 2013 at 2:11 am
What’s insane is deciding that sunlight is the most important factor in determining waking hours, and then ignoring that factor because a little box on your your nightstand is displaying a number that you don’t find aesthetically pleasing in relationship to how bright it is.
DST is a poor solution to the problem of variable spans of daylight. Even with DST, places have seasonal hours, and stores are open at different times in different geographical areas. It’s not just a granularity problem, because it isn’t an issue of daylight simply being shifted. The amount of daylight increases and decreases. So shifts that “fix” things in the morning will screw them up in the evening, and vice versa. We can’t win. We still, with DST, have the issue where sometimes 19:30 is sunny and sometimes it is dark. If it fixed the problem, I might be more tolerant. But it doesn’t fix the problem. The problem is, self evidently, unsolvable.
We can’t optimize around whether or not certain hours feel like they should be dark hours or feel like they should be light hours, and by trying we both fail at giving a predictable hour-to-amount-of-sunlight relationship, and introduce a bunch of stupid, unpredictable, politically- and religiously-motivated complexity that has real world costs.
March 12th, 2013 at 2:42 am
The road safety issue as it relates to children seems pretty clear-cut: the school day begins more or less around the same time as the standard office day, but ends earlier, so it should be a higher priority to have light(er) mornings in those latitudes where it’s a choice between the two, because there are more cars on the road.
March 12th, 2013 at 3:17 am
I spent most of my life in Saskatchewan, where we don’t switch times at all. I enjoy that. I have disliked living in places that do switch time. The technology is here now, let’s make all clocks local, so that the sun sets at 9 pm every day of the year. The computers and clocks can automatically adjust. That way, there is always lots of sunlight in the evening.
March 12th, 2013 at 4:13 am
You know, Anal Emma’s reputation is, in most respects, wholly undeserved.
March 12th, 2013 at 11:09 am
Go look up the same table for Anchorage, Alaska. That is what sunrise is WITH daylight savings.
Again, go look up Anchorage, Alaska. It is dark when kids go to school and leave school in the winter.
My point is, life goes on, people deal with it and most of your reasoning doesn’t hold water.
March 12th, 2013 at 11:22 am
It seems to me that shifting school hours makes more sense than shifting the clock.
March 12th, 2013 at 12:58 pm
I suspect you were trying to make that sound ridiculous, but I see nothing wrong with it.
March 12th, 2013 at 1:31 pm
Let’s just split the difference and move the clock forward half an hour, permanently.
March 12th, 2013 at 1:49 pm
The real problem lies not with DST but in our screwy time zone map. The eastern time zone is much wider than it should be. Its western edge has shifted almost to the middle of the country.
My problem with DST is that it begins just at the time of the year when MN (mother nature) has already started to fix the problem of too few daylight hours — as a morning person by the end of February I have started to feel like a human being again, then someone comes and pulls the carpet out from under me. The shock wasn’t so bad before they moved the date closer to the beginning of March. Maybe there would be less noise if they’d just stop moving the goalposts.
March 12th, 2013 at 2:16 pm
It does, but school hours don’t exist in a vacuum, and shifting them means adjusting either parental work hours or pre-/after-school care arrangements. Which ain’t easy.
jirwin: Anchorage (61N, pop. ~300,000) is an edge case here, and not really relevant to the broader discussion of optimizing daylight hours for the many millions of people who live in major urban areas in the contiguous US, particularly those between 40-45N.
March 12th, 2013 at 2:47 pm
nick s: Population size doesn’t matter when the argument is based on birds chirping and it being “too dark” in the morning in winter. There are already functioning communities that operate under those circumstances. That is something that can’t be explained away with a simple “edge case” declaration.
March 12th, 2013 at 5:33 pm
I don’t believe I made that argument. The one I’m making is about the benefits of daylight during the times when human beings are in motion, and for that, population size and density is clearly a consideration.
And if you’re trying to argue that Alaska isn’t an edge case when talking about time zone policy for the US — when it’s as wide as the lower 48, and significantly further north — I’m not sure you’re going to get that many takers. People in Anchorage deal with the cold, too.
March 12th, 2013 at 5:48 pm
Dr. Drang said tossed off. Heh!
March 12th, 2013 at 6:11 pm
This may be the first post in the history of the site that dismisses data-driven argument as “obvious bullshit” that “undermine(s) the public’s confidence in real science and real research.” Sure, you can find bad studies about DST, but you can find bad research on tons of stuff. That doesn’t mean good research doesn’t exist.
For example, consider the National Bureau of Economic Research report titled Does Daylight Saving Time Save Energy? Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Indiana. This is a data-driven report based on Indiana’s relatively recent switch in 2006 from not following DST to following DST. It addresses a common argument made in favor of adopting a DST approach. The NBER is a well-respected organization with numerous Nobel Laureates as members. This particular report was co-authored an economist from Yale.
Dr. Drang, does this qualify as “obvious bullshit?” Does this undermine real science and real research?
I’m only asking because it seems like setting government policy based on personal preferences, like whether or not we want to take a walk in civil twilight, seems a lot more arbitrary than using the sorts of data-driven arguments that your site previously exemplified.
March 13th, 2013 at 8:42 am
I just want to stand up and clap at the end of this, like in Hoosiers, or Rudy… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM0dbwDc2FE
March 13th, 2013 at 10:51 am
You’re really neglecting the health costs that DST brings with it. Especially when dealing with humans’ circadian rhythm. I’m not going to link the umpteen studies on heart attacks and DST, car accidents and DST, et cetera. Rather, let’s look at testosterone and sleep in men. If a man gets less than 6 hours sleep his testosterone drops significantly - ergo, 10% to 15% after just one week of sleep deprivation (5 hours or less). The men in the study were healthy males, with an average age of 24 years old (study is here: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-05/uocm-sll053111.php).
If we take into account that the average American averages 6 hours and 19 minutes of sleep per night, a reduced 1 hour due to the dictatorially imposed DST means testosterone stops dropping. The effects are well felt, beyond even the first week of time change.
Besides “cyberloafing” increasing after DST (source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-03/ps-std030712.php), I think it’s an archaic construct from antiquitous ‘programmers’ of yore. The original idea for DST a hundred years ago was to give farmers and yeomen more light during the evening and to maximize the amount of sunlight starting from dusk. But our ancestors were statistically challenged - rather, they never actually tested DST other than the British politicians at the time thumping their iron fists and cudgels on their bully pulpits to make the necessary changes. We’ve followed antiquity religiously into modernity. Why? Humans hate change. It’s the same reason we continue to add fluoride to water since the 1950s and will continue to do so for the next 50 years.
I propose a referendum on DST, with both camps for and against publicly arguing their points. You’ll find that the pros for not rolling the clocks back outweigh the cons.
March 13th, 2013 at 2:42 pm
Well, it’s been an interesting couple of days, but I’m going to take the white smoke coming out of the Vatican chimney as a sign to close up the comments on this one. After a while, it gets depressing to read yet another argument against something I didn’t say.