Welcome Back Daylight Savings Time!

[Long Run]

I'm for staying with standard time. Either that or find a way that twice a year we get to "fall back" without ever having to "spring forward". A group of Oregon legislators are following a trend to get rid of daylight savings; the plan is to implement if neighbors in California and Washington go for it. http://www.katu.com/politics/Senate-Bil ... 51521.html

[Gob]

Stupid website can't find Petaluma!

Have you looked under the sofa?

[rubato]

FWIW China has one time zone for the whole country.


yrs,
rubato

the point of time zones, and DST for that matter, is to make sure light is present during the most productive time of the day; having the sun rise while people are sleeping, or set well after they retire, is what is the zones try to avoid. I don't relish the sun rising at 4:30 AM or setting after 11:00 PM, but I guess the people in China don't mind it. Maybe they shift their working hours to accommodate it?

Really, and I thought the purpose of time zones was to divide up the globe into 24 intervals to coincide approximately with the rotational frequency of the planet so that everyone got to have a portion of glorious daylight and comforting night.


yrs,
rubato

[Econoline]

...so that everyone got to have a portion of glorious daylight and comforting night.

Regardless of how we humans keep track of it and how we label it, that's going to happen anyway, as long as we live on planet Earth.

[Big RR]

econo--absolutely, at least for most of the planet. But the zones (and DST) allow us to have the light in the part of the day in which most people would prefer it (usually between 6:00 AM and 9:00 PM).

rubato--not quite; what about if you live far north or south? Time zones or not, you will get no light during much of the winter.

[BoSoxGal]

Standard time zones are about ease of conducting commerce.

[Econoline]

There's absolutely nothing that would prohibit any business, school, institution, government agency, or individual from changing its scheduled hours according to the season of the year. (Just sayin'.)

[BoSoxGal]

Of course not, and I wasn't really speaking to DST - rather to the comments about the underlying reasons for DST and time zones (China has only one, etc.).

I heard an interesting oral essay on the history of the establishment of time zones on NPR a few months ago - it's very interesting to contemplate that until the late 1880s each town had its own time zone, generally set by the sun or a prominent clock in the village square, on a church steeple, etc. It was the railroads that instituted the first time zones in the US, thus the primary basis for standardized time zones is the ease of conducting commerce and the basis for DST was essentially similar.

[Econoline]

Here's an interesting and informative video on the history of time zones, DST, and the International Date Line. (I thought the narrator's Scottish accent was pretty cool, too.)

[MajGenl.Meade]

Sorry but I recently lost my hour available for watching videos. I'll bookmark this and come back to it November 1.

[dgs49]

Regardless of what the clock says, it's nice having more hours of daylight in Summer (in addition to the better weather).

It is interesting to consider how the invention of clocks and artificial light (the light bulb) has changed human sleep patterns that existed for eons.

For working class people I can't imagine they stayed up for long after it got dark, unless something special was going on.

[Long Run]

Every piece of advice talks about getting your 7 or 8 hours of sleep each night, but DGs makes a good point. I was reading an article on recent research that before the electric light, people did in fact go to bed earlier, would sleep for 4-6 hours and then get up for awhile and even visit neighbors, before returning to sleep for another few hours. Not sure how it worked during the long daylight months.

[Scooter]

[BoSoxGal]