On Sun, Oct 27, 2024 as every year we will change the clocks, here in Europe we move them back 1 hour gaining more time in bed, lighter mornings but darker evenings.
Every year there is movement to stop this change with many views positive or negative on its effects.
Personally I prefer summer time to winter time and would vote for staying the 1 hour extra in the evenings to allow me to stay out longer in the light.
Thoughts and comments please.
How easy is it to stick with summer time and the effect on computer installations, i suspect the biggest numbers use the internet system clock for time settings.
I think we should keep time in the manner it was done before mechanical clocks.
Each day had exactly 12 hours of daylight, 12 hours of dark, so the length of an hour varied with time of year and with location.
Why would I want such a complicated system?
Because that is the way our biological clock worksā¦ humans are adapted to a certain diurnal rhythm. Breaking it has consequencesā¦ just ask shift workers about effects on their health.
Such a system might have been difficult for mechanical clocks, but computers could cope with it easily because they know date and geolocation.
We would need to distinguish between time interval measurements( like speed of your car) and āhourā statements which are points if time in the day.
Points of time need to be consistent to keep our biology happy.
I think when this started, we used electricity 80% for lighting, and we used the heat producing bulbs mostly.
Nowadays we have compact fluorescent lamps and LED lights.
And use computers, TVās, microwave ovens, washing machines, dishwashers, and so onā¦
These require energy, and not just some energy, but way much more energy, then we use for lighting today.
So in the 1960ās we saved with the daylights some of the 80%, nowadays we save some of the 5%.
If you want my opinion, the troubles with train schedules, and health problems, especially for aging people is more difficult to adapt, so I think what we gain with some little sparing, but loose more on the difficulties caused.
Does not worth.
Iād leave the clock alone.
I donāt care itās winter time or summer time, but please donāt adjust twice a year!
How would that relate to Earth spinning and orbital period?
Hours, and days / week is arbitrary anyway, so they could be converted to decimal. But in that case a proportional 3 days weekend is a must have
I have heard lots of rumblings about sticking with one time zone all year. My argument is always this.
In the spring, we spring forward. Then at the height of summer the sun comes up, where I live, at 5:32 AM.
If we did not spring forward, the sun would come up at 4:32 AM. I donāt think anyone really wants that.
Also, no one really thinks about the fact that people live all over the region of the time zone. People that live further east than me, say in Chicago, the sun would come up at 5:15 AM rather than 5:32 AM. With no time zone change it would come up at 4:15 AM. That just seems ridiculous.
You need my medieval systemā¦ the sun always rises at 6.00 am regardless of time of year or location ( see reply #2)
and always sets at 6.00 pm.
You work longer hours in Summer, shorter hours in Winter, but the same number of hours. That makes biological sense, and is the way we lived for all except the last 400 years.
I suppose today it is airlines tieing us to mechanical time.
I think computers could help us escape from it.
I havd been toying with the idea of making medieval time of day app. It would have to use location and date information. There may already be something .?
I am not saying we should abandon mechanical timekeepingā¦ time-of-day is a different thing and it is the latter which should set our living schedule.
The idea of time-zones is a ridiculous oversimplification.
Time-of-day is continuously variable with latitude and needs to be treated as such.
Elapsed time ( ie measured time) does not vary at all with latitude. The two things need to be kept separate.
If you travel its quite strange the difference in time, i left france moved through spain, same time zone, crossed 8nto portugal and they are 1 hour behind spain, yet the difference in-between the 2 countries is a river perhaps 1 km.
All of france mainland and spain mainland are on the same time zone, yet sun rise and sunset are big differences.
I had a friend in Australia and could never remember what time to call him and got even more lost when the clocks changed with the time differences. 11 hour in front, 12 hours or 13 hours depending on the day around clock change. In the end just left skype on and waited for him to message me.
In my lifetime of living here (mostly here since late '72) - weāve trialled it three times, each time ending in a referendum that wasnāt passedā¦
I quite like it myself. What I hate is when dealing with the East Coast, and I do that a lot - all of a sudden Daylight Saving kicks in in Sydney and/or Melbourne, and what was a 2 hour time difference is now 3!
Iām glad I donāt have to worry about time switching servers thoughā¦
Iām nearly always awake at 6:00 amā¦ But usually takes me two cups of black espresso to get motivated to start work (I brew moka on the stove the proper way )ā¦ Sometimes Iām awake at 5 am - those mornings, I start work by 6:00 am after my obligatory two cups of espressoā¦
Up to writing this post, i had assumed that the whole world used the daylight time saving system.
Been a real eye opening post to think some countries dont need or use it. But especially austrailia, i always though they moved with europe. That explains why i could never work out my pals hours when he live there as he travelled around the place.
Are there any other countries that are like this some moving and others not ?
When i portugal I was staying on the border town and occasionally went across to spain, one day got the ferry across not thinking about time, everything was closed except the restos because of lunchtime and then siesta, so got the next freey back. But for workers ā¦ guess you just live with the changes.
West Australia and Queensland donāt do daylight savingā¦ But New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia do - Iām guessing Northern Territory follows South Australia, and Australian Capital Territory follows NSWā¦
so when Melbourne, Sydney and Hobart (and probably Adelaide) cut forward or backward - Perth and Brisbane (and the rest of Queensland) are out of whackā¦
What amazes me is that a country with the width of China (itās at least as wide as Australia) has a SINGLE timezone! And its the same timezone as Perth!
I remember when setting a timezone on a computer was a āthingā (maybe Windows NT 4.0 or 2000? Maybe even 95 and 98) - I used to set my timezone to Lake Baikal in the former CCCPā¦ i.e. Perth is in the same timezone as Far Eastern Russia (but not the eastest in Russia)ā¦
forgot to mention - WA has two time zones - thereās a different offset at Eucla - which is not far from the WA and SA borderā¦ Itās main claim to fame was a telegraph repeater station was stood up thereā¦
