PSA: Set your clocks back an hour

[Vlad!]

It's that time again, unless you live in Hawaii, Arizona, Indiana, or an enlightened country.

Saying that you gain an hour is like saying that you've gained a car when the police find your stolen car. Actually, it's not really even like that since the number of hours in the system remains the same. Gah.

[murlough23]

I normally gripe and grumble about the fall change, because I hate the early sunset. But as late as I've been going to work these days, I've been leaving after the sunset regardless. It's not like I was doing anything outdoorsy with that extra hour in October, so I really can't complain. I guess I used to dislike it because I found the darkness depressing.

This year, I decided to use the time change as an excuse to start going to bed and getting up at more reasonable hours. Basically I just didn't bother to adjust my body clock to the new schedule. This seems trivial, but I actually feel a lot better about myself for having kept the habit thus far this week. We'll see how long it lasts before that one leve of some video game keeps me up way too late and then I revert back to my near-nocturnal state.

[Vlad!]

Yeah. I don't wake up to an alarm, so for a while I was waking up at 7 instead of 8. But then life kind of got in the way (as it does) and now I'm back on the 12-to-8 sleep schedule, except that the sun reaches morning brightness an hour earlier so I feel like I'm not getting as restful sleep during the late morning.

I really don't like it being so dark in the evening for many reasons: if I'm going somewhere unfamiliar in the evening (which happens at least once a month) it's a lot harder to find; I'm more likely to hit (or be hit by) a deer on the way home; and just that looking out the window at 6pm at work and seeing darkness is depressing.

(Have you Californians managed to kill off all the deer in your area? The couple of times I've had houseguests from California and I'm showing them around, they always act like it's a big deal to see a deer. I see the pesky things every day, and I'd be OK if they were consigned to zoos (not really, but sometimes).

[murlough23]

Yeah. I don't wake up to an alarm, so for a while I was waking up at 7 instead of 8. But then life kind of got in the way (as it does) and now I'm back on the 12-to-8 sleep schedule, except that the sun reaches morning brightness an hour earlier so I feel like I'm not getting as restful sleep during the late morning.

My typical sleep schedule before the time change was roughly 2 to 9; now it's closer to 1 to 8. I'm allowed to come into the office as late as 11, but I realized I don't really like going home at 7. Not that going home at 6 is much different now that it gets dark at 5:30-ish, but I think the wife will appreciate it more in terms of scheduling meals and stuff.

I totally hear you about the sunlight thing. I have my sleep issues in general, but since we moved to a new apartment in May and we sleep in an upstairs bedroom with a window facing onto the street, I've had a hard time adjusting. (The bedroom in our old apartment didn't get much light, and I got too used to that, making it easier to sleep later, which was good for health but bad for my professional life.) It's a double whammy for me, since my wife gets up and goes to work early, and generally the process of her getting up and ready in the morning wakes me up, and once I'm awake I have a hard time getting back to sleep (especially knowing I'll have to get up myself within another few hours).

Take the fact that I'm posting this at 7:30 AM to be indicative of my sleep issues.

I really don't like it being so dark in the evening for many reasons: if I'm going somewhere unfamiliar in the evening (which happens at least once a month) it's a lot harder to find; I'm more likely to hit (or be hit by) a deer on the way home; and just that looking out the window at 6pm at work and seeing darkness is depressing.

I think this would be unavoidable at the apex of winter even without the time change. Also consider the fact that folks who work in schools or other jobs where you have to be there at 8 AM or earlier would be going to work in the dark. (Granted, that's commuting to a familiar location, but still, it ain't fun for schoolchildren walking to the bus stop and so forth.)

Not that I'm advocating the time change - I still think there's gotta be a way to remain on a constant clock that is more mutually agreeable to residents of a particular location. I feel like work and school schedules should be flexible enough to adjust for the changing daylight hours, rather than everyone having to change their clocks.

(Have you Californians managed to kill off all the deer in your area? The couple of times I've had houseguests from California and I'm showing them around, they always act like it's a big deal to see a deer. I see the pesky things every day, and I'd be OK if they were consigned to zoos (not really, but sometimes).

In our area? California's a big place. You probably wouldn't see deer in the cities, and we've probably managed to drive a lot of them out of the local mountains due to our habit of torching the hillsides every year. But they are a very real danger on most mountain roads throughout the state. A harrowing experience involving my mom hitting a deer when we were driving out of Lassen Volcanic National Park (way up in the real Northern California) back when I was a teenager still comes to mind. They have a bad habit of darting out onto roads in the dawn/dusk hours.

Your houseguests from California must not travel much within their own state. We have much more geographic diversity here than most folks take the time to appreciate. (Which is weird, because we have one of the nation's most visited national parks.)

[Vlad!]

I think the thing they were marveling at wasn't that there were random deer on the side of the road so much as that we were driving through the suburbs at the time rather than through the countryside, forest, or mountains. I figured that California had deer, I just suspected that they weren't the sort of thing you'd see on your daily commute.

No time schedule is going to work for everyone, and no time system is going to effectively abstract away the fact that we're living on a ball o' rock hurtling around a sphere of incandescent gas which is the source of our daylight. Until we have built a ringworld with shadow squares to control our day/night cycle, we will have to live with what we have.

That said, Daylight Saving Time is about the dumbest way of dealing with it I could think of. Let's just go on DST and stay on it permanently (yes, I realize that if we ever reach agreement on the issue of "let's get rid of the time change", the next argument is "should we remain permanently on saving time or standard time?". But since the majority of the year is spent on saving time, that seems to be the most appropriate choice. The fact that it also works better with my preferred schedule is entirely incidental).

[Vlad!]

Also, if you're curious about how many daylight hours you get on each day of the year, this site offers a very slick visualization. Flash required, though this seems like the sort of thing which could be easily implemented in HTML5 </side rant>

[enemy anemone]

from the movie Collateral:

Traffic Cop #2: Hey, is this blood up here on your windshield?
Max: Yeah, uh, yeah. I hit a deer.
Traffic Cop #1: You hit a deer?
Max: Yeah, over on, uh, it was on Slauson.
Traffic Cop #1: A South Central deer?

(this made me laugh.)

[Vlad!]

Hah, I like that movie.

Normally I feel bad for animals whose habitat we've displaced, but deer are so pesty that I don't have any sympathy for them.

[murlough23]

Also, if you're curious about how many daylight hours you get on each day of the year, this site offers a very slick visualization. Flash required, though this seems like the sort of thing which could be easily implemented in HTML5 </side rant>

Pretty cool animation. It's defining "daylight" by the sun being strictly above the horizon, I think - which means everyone averages out to 12-hour days. In practice, I believe the far nothern/southern latitudes actually get more daylight per year, due to longer periods of twilight when the sun is below the horizon but it isn't really "night". I've experienced this, up in Alaska near summer solstice. Technically everywhere below the Arctic Circle still gets a "sunset", but practically speaking, you could sit on your front porch all night and read a newspaper by natural light. (Conversely, near winter solstice, some places slightly above the Arctic Circle will still get natural light - basically a sunrise that gives up and becomes a sunset again before anyone actually sees the sun.)

[Vlad!]

This just in: Russia permanently moves to Daylight Saving Time!

The two (physically) largest nations now remain at the same UTC offset year-round (China does the same thing). Here's hoping the US (as the third physically largest nation) will do the same.

(I realize that land area has nothing to do with it, but I thought it was neat).

[murlough23]

The two (physically) largest nations now remain at the same UTC offset year-round (China does the same thing). Here's hoping the US (as the third physically largest nation) will do the same.

Hear hear!

(I realize that land area has nothing to do with it, but I thought it was neat).

It might affect it somewhat - consider the note about Eastern Russia. Countries with larger land area have more time zones and thus more complications and people to argue with when they try to make a switch like this. Thus, it's more of an accomplishment for Russia or China to accomplish this than it would be for, say, Liechtenstein.

On the flipside, the Russian and Chinese governments probably have less tolerance for people bitching whenever they try to change a law than the American government does.

We already have states and sections of states that don't observe DST, so clearly there's some latitude (heh) at the local government level here. I say our federal government should push to abolish DST, but make allowances for places like the northern states to opt out of the change if they feel they have really good reasons for keeping things the way they are (such as "we don't want our kids walking to school in the dark"). Yes, it will be confusing to people doing business and/or traveling between the states, but it'll allow most of the country to change without incessant arguing to try to get everyone on board.

I have no idea whether this sort of "opt-out" arrangement would actually work, but given that the concept of allowing individual states to make the decision has been brought up in much more heated debates such as health care and gay marriage, one would figure it's only fair to let Washington or Minnesota or wherever choose to retain the time changes if they really want it that badly.

[Vlad!]

One time at work one of our cell repeaters had failed to apply some firmware update cluing it into the fact that the date for DST had moved (again), so for a week my cell phone was freaking out as it switched between cells and one cell was an hour ahead of the other one. Seems like that's the sort of thing people on the border of such delineations would have to deal with all the time. I guess there are some benefits to being a totalitarian state. Sure there may be all sorts of human rights violations and if you say the wrong thing to the wrong person you may be dissappeared one evening, but at least they can just freaking say "we're doing this thing" and make it stick.

[murlough23]

One time at work one of our cell repeaters had failed to apply some firmware update cluing it into the fact that the date for DST had moved (again), so for a week my cell phone was freaking out as it switched between cells and one cell was an hour ahead of the other one. Seems like that's the sort of thing people on the border of such delineations would have to deal with all the time.

I'd be interested to know how that works now if you live somewhere like Needles, CA (right across the Colorado River from Arizona). I'd imagine it must be really confusing within the Navajo Nation (which does use DST even within their Arizona territory), but then I don't know if cell phone providers in the area bother to account for this, so it might just be something that people make mental note of when traveling between Navajo territory and the rest of the state, and their technology doesn't account for it at all.

I guess there are some benefits to being a totalitarian state. Sure there may be all sorts of human rights violations and if you say the wrong thing to the wrong person you may be dissappeared one evening, but at least they can just freaking say "we're doing this thing" and make it stick.

You should totally make that quote your signature.

This reminds me of the attitude some of my friends have about the 710 freeway here in Southern California. It's been pending completion for decades now, but issues with eminent domain have kept them from getting the two stubs to meet up, leaving a relatively land-locked area south of Pasadena (in which I just so happen to live) that isn't conveniently close to any freeway. Many of my friends are first or second-generation Chinese, and they tell me that if this happened in China, they'd just say "Screw it, bulldoze 'em" and it'd have been done a long time ago. Not that I'm advocating anti-democratic sentiment... but I do find anti-democratic sentiment to be humorous sometimes.

(On the flipside, some family being being able to keep their house is probably more important than how long it takes me to get to an on-ramp. Especially considering that I'm just gonna be stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic once I get on anyway.)

[Vlad!]

People in California obviously did not watch enough Dukes of Hazzard. Three words: giant dirt ramp.

[murlough23]

People in California obviously did not watch enough Dukes of Hazzard. Three words: giant dirt ramp.

We only watched the movie version to ogle Jessica Simpson's midriff, I think.