Daylight savings time, blah blah blah.
Spring forward, fall back, blah blah blah.
OK, fine. Tonight at 2:00 a.m. you’re supposed to set your clocks forward an hour and pretend like 2:00:00 to 02:59:59 never existed. Or you can do like me, forget all about it, stumble around in the morning without looking at the clocks, turn on the TV and realize you missed something you wanted to see, then stomp around the house resetting the clocks, then swear like a sailor when you accidentally set one three minutes ahead of the correct time and then have to hold down the "time" and the "fast" button for another 30 seconds while they cycle through an entire day, then realize ten minutes later you set yours but not your wife’s, and then swear again.
I’ve always disliked and distrusted Daylight Saving Time. At least now, according to Astroprof, I have a legitimate reason.
Congress. Setting back clocks for decades now.
March 8th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
I don’t care if Daylight Savings Time saves any energy or not. I just know that once it kicks in, it’s feasible for me to start using my bike to get to and from work. Otherwise, there’s too little light when I leave my office at 6:00 PM. Also, I love being able to take a walk after dinner. DST may not save energy, per se, but it does a lot to lift my mood, and that counts for something.
J. D.
March 8th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
You should move to Hawaii. We don’t have such clock resetting problems. Our problems are related to having to constantly adjust to when you mainlanders reset your clocks. TV shows out here tend to change time by an hour whenever clocks on the mainland reset. It’s freaking annoying for us to have to deal with such absurdities. Before the sighs of envy start however, there’s a price to pay for livin’ it up out here. Most 3 bedroom houses start at about 400,000 dollars, and it’s near impossible to afford something. Living expenses are outrageous, and for those lactose tolerant folks, the price of milk is an eye gouger. Not to mention the price of gas, which would cause those with weak hearts and even weaker wallets to think twice. Yet, somehow, not having to scrap ice off the driveway, and waking up every morning thankful of the weather (barring any hurricanes) is a small price to pay.
March 8th, 2008 at 8:21 pm
Not sure why I should set my clocks forwards one hour, after all it is Autumn and we are heading into Winter - especially after setting our clocks back an hour not so long ago.
Surely even a ‘Bad’ Astronomer should know our planet does not have the same season everywhere!
-Nivag
March 8th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
Or move to Saskatchewan. This is a goofy place, but at least we don’t have DST. Actually, most of the world doesn’t have daylight savings time. Only a few silly places do it. It’s nothing more than a waste of time and energy. I hate DST.
March 8th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
I trust one time source only - the CO synced watch on my wrist which adjusts to DST. Not sure why, I thought they didn’t include that in the signal, but it has for years including post-switch, so that’s good.
But really, I’ve said the same since childhood. DST is just silly. Even time zones are silly - people do things at different times. Just get used to it and we can all go by UTC. That’d be utiopia.
With the switch last year, they managed to annoy me on two levels. First, I wrote a cgi script that displayed a banner showing where it was five o’clock (’cos, you know, it’s five o’clock somewhere). This was less easy then it sounded including DST issues. But I got it done and thought it’d suck if they changed DST times, but whatever, it’s been the same for ages now. The changed it. Doh.
Driving in the morning, used to turn straight into the sun at 7:33 every morning. I thought it’d be ok to wait it out, because in a few weeks that’d quit happening - the sun would rise just a tad earlier and get out of my eyes. Indeed it did - then DST kicked in and it was right back at me. First day coming home after dropping the kids of I was livid and yelled at my wife that the buerocrats had moved the sun and now it was in the way again. She sighed quietly, hoping I’d quit ranting about the evils of DST until next year.
March 8th, 2008 at 8:54 pm
I generally use my cell phone to get the time anyway. As that syncs with the cell network and changes it’s time automatically I don’t even worry about it. I’ll wake up tomorrow and the clock will have skipped an hour ahead and I probably won’t even notice.
March 8th, 2008 at 8:58 pm
No, this Arizonan refuses to change the clocks
March 8th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
I’m not nuts about changing the clocks, but I prefer Daylight Savings Time. I hardly ever care when it gets light, but after work it’s great to be able to do more things when the sun is still up.
March 8th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
It isn’t widely known, but last year it was reported that if people didn’t like the new date change for DST, they could write to the DOE. And, if the DOE got enough complaints, the Secretary of Energy could override the rule and put it back to April and October dates.
March 8th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
When I was living in Indiana we didn’t change our time. Then I moved to Arizona, the only other place in the Continental US that doesn’t also. After I moved here to AZ, IN began changing it’s time. So, so far I’ve lived my whole life without having to change times.
March 8th, 2008 at 9:13 pm
Well, I don’t like DST much. I like looking at the stars - and the time changes messes me up - with sunset happening an hour later, I have to wait that much longer to go out to look.
jbs
March 8th, 2008 at 9:21 pm
The answer to this is simplicity itself: set all your clocks, watches and other timepieces to UT. Then it’s simply a matter of remembering that the local offset changes by one hour during the time that daylight savings is in operation.
For best results, make sure to use a binary clock in 24-hour mode.
March 8th, 2008 at 9:22 pm
P.S.
The current temperature is 279. I’m an SI nazi!
March 8th, 2008 at 9:33 pm
OK so we just have to get used to change our clocks at slightly different dates. I hope for one the government doesn’t change it back. I work in I.T., we spent a lot of time making sure all the computers and servers on all sorts of different OS’s were patched. Also had to make sure sure we pushed the DST patch to everyones crack…er…Blackberry. Call it a mini Y2K issue we had to take care of in out “spare time.”
If congress changes the laws back, I predict many angry geeks descending on Washington.
March 8th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
[…] like me, forget all about it, stumble around in the morning without looking at the clocks, … credit : […]
March 9th, 2008 at 12:20 am
I hate DST with a deep and loathing passion.
A few years ago, my friends and I designed a sundial for our high-school, and DST caused us no end of frustration. Get rid of it.
March 9th, 2008 at 1:30 am
Abolish DST.
Been saying that for 20+ years now, and will continue until it actually happens. (Actually, lately it’s been more along the lines of “Quit f***ing with the clocks all the time!” but you get my point.)
March 9th, 2008 at 1:36 am
What we need to get rid of, is that accursed star at the centre of our solar system. DST is just one of the problems it causes, along with skin cancer and the slow death of people who crash their planes in the middle of the Sahara desert. I say we just blow the damn thing up with an MX missile and be done with it.
At any rate, I always wondered why we altered the clocks and not business hours. It would be easier for people and businesses to choose whether to participate or not.
If you’re local spatula outlet decided not to, for example, that means you’ll just have to make sure you buy all your much-needed spatulas before 4pm instead of 5pm. Other businesses that needed to deal with each other at these times would do so. I think after a while on that system we’d see whether people really want DST or not.
Sure at the moment you could “opt out” and “change” your hours anyway, but why should you be saddled with the confusion when you’re not the one doing the changing?
Also, I’m just not buying the hypothesis as to why Indiana uses more electricity post DST - or rather it seems a little simplistic.
If I worked at the above spatula outlet, left work an hour earlier, (during the hotter part of the day), got home and cranked my air-conditioner while I watched Spongebob Squarepants, I doubt the energy usage by me would amount to a hill of beans compared to cooling an entire warehouse of spatulas with active commerce, (I’m assuming they’d turn the air-conditioner off at ‘Spatula City’ when I left).
What I’m saying is, blaming air-conditioning on it’s own seems a little simplistic. Wherever anyone is during the hottest part of the day, they’ll be running an air-conditioner if the option exists, and homes while probably less efficient generally have much less cubic footage than many workplaces, (unless you are Al Gore).
March 9th, 2008 at 3:08 am
I like daylight savings…. I just hate the changing. Let’s go to it AND STAY THERE. Evening walks. I like them.
Of course, I am on night shift when we go from DST this year. If there is anything worse than pretending an hour happened… It’s having to do it again.
Especially when the application programers will not certify the mainframe apps can handle duplicate time stamps. So you have to leave the mainframe down for an hour.
(Note: years ago IBM changed the database systems to use GMT, or whatever it is called now. So the database SYSTEM can handle the change. It is if the application can.)
Oh well… come on 13.25 hour shift.
March 9th, 2008 at 3:46 am
Just a note that this date for going to DST is strictly USA only. In Europe we will not do so untill the night of 29-30 March.
March 9th, 2008 at 4:08 am
I’ll chime in on the HATING side of this. My alarm clock changes automatically, except that it is on the old DST (done with a puter chip) which doesn’t happen for 3 weeks yet. So now i have to change my alarm clock 4 times each year. ARG!!!
March 9th, 2008 at 4:34 am
Wow, having to change your alarm clock four times a year! Man, I really feel your pain…
I think you are all making way too much of DST. Stop complaining about nothing!
March 9th, 2008 at 5:07 am
Hey, Phil, BST does not start this weekend here in the UK. Not yet.
BTW, does anyone know why they call it “daylight savings time” as opposed to “daylight-saving time”? I mean, why is the saving plural?
Off topic:
Helioprogenus said:
“Not to mention the price of gas, which would cause those with weak hearts and even weaker wallets to think twice. ”
Yesterday, I paid the equivalent of US$2.20 per litre to fill my tank (that’s about $8.30 - $8.40 per US gallon) with 97RON. Is fuel really so expensive in Hawaii?
March 9th, 2008 at 5:40 am
Actually, I _like_ DST. But it may be because I live at much higher latitude (about 62″N) then the most of the USA.
DST allows me not to walk in near complete darkness in autumn.
March 9th, 2008 at 5:51 am
I loathe daylight savings time and it has nothing to do with actually having to set any clocks. I don’t like feeling short on sleep for the first few days of it. I get up early enough without DST. Yet another reason to move to AZ.
March 9th, 2008 at 6:24 am
[…] Plait, in his badastronomy.com post Don’t Forget to Reset Your Clocks is short, and grumbles a bit about the whole DST thing, while the Astroprof’s article […]
March 9th, 2008 at 6:31 am
I’m that pedantic twit who spends the day telling everybody “It’s Daylight Saving Time, not Daylight Savings time! We’re saving daylight; there are no banks (savings) involved!”
rant>
I don’t know why it bugs me so much. It’s almost as bad as when people say “PIN Number” (personal ID number number) instead of just “PIN”. Can I have your PIN number?” “Yes yes you can can”. Even worse is when your PIC is all letters and they still call it a PIN number.
March 9th, 2008 at 6:40 am
I forgot to reset my watch. Having the stomach flu and throwing up in a trashcan was SOMEWHAT distracting.
March 9th, 2008 at 6:51 am
I dislike DST with a passion. It messes up my sleep for a few days a year. And I’m with John B, I like to look at stars early in the evening. Try showing the starts to a Cub Scout group when the meetings finish up at 8:30.
A friend once suggested splitting the difference between DST and regular time all year. But there just isn’t enough daylight in late December.
I always wondered what shift workers do for compensation over time changes? Do they get a full shifts pay for an hour less? Not so nice in the fall. Of course salary folks who get paid monthly-bimonthly loose a day in leap years too.
March 9th, 2008 at 7:48 am
I agree totally with the whole daylight saving time BS.
I am also a stickler, I want my clocks to be exactly set in sync (seconds) with UTC
March 9th, 2008 at 8:13 am
(pedantic_mode)
“Daylight Saving”, not “Daylight Savings”
(/pedantic_mode)
March 9th, 2008 at 8:18 am
I liike DST. No special reason except the extra daylight in the
evening. The hour of sleep I just lost will slowly come back in
my body clock.
March 9th, 2008 at 8:51 am
Well, perhaps it says something when the first reminder that I forgot to change my clocks comes from this web page…
March 9th, 2008 at 9:56 am
As a Truck Driver I enjoy the extra hour of daylight in the evening. The truck stops start filling up at dark, and it makes finding a spot to park for the night difficult sometimes. Give me the daylight in the evening.
March 9th, 2008 at 10:11 am
I have been wishing for DST to be abolished for a long time myself. I can see why people like it, but I don’t like feeling that the clock is not tied down to the local position of the sun, and can be “fiddled with”.
Those people saying “keep it all the time”… NO! You must be crazy! If you want the benefits all year, change the official start times for work, and/or your personal lifestyles. Don’t advocate what amounts to a permanent kludge bolted onto a perfectly lovely astronomical system. It’s bad enough that we have the kludge during the Summer.
It wouldn’t be so bad if everyone changed at the same time in each hemisphere. As mentioned above, the UK doesn’t change until the end of March, which means my handy “East Coast = GMT-5, West Coast = GMT-8″ rule doesn’t work for three weeks…! I’ve been caught out by that when attending (well, sometimes missing!) conference calls with people in the USA.
Follow the Sun, not the government. Viva la revolution! (ha ha)
March 9th, 2008 at 11:03 am
I also refuse to follow DST. Unfortunately, I have to find a new job every spring.
March 9th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Skimming over the comments. I didn’t see one of the reasons I dislike DST: It shortens the time I can look at the night sky. Looking at the stars (and planets and nebula and the occasional comet) is one of the things I enjoy about winter. I have precious little time to sky-watch at is it, and DST makes it harder.
Despite the fact that DST doesn’t save energy I don’t look for a major shift back. Why? Because reprogramming electronic devices for the last shift in DST was worse than fixing the Y2K bug. Most time-sensitive devices don’t care about the year, but they do care about the hour. Setting them back will require an equal amount of effort.
Sigh.
On the home-front, I tuned the ol’ shortwave to WWV and started setting watches and clocks. Took me maybe two hours.
March 9th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
I tried this one on my six-year-old son last Fall when we changed the clocks - he’s not as science-minded as his older brother, but has a certain _practicality_ in his outlook.
After explaining about the time change, I challenged him, “If it’s three o’clock here, and two o’clock in Hawaii, and six o’clock in New York, what time is it in _all three places_?” He looked at me quizzically and said, “Right now,” and went off to play.
Full disclosure: I did steal the question from Terry Prachett, but he won’t miss it.
March 9th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
I wish we had annual “Daylight Savings Time.”
I really don’t mind changing the clocks, and, yes, any time-changing screws up my sleep a little. But I vastly prefer having a little more light-time in the evening.
March 9th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Good grief; such whining over such a small inconvenience. You can buy a clock which is battery operated and sets itself to the (NIST and USNO coordinated Universal Time Clock) UTC in Boulder, CO, for about thirty bucks. Buy one(or more), never set at least one clock ever again. You’ll have to change a battery once a year, though (the horror!). But I’m retired from teaching; I never worried about the time once I got to school ’cause the hours were chimed/belled/alarmed all day. I hardly ever wore a watch…and the kids always knew when the period was about over. You could sense them as they started to shut down just about five min. before class ended. I’m a morning person and I love DST. When I did work, though, I really liked the longer afternoon and evening daylight periods. And now that I don’t have to work, I’ve got all that fly fishing time in the daylight hours. Such a life…
March 9th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
I’m amazed at how many of you don’t like DST. I love it! Give me sunlight later in the evening any time. I always get depressed when we have to go back. It would be pretty hard to have it year round because of how late it would rise in the morning, but I stay extend it as much as possible! I got very excited last year when congress decided to push it back into March and into November. Keep it coming!
March 9th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
I usually reset my clocks on Saturday evening. Then I wander around saying “s**t, is it really that late?” before I realize what time it really is.
Tomorrow morning I will get to work in the dark again. Oh well, earlier sunrises were nice while they lasted.
OTOH, I won’t be awake in the summer time early enough to “enjoy” the early sunlight.
One more ramble: Years ago I was on my computer at 2 AM in the autumn time shift, and the computer asked me if it should change the clocks (Windows 95, I think). I said yes. An hour later, I was still on the computer, but somewhat less coherent. When it asked again, I again said yes.
Serves me right for looking for free pictures of naked ladies at 3 in the morning.
March 9th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
The state of Queensland is the only state in Australia that does not adopt “Summer Time”. The Northern Territory also holds out. Western Australia used to, but has started putting their clocks forward over the last two summers. The thing is, nobody more than a couple of hundred kilometres outside the capital cities seems to want DST, with the possible exception of those in Victoria and Tasmania. There is a big push in the southeast of Queensland (i.e. Brisbane and the coasts north and south) to adopt it, but Queensland’s relatively large rural population has seen it defeated in the last two referenda we had on the daylight saving issue. People in outback New South Wales are not so lucky, as their voting is dominated by the populations of the Sydney/Newcastle/Wooloongong area, who all favour “Summer Time”.
March 9th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
My husband and I used to share the chore of resetting all the clocks. But he and I never coordinated too well on which ones… so some were set correctly, some were adjusted twice, and some were overlooked. Before we had a computer that set automatically with the net, we’d wander around lost the next day!
March 9th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
The computers set their time from the time servers, but it has taken a day of stumbling over the other clocks to get them right. The computers are the oracles of correctness.
I’m going to enjoy seeing the stars in the morning again. But I’m not happy that for a few weeks the kids will be catching the bus in darker twilight. It isn’t safer for them even though they have more time to play outside after school.
In looking for the Dept. of Energy place to comment on the time change, I ran across an article for the California Energy Commission stating that they were looking at year-round DST and double DST. Towards the bottom, there’s a reference to an inconclusive study of the energy effects of switching clocks earlier last spring.
March 9th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
In addition to my previous reply: November 11 is Armestice Day, or Remembrance Day, as it is sometimes called, and commemmorates the day on which the armestice was signed to end the First World War. When Melbourne built its Shrine of Remembrance to honour the memory of those who were killed in the war, the building was finished with a small hole in the roof, so positioned so that at 11:00 AM on November 11 each year (i.e. the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month), a narrow beam of sunlight shines down through it to strike the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, right on the word “Love” in the inscription “Greater Love Hath No Man…” It is said it took the efforts of the Government Astronomer and three surveyors to make sure it all worked.
When Victoria adopted Daylight Saving Time in the early seventies, it was quickly realised that November 11 would be within the Summer Time period, and the phenomenon would occur at noon by the clocks rather than 11:00, so a system of mirrors had to be installed to make the whole thing occur an hour earlier by the sun.
March 10th, 2008 at 3:37 am
As a lover of astronomy, I like it when it’s _dark_ in the evenings!
March 10th, 2008 at 3:57 am
In the UK Daylight Saving was introduced as a temporary measure during WW1. This was at a time when many factories and other places of work had no electric lighting.
Our clocks go forward at the end of March, which means I lose an hours sleep and will be grumpy for weeks afterwards.
Personally in the UK, I think we should stick with GMT (which is same as UTC)
March 10th, 2008 at 4:31 am
@Will., American Voyager…
No, no, no! It’s NOT about the inconvenience. I don’t find it inconvenient to spend 10 minutes changing the time on a few devices around the place. For me it’s far more about the illogicality of it all. We have clocks that follow the sun because that’s the sensible way to measure the passage of the day. We choose 12:00 (should have been 0:00, but don’t get me started on THAT!) to represent the sun’s highest point in the sky. If people want more daylight in the evenings, then we should change business hours so that they go to work earlier and go home earlier.
The argument here is interesting, because it seems to me that one’s choice of side depends on whether one views our system of timekeeping as the province of government and business, or as the province of science. Me, I choose science.
March 10th, 2008 at 6:13 am
I agree with Mike Torr. And unlike the nineteenth century, it wouldn’t be difficult to coordinate a gradual changing of business hours as so many people already have cell phones, computers or clocks that get their time from NIST.
To me it seems like the amount of daylight is only a few minutes more than last week - but I have to go in to school an hour earlier.
I stopped changing my clocks about 30 years ago. I just add the hour if I’m looking at one of my clocks, and don’t if I’m looking at someone else’s.
Looking back a few centuries, wasn’t the length of an hour variable based on the time between sunrise and sunset? I seem to recall reading that we went to our uniform 3600 second hours only after cacophonous clocks in the courtyard became common.
I vote for sticking to sun time with a constant hour length, and making gradual schedule changes as the seasons change instead of making two large clock changes - we have the technology (or soon will). I won’t hold my breath.
March 10th, 2008 at 6:25 am
And bear in mind that it contributes to global warming, because although we lose an hour of morning sun, we gain an hour of afternoon sun, which of course is hotter, thereby warming the planet.
Jeffersonian-
PIN number AAAGGHH. What’s worse (for me) is the common use of the Triply Redundant term “ATM Machine”. That drives me up the wall. I call them Teller Machines.
March 10th, 2008 at 10:53 am
I HATE getting up and going to work in the dark. I also doubt that it is very safe for the kids who have to walk to their school bus stops in the dark either. Thanks Congress. I believe that they actually think that by just adjusting the clocks, we actually get more hours of daylight. No, all it really does is shift the light from the morning to the evening, so then mornings become more dangerous.
We need to go back to the “old” schedule of DST from April to October. Better yet let’s just repeal this whole lame brained experiment and go back to “standard” time where we belong.
March 10th, 2008 at 11:21 am
Well, why don’t we just call DST as CST and get over with all the crap about changing clocks. All four timezones in USA can move ahead permanently by one hour and stay that way.
I mean, look at the situation - there is more DST now than CST!! I just came back from The Bahamas (Nassau) yesterday and yes, they change clocks too!!
This stupidity has got to stop.
SR.
March 10th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Put me down as one of those people who just wants to pick one “time” and use it year-round. While I have a slight preference for DST over standard time, I’d be just as happy no matter which one is chosen. Just pick one, dammit, and stick to it!
March 10th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
What, you mean “By the sea sorceress’s song, mateys! ‘Tis only eight bells, or hang me from the mizzenmast!” That sort of thing?
March 10th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
Ah, I share Philip’s issues. I used to work night shifts. Adding an hour or losing an hour, happened during shift and no extra pay for it.
Worse was that older IDS systems designed to sense unauthorised changes to files would often be implemented poorly. Resulting in a massive number of alerts pertaining for files “modified” without authorisation. (The system kept track of file details and didnt compensate for DST, so massive timestamp inconsistencies)
Nowadays I work days and don’t really care. But I don’t change the clock in my car. So it gets changed whenever I put it in for a service in a different timezone than it was last put in.
March 11th, 2008 at 1:28 am
I can’t believe people are still asking for DST all year round! To make an analogy of this - it’s like asking for “sea level” to be redefined as -100m for the convenience of those people who happen to live below it. Sometimes reality has a natural “zero”. To arbitrarily shift a science-based measuring scale is to deny reality.
Until the day we learn to move the sun in the sky, we’d better just toe the line and measure our time according to our star