Daylight Savings Time -- origins and / or meaning???

Weird discussion of the day. And heck, it's Friday !!

Just had a discussion about Daylight Savings Time, and ... well... I always thought that Daylight Savings Time occurred during the winter (BTW, U.S. specific discussion), after all, there is a lot less daylight in the winter, and hence, you need to shift the amount of daylight to what the society deems as important. ie. to save the daylight for the important stuff.

However, it turns out that I was wrong. Daylight Savings Time is during the summer, when there is plenty of daylight to spare... so this leads to the question, with so much daylight, what is this daylight "savings" supposed to do?

Henry

Henry Wong wrote:
so this leads to the question, with so much daylight, what is this daylight "savings" supposed to do?
Henry

Save non-renewable energy.

During Daylight Savings time, you save an hour's worth of daylight from the morning (when you have to more than you need) until that evening, when you can actually take advantage of it.

As for which one is the "standard"...
It's true that either winter or summer could have been kept as "Standard" and the other one could have counted as "Daylight Saving". In the summer, you're saving some morning daylight, when you have an overabundance, to use that same evening. In the winter you'd be saving some daylight from the evening, when you don't really need much, to use the following morning. It probably just made slightly more sense to go with the terminology where the "saving" and the "using" are in the same day.

Paul Anilprem wrote:

Henry Wong wrote:
so this leads to the question, with so much daylight, what is this daylight "savings" supposed to do?
Henry

Save non-renewable energy.

So we're told, but in fact it doesn't do this: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/11/110311-daylight-savings-2011-time-savings-when-does-spring-forward-nation/

Henry Wong wrote: what is this daylight "savings" supposed to do?

just to give/save employment. for instance - joda time

Well, there's just as much daylight before noon as there is after noon. And if you're a farmer then you get up at dawn and go to bed at dusk and it all works out nicely.

But if you live in a city and work in an office, then your day isn't that symmetrical. Think of "9 to 5" -- notice that there's only three hours before noon and five hours after noon? So there's a lot of daylight hours in the morning which you fritter away by sleeping, if that's your work schedule. But if you redefine "noon" to be "1 pm" then symmetry is restored because now "noon DST" is in the middle of your working day. So you tick off a few farmers who have to start getting up "an hour earlier" to milk their cows, but so what if it allows you to get in a round of golf after work?

It would be simpler if you just switched your work hours to be 8 to 4, and have Letterman come on at 10:30 instead of 11:30, really.

Paul Clapham wrote:Well, there's just as much daylight before noon as there is after noon.

That's a neat trick. If I live on the VERY western edge of the Central time zone, how do I get such a dramatic difference from someone who lives on the VERY eastern edge of the Mountain time zone? We may only be a few feet apart, but somehow the sun crosses the meridian for him an hour later than me?

fred rosenberger wrote:

Paul Clapham wrote:Well, there's just as much daylight before noon as there is after noon.

That's a neat trick. If I live on the VERY western edge of the Central time zone, how do I get such a dramatic difference from someone who lives on the VERY eastern edge of the Mountain time zone? We may only be a few feet apart, but somehow the sun crosses the meridian for him an hour later than me?

There's just as much daylight between solar noon as there as after it. (Is what I intended you to interpret that as.) When the clock says 12:00 it isn't necessarily the middle of the day, it's a modified version of that.

What we need to do is save all the superfluous daylight during the summer, then release it during the winter when we don't have enough. People living near the equator have been doing this for centuries!

I have all those hours of sunlight saved away in a Leyden jar just waiting for the zombie apocalypse.

Works even better in case of vampire apocalypse.

Sigh, "modern" vampires just sparkle when exposed to sunlight, not vaporize into ash like a vampire should.

Well, I mean real vampires. Duh.

Bear Bibeault wrote:I have all those hours of sunlight saved away in a Leyden jar just waiting for the zombie apocalypse.

Doesn't the temperature of the light increase as you pack in more hours? Or doesn't Gay-Lussac's law apply to light because it isn't made of atoms?

Remember, light is both a floor wax and a dessert topping, er, rather both a wave and a particle!

Our horses (from Iceland) grow shaggy coats when the daylight hours get shorter - regardless of the climate they live in. Since we live in California we have to shave them in the winter or they get too sweaty.

This picture isn't of the same horse, but this is how dramatic the change is:

Mike Simmons wrote:Well, I mean real vampires. Duh.

Thank goodness!

Bear Bibeault wrote:Sigh, "modern" vampires just sparkle when exposed to sunlight, not vaporize into ash like a vampire should.

What's up with that? Some secret military weaponization project?

Paul Clapham wrote:

Bear Bibeault wrote:Sigh, "modern" vampires just sparkle when exposed to sunlight, not vaporize into ash like a vampire should.

What's up with that? Some secret military weaponization project?

On the other hand, vampires can now be kill by the sun's power, even at night, with ultraviolet rounds ...

Henry

fred rosenberger wrote: If I live on the VERY western edge of the Central time zone, how do I get such a dramatic difference from someone who lives on the VERY eastern edge of the Mountain time zone? We may only be a few feet apart, but somehow the sun crosses the meridian for him an hour later than me?

Timezone geography has only a little bit to do with the sun, and a lot to do with politics. And yes, the politicians make the sun cross very quickly in some areas.

Even the creation of daylight "savings" time is political. It may have made some sense when we worked in factories that had no internal lighting, but Edison made that concept fall from fashion. Once we have lightbulbs, at most the savings can only be outside. Indoors you just turn on the switch. While there may be some theoretical energy savings, the simple facts are that light bulbs are a very small amount of a developed country's energy bill.

The politicians have tried to have "daylight savings" all year, and in the US at least, the voters went nuts. Seems that with DST, the kids were standing on the corners waiting for school buses in the dark. We can't have that. Our kids are too dumb to recognize what a big yellow school bus is without the sun.

Pat Farrell wrote:Seems that with DST, the kids were standing on the corners waiting for school buses in the dark. We can't have that. Our kids are too dumb to recognize what a big yellow school bus is without the sun.

It's worse even than that. When we "spring forward", they are in the dark again.

Pat Farrell wrote:the kids were standing on the corners waiting for school buses in the dark. We can't have that. Our kids are too dumb to recognize what a big yellow school bus is without the sun.

kids still stand outside in the dark.

And the issue with that is not kids recognizing the bus...it's the idiot drivers who go too fast when it's dark and hit people.

Of course time zones are political. Take China - it spans five time zones in astronomical sense, yet they use one time zone for the entire country: http://www.timeanddate.com/time/map/