Just in case you’re wondering, Daylight Saving Time ends next week, on November 1, for the United States. On that date, us ‘muricans will set our clocks back an hour.
For those in Europe, though, European Summer Time ends now. I’m writing this at 18:00 my time, which is already past midnight in England. At 01:00 you set your clocks back an hour. I have checked some online clocks, and they are confused — or maybe I am, who knows — on what time it is right now. So my advice is to wait a while. Of course, since it’s late there, by the time you read this it’ll most likely be Sunday morning. So when you wake up and read this, make sure you set your clocks accordingly. That’ll make it easy on everybody.
And yeah, I’m no big fan of this either.
October 24th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
I can’t wait until we can set the clocks back again. It’s way too dark at 6:30 in the morning.
October 24th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
In the UK clocks go back at 2am, which becomes 1am. I’m watching a TV show now (1.30am) which is scheduled to end in 45 minutes – at 1.15am! How strange is that?
October 24th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
We should set the clocks back an hour every Sunday, so I live longer!
October 24th, 2009 at 6:32 pm
I am so happy I live in Arizona. No DST.
I’d love to see the feds abandon DST.
October 24th, 2009 at 6:45 pm
If I didn’t have a job, I wouldn’t care what time it is.
October 24th, 2009 at 7:14 pm
Or messed. I think on this site I’m supposed to say “messed with”. >.>
October 24th, 2009 at 7:15 pm
I hope you anti-DST folks are aware of the fact that it saves a non-trivial quantity of energy each year, regardless of exactly why it was instituted in the first place.
I was looking forward to some numbers to show the difference with the recent change, but the recession will make them invalid, unfortunately.
October 24th, 2009 at 7:35 pm
I’m gonna go to bed at 1 AM, and then I’m gonna go to bed at 1 AM again! Hah! I love being a grown-up.
October 24th, 2009 at 7:37 pm
Last month Skeptoid did a podcast about DST myths, including the one that says it saves energy.
I grew up without it in Indiana, but it had a big effect on us when all the TV shows changed twice a year.
October 24th, 2009 at 7:47 pm
Thanny, DST only saves energy if one assumes that activities are pegged to the clock. There is no particular reason why office workdays should be 9-5 or school should start at 8, and so forth. I’ll admit that the purpose of clocks is to coordinate activities, so moving the clock is a practical approach, but there is a stranded-on-the-escalator aspect to the unquestioned assumption.
If we want to save a non-trivial amount of energy, we could cut back on excessive street lighting and brighter-than-day parking lots. Bring back the night!
October 24th, 2009 at 7:54 pm
And it also costs a non-trivial amount as well, thanks to people being at home in warmer hours during the summer and using air-conditioning more. Whether it’s a net positive or negative depends on the region.
October 24th, 2009 at 8:09 pm
I like it because it makes things somewhat consistent in terms of how much daylight I get during my waking hours. I think it’s good for my psychological well being here in North America. When I lived closer to the equator, we didn’t have it, and that was just fine.
October 24th, 2009 at 8:10 pm
> At 01:00 you set your clocks back an hour.
No we don’t. At *3:00*, we set our clocks back an hour.
October 24th, 2009 at 8:16 pm
Thanny, DST did in fact save electricity back when they introduced it … but nowadays, air conditioning and other household electricity usage that goes up when people are home makes any effect negligable.
But having said that, I’m very much pro-DST. Changing your clocks twice a year isn’t anywhere near the inconvenience that people act like it is (and an hour isn’t enough to throw people’s internal clocks off, though I’ve heard that argument too). The REAL point of DST is to align sunrise closer to the time that people usually wake up, thus giving you more daylight to enjoy during your recreational time in the evenings.
October 24th, 2009 at 8:17 pm
DST has outlived it’s usefulness…………..abandon it and quit messing with our time !!!
October 24th, 2009 at 8:22 pm
DST is *great*. It allows me to exercise and pretend I have an outdoors life after work. Thanks to DST, I did some 1000 miles of mountain biking *after* work this summer alone. Can’t beat that.
October 24th, 2009 at 8:23 pm
Why not simply wake up earlier?
October 24th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
There you go again BA, forgetting about us Americans of Hawaii, Arizona, and I guess at least a few years ago, some parts of Illinois. We’ll just leave our clocks the way they are and let you all panic.
October 24th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
I’m glad you called it “Daylight SAVING Time” not Savings like so many people erroneously call it.
Bugs me a little, hear it all the friggin’ time.
Phil: Fan Mountain was rainy last night for the Open House. Did you buy a scope or something?
;^)
October 24th, 2009 at 9:15 pm
The oddest bit of D.S.T. ‘time-foolery’ I have been a part of was a Halloween (technically, early morning, Nov. 1st) in the early ’90s.
I was living in a medium-sized city on the east coast that had ordinances requiring bars to have their ‘last call’ at 1:15 A.M., drinks off of the tables by 1:45 A.M. and then everyone out of the buildings by 2:00 A.M. It was obviously a Saturday night, and the trend was for the bars to stay packed until the very last minute. Bouncers had to practically drag the patrons out at closing time.
There had been rumors (mysteriously unconfirmed by staff) circulating around the club the whole night that, because of the time change, they were just going to stay open an hour later than usual. At 2:00, it would become 1:00, and therefore the bar was still operating lawfully. However, much to everyone’s dismay, at 1:15 A.M. the customary last call was given, and the drinks were dutifully removed from the tables at quarter to 2. Everyone was removed from the building, but a large crowd of hopeful and stubborn ‘Halloweeners’ hung around outside the doors to see what happened at 2.
As predicted by the hopeful, at 2:00 AM, the doors reopened (as it was now 1:00 AM), and the bartenders endured a frantic 15-20 minute scramble for booze. The flow was then again squelched, and all of the glasses again gathered, and the herd shuffled towards the door.
Those stubborn few that had stayed got an extra hour of partying that night. I was one of them. It’s also probably obvious that I’m one of ‘those people’ that sits through the credits of a movie, just to make sure I don’t miss anything.
October 24th, 2009 at 9:28 pm
October 24th, 2009 at 9:29 pm
Why is it easier to have everyone change their clocks than to just have people show up for work and hour later (or earlier)? And yes, I do think we should all be on GMT. When you travel to a new time zone you would just ask “what time does the sun rise here?” instead of “what time is is here?” Maybe I just travel a lot more than the average person.
-kp
October 24th, 2009 at 9:41 pm
I say we should all set to GMT and be done with it. As far as I’m concerned, the enormous amount of labor that went into converting millions of computers when the new dates were set a few years ago and the time spent annually resetting legacy systems that couldn’t be patched (yes, I work for the gov’t) outweighed any energy benefits that might have been gained for years to come. And I’m also not convinced that those benefits are even real. No study that I’ve seen has satisfactorily proved it either way.
October 24th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
Just as the surf in northern California starts getting good, the available daylight after work gets less and less. Then, to add insult to injury, daylight saving happens and – bam! – it’s too dark after work to do anything. No sir, I don’t like it.
October 24th, 2009 at 9:55 pm
The odd things you learn… talking to the guy fixing the snack machine (yet again) and while daylight saving time is irritating enough for them with having to update machines, the change to move it by 3 weeks cost them a lot of money. Those fancy machines that dispense coffee and other stuff have clocks in them. To change to a different schedule for DST involves replacing the EPROM (part on the circuit board). Which wouldn’t be so bad except then you have to completely reprogram the machine, which takes 6-8 hours to get it all set up. The service person said they just go out to all of the machines and change the time manually. Then in 3 weeks go change it again. SO they have to cover the cost to have the service people go out and play with a lot of machines.
The moving it by 3 weeks was an expensive modification for all sorts of businesses. I don’t think it was really thought through and complaints weren’t listened to very well. There are a lot of back of the house costs that tend to get forgotton.
Personally, I don’t see the point of DST. But I know I don’t really have a say in it.
October 24th, 2009 at 10:02 pm
I lived for years in the part of Indiana that didn’t observe Daylight Saving Time, and laughed at the people that had to mess with their clocks twice a year. Then the entire state went to DST, and life got complicated twice a year, for no good reason.
I no longer live in Indiana (I’m in a Mountain Zone state), but DST still does not “save” any time for anyone, and never did. No DST might be a good reason to move to the standard time part of Arizona…
October 24th, 2009 at 10:30 pm
One of the nice things about Arizona.
Actually, I remember back in the late 1960′s when we left Florida, they were just going to (had just gone to?) using DST. Lived in NJ for awhile, then we moved out West….
I didn’t like DST when I first dealt with it in FLA, and would prefer not to deal with it now.
J/P=?
October 24th, 2009 at 10:37 pm
Fortunately, I don’t’ have to worry about setting clocks, as my PCs, of course, are automatic and linked to Time servers while all my timepieces use Radio Time signals, either Anthorn, Cumbria or DFC77, Germany. When at home the only time I tend to notice it has changed is when I see the time on my PC or timepieces and realise it is out of sync with my internal clock and each time it changes it then takes two or three days for my internal clock to ‘recalibrate’.
October 24th, 2009 at 11:11 pm
I’m not a big fan of it at all, it’s kind of like institutionalizing the way that some people seem to think that that if they set their clocks 15 minutes ahead, they won’t be late for work all the time. Neither makes any real sense. Maybe we can just have all the time zones move ahead one hour and be done with it forever like they did in Saskatchewan. Think of all the electricity that we would save! [/snark]
October 25th, 2009 at 1:07 am
Here’s a snippet from an article in yesterday’s Guardian newspaper here in England. Some times the reason we do things in the modern world are so stupid.
“Daylight saving, proposed in 1895 by a New Zealand entomologist, George Vernon Hudson, which is still passionately debated twice every year as the clocks go forwards and back, came in 1916 as Britain scrambled to catch up with the perceived greater efficiency of Germany, which introduced the measure in 1915.
Germany introduced it after a passionate 10-year international campaign by an Englishman, William Willett, who liked horse riding before breakfast, hated having to finishing his afternoon golf round after dusk, and resented how poorly the time fitted both his hobbies.”
October 25th, 2009 at 1:41 am
I hate DST.
The energy arguments? Been there, done that, bought the T shirt. There are valid points on both sides, though I’m inclined to side with the “no difference” conclusion. But to me, all that is simply irrelevant. I just think it’s insane that the human race can come up with a system of timekeeping that synchronises itself to the sun’s position, and then decided to subvert it by adding an offset. It just feels wrong, like arbitrarily redefining sea level as 100m or something.
Mind you, I live in the UK where there is a single time zone. I expect the “sun’s highest point” argument might be less persuasive in a large country where this varies by several hours across the land…
October 25th, 2009 at 1:43 am
Cool an extra hour to my b-day cool. Have nothing plan but cool.
October 25th, 2009 at 2:20 am
I like to call it Daylight Wasting Time, because of all the energy that it actually wastes.
I live on GMT, but that’s because that’s where the EVE Online game servers are.
October 25th, 2009 at 2:33 am
I’m all in favour of abandoning DST. In my house, we keep the manual clocks set on GMT all the year round, so we don’t have to change them. It’s a little confusing for visitors, but we like it fine.
Local time is “real time” – when it’s noon GMT (or whatever your local time zone is) , the Sun is around its highest point in the sky for that day. And that’s how it should be. With the internet and global electronic communications, just how many office workers need to be in work by a certain time each morning?
October 25th, 2009 at 2:56 am
I love only one thing about it – it’s the one night in the year where we get one hour more to sleep, officially. The rest of planning around DST and thinking about it, etc., that is a nuisance, though, I agree.
October 25th, 2009 at 3:02 am
I am pro-DST all the way. I simply don’t get the robotic, soul-dead aspies who can’t deal with changing a clock two times a year.
October 25th, 2009 at 3:29 am
It’s NOTHING to do with having to change the clocks. Notice the plural – I have to change about 10 of them, though even then, it’s not that relevant to my argument. I would happily change 50 if I agreed with the principle. But I don’t.
Is that clear now?
October 25th, 2009 at 4:45 am
What I can’t get, are the robotic, soul-dead aspies who have tho change the clock instead of just changing their working hours.
October 25th, 2009 at 4:48 am
I hate this time of year. You leave work in the dark and barely see and daylight again until the clocks change back. We should stick with BST. It always seems such a waste of daylight in the morning!
October 25th, 2009 at 6:12 am
Like Mike Torr says, it’s got nothing to do with clock-changing. I’m an “aspie” and I can change clocks perfectly well, thank you very much. And I even enjoy the extra hour in bed that I get every last Sunday in October.
I simply see no logical NEED to change the clocks, that’s all.
October 25th, 2009 at 6:41 am
Please folks – resetting clocks is not all that difficult, even if you have a dozen or more. I would agree that the three week change which was touted as an energy conservation measure made little sense. The change was too small to notice. It also put the US out of synch with other countries.
As for saving nrg, tough to tell but will say that for those who have set work hours, it’s a plus in the summers. In the winter, many parents prefer to have the kidlits standing about in some light as they wait for the bus.
October 25th, 2009 at 6:57 am
How anyone into astronomy could be happy with DST is beyond me! I am so happy that despite repeated attempts by politicians and big business, people of my state have yet again voted against it.
One of the biggest problems I have with it, is that as an astronomy professor it means my observing labs have to start at a ridiculously late hour. It is hard enough as it is to get students to come back to the college at night… let alone for a lab that will not finish until mid-night!!!!!!
October 25th, 2009 at 7:00 am
I suggest that we disabuse ourselves of the innocent notion that civil time has anything to do with physical reality. Consider, for example, what happened when the United States
bought Alaska from Russia in 1867: the International Date Line moved from the Alaska-Canada border to the Bering Strait; and October 6 in the Julian calendar was followed by a second instance of the same day with a different name, October 18 in the Gregorian calendar.
One nit to pick: the Navajo Nation observes DST, so not all of Arizona is DST-free.
October 25th, 2009 at 7:18 am
Every week, it seems, sometimes several times a week, there is a new updated to ‘tzdata’, the timezone data package in Ubuntu. Yet Another Stupid Country will have changed their dates for DST and every PC in the world needs to know it. Worse, every computer needs to keep a table recording when DST started and ended each year in each country.
The people who maintain this package are starting to really show how fed up with it they’re getting. The last two updates had the following descriptions:
(Seriously. Two days before it went into effect, they changed the start date. Good thing the people maintaining the data are quick on the patches. Sucks for anyone in Argentina who didn’t update their computer that Monday.)
(They’re not joking. Bangladesh added DST a couple days ago, but have not set an ending date for it. As the tzdata people say, careful planning is boring.)
At work, we discussed DST and had decided that, since we’d be camping Oct. 26 – Nov. 5, we’d just end DST on Oct. 27 for simplicity. (That trip ended up getting scrapped. Apparently we’ve already done too much work for the State Parks this year.)
Personally, I won’t change my watch. It will remain on UTC as it has for eight years now. I’ll just learn to subtract six hours for local time instead of five.
October 25th, 2009 at 7:47 am
And didn’t Venezuela put its clocks permanently back by just thirty minutes a couple of years back, merely to be in a different timezone from the USA? And Pakistan maintains a 30 minutes time difference from India, again just to be different.
Glad to see there’s another fan of UTC/GMT!
October 25th, 2009 at 8:51 am
Newfoundland has its own timezone that is 30 minutes out of sync with the rest of Canada.
October 25th, 2009 at 8:56 am
Mike Torr @30: That’s a time zone matter, not DST. Nothing wrong with having a time zone that corresponds to local time.
October 25th, 2009 at 9:31 am
kevin halse@35: You may want to consider that some of us have better things to do than to change clocks for no apparent reason. You may not (which I am inferring from the tone of your post), but I know that I do.
October 25th, 2009 at 9:34 am
I like DST, it should also stay in winter (northern hemisphere). I prefer more light in the evening than in the morning!
But wait – now I have to recalculate, when the launch is on Tuesday in my local time. Since Germany is now only UTC+1 instead of +2 — that makes 5hrs between Germany and Florida. So launching between 0800 and 1200 means for me 1300 and 1700….
That means for NASA: Do not launch between 0900 and 1100 EDT !
October 25th, 2009 at 9:49 am
My co-workers and I will undoubtedly miss several meetings this week because our office is in the UK, but the servers are in the US. Our clients’ servers are in the UK and elsewhere. It’s always a mess. WHY DID THEY DO THIS?
October 25th, 2009 at 10:58 am
The argument that “the government makes me mess with my clock twice a year” is bogus. The Sun makes us mess with our watches every time we cross a time zone. If it’s really such a big pain switch to UTC and then you only have deal with the occasional leap second. And the fact that Arizona does not use DST saves me from having to reset my watch every time I visit from California – at least for half the year.
October 25th, 2009 at 11:04 am
The whole Daylight Savings Time system is a giant turd that needs to be flushed.
October 25th, 2009 at 11:09 am
Like spending as much time complaining about it as it takes to do it!
Thank you for the laugh.
October 25th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
Changing the clocks twice a year isn’t such a big deal but it is a nuisance and as someone pointed out it is very expensive to some industries.
It doesn’t really save all that much energy – we’d save more by enacting stronger controls on light pollution and vampire (or standby) power. The Bureau of Standards in fact noted no significant energy savings due to DST and a study in Indiana actually found a 1 to 4% increase in energy use due to people coming home and turning on their air conditioning.
However it most certainly does mess with our bio clocks – studies have shown that the number of accidents go up when the clocks change.
And finally I would like point out that most people who like DST live at the center of their time zones…what about the poor bastards that live at the eastern and western edges of the time zones? In Michigan for example, the sun doesn’t set until almost 10:30pm in June. For them the sun is out of sync with the work/school day due to their location and DST.
October 25th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
I prefer ISH time.
Right now for example, it’s seven-ISH. That’s good enough for me.
You can convert analogue clocks to ISH time quite easily. Simply remove the minute hand from the clock face. You’ll be amazed at how much more relaxed you’ll be!
October 25th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
Canada now changes clocks at the same time ‘murrrica does, March & November. We used to do it in April & October, but we changed it a couple years ago so we could be more like you. Awwww.
Pointless practice, unnecessarily confusing, should be stopped. Check out the map on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time
October 25th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
Naked Bunny, I’m glad that a robotic soul-dead aspy such as myself can bring you so much mirth. Oh, and the key word in my case is Sas-kat-chew-an. You guys are on your own, I have no emotional investment in this.
October 25th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Despite repeated assertions that it’s nothing to do with the inconvenience, there are STILL people on this thread saying “why is it such a hardship changing clocks blah blah blah…”.
I give up.
October 25th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
In Canada, Saskatchewan does not change their clocks… ever. They’re a little strange there.
October 25th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Why not just switch to stardates and decimal time and be done with it?
SD 55129.9
October 25th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Actually MichaelL, SK is always on DST. And yes, it’s a strange place. I blame the long winters. ;^)
October 25th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Wow.
Is there nothing on the internet that we can’t get worked up about?
October 25th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
We in Western Australia just kicked this nonsense out (for the third time) after a three year “trial”. We’ll see if it sticks though. Business and government are generally mad keen on it and simply will not leave it alone. It’s been this way for twenty years and let me tell you it’s divisive. If they kept polling for it on a regular basis and the descision was to stand either way, governments could fall because of it and given long enough civil war might even break out.
I’m only slightly exagerrating too. It’s hilarious. Everyone knows it’s a middling little thing for which there are arguments for and against. But the people who don’t want it really don’t want it and vice versa. So the prospect of having to put up with the opposite of what you want, for years on end, can bring out the spirited activist in anyone and all the tortured, reaching arguments that go along with it.
In this way the issue is a perfect little model of democracy; there’s only one option that can stand, what can you do to prevent it being the one you don’t want? Try any rhetorical trick in the book, usually.
Me, I can’t stand the thing. Timezones are tortured enough things as it is. No one anywhere should have it. The fans of evening activity (something which most supporters cited, incidentally, as well as added exercise time, but it was found evening business and general activity barely shifted) care little for the people who get up very early for one reason or another. For them it’s unbelievably annoying (as it is for anyone whose lifestyle is ruled by the planet rather than the clock; farmers, people with young children etc). I’m happy as hell it lost. But it is still out there, like Sauron waiting to return. We must be ever vigilant.
October 25th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
Since I always wake up after sunrise, all this does is cost me an extra hour of daylight when I could be outside. I hate it.
October 25th, 2009 at 7:56 pm
I love DST! More daylight at the end of the day when I bicycle.
That said, the days get so short here in the Winter that it is dark when I wake up and dark when I get home from work, so no adjustments of the clock can help. So we might as well switch back to ST for those dreary months.
October 25th, 2009 at 10:42 pm
Are people really suggesting changing working hours is easier than changing a few clocks? You realise that would include changing all public transport timetables, or timetabled activities (colleges, universities etc would have nightmares if you decided to shift them forwards an hour), all opening times for pretty much every business? surely it’s alot easier to shift your clock/watch back or forwards by an hour?
October 26th, 2009 at 10:25 am
I don’t have a problem with DST. My problem is that, over the past few years, the dates for switching over have changed several times.
There are 4 clocks in my bedroom. (VCR, 2 Clock/radios, Cable box), and two of them have decided that DST ended yesterday, while the other 2 have not. (Okay, one clock/radio doesn’t know anything about dates and DST and is always manually changed.) It made this morning a bit “interesting” for a moment, as I had to remember “did they move the switch earlier, to this week, or move it later, to next week?” “Which clocks are correct?” A little tough to do at 6:40AM.
October 26th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
DST should be year round; having extra sunlight in the evening is much more useful than the morning anyway. How many people would want to have their kid’s soccer or baseball game at 6AM instead of after work? And here in Canada during winter the extra sunlight after school would allow hockey practice outdoors under natural light instead of glaring high intensity lamps.
October 26th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
I’m with Shoeshine. In the wintertime, its still dark when I go in to work and its already dark when I get off work. Changing the clocks does me no good whatsoever. Changing the clocks seems so silly. I wish we could leave them on DST all the time.
And for the person who said that you don’t change the clocks at 1 AM, you change them at 3 AM, actually, you always change them at 2 AM. Either you skip from 2 to 3 or you go back from 2 to 1, depending, but always at 2 AM.
October 26th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
68. Lloyd Says:
DST should be year round; having extra sunlight in the evening is much more useful than the morning anyway.
Obviously, you don’t remember that was tried some time ago. The problem was that children would be waiting in full dark for their school buses, which led to parents having (yet another!) concern about their children’s safety, this time dealing with other vehicles (who are such idiots about stopping for buses as they load/unload) who simply couldn’t see the children as they crossed roads, etc.
J/P=?
October 28th, 2009 at 6:44 pm
I’m also glad, Phil, that you correctly called it “saving” time. (Rule of thumb: there’s no money involved, so there’s no “savings”).
This error is nauseatingly ubiquitous and a programmer’s bane. Even my X-Box misspells the term.
October 29th, 2009 at 7:39 pm
DST is stupid. Costs clearly outweigh by far any benefit, the latter probably nonexistent anyway.
October 31st, 2009 at 5:29 pm
I’m pro DST. Extra hour of day light helps tourism, commerce, health (extra activities after work). Who needs sunlight in the morning when you’re still asleep? Maybe we should keep it all year around. Also I don’t live in a palace, I can change all my clocks in 3 min. I don’t have 100 clocks in a house.
November 3rd, 2009 at 10:01 pm
English has no Academy. All descriptions of “correct” usage are manifestly descriptive language, not prescriptive.
Daylight Savings Time is exactly as correct as Daylight Saving Time. In fact, which is “correct” depends mostly on where you live.
Where I live, the first usage is correct. The second sounds odd.