Now is the time of the year when I’m most inclined to grouse about Daylight Saving Time. This is more of a national thing than a state thing, but if we insist on observing it, I think standard time should resume now instead of November 1. It’s personal preference with me, of course, I simply don’t like waking up in the dark. It tends to make me feel sluggish the rest of the morning for some reason. I’ll do the rest of my crying somewhere else.
It’s not supposed to be dark so late at this time of year. Feels like late December. And that “extra” hour at the end of the day isn’t much use when it’s cold outside.
I just left Illinois recently and my family were noting that the mornings were getting darker ..sun rose now well past 6:30 CDT. I suggested we drive over to Crawfordsville (about 40 miles) and spend the night and we’d be amazed how early the sun rises back In Illinois..Sunrises and sunsets are relative from place to place,but there does come a point where an 8 am sunrise in September does seem extreme in a non-relative way.
Daylight in the morning is pretty useless to me. Nightfall at 4:30 is depressing. For the first 35 years or so of my life, it was dark in the morning in winter.
Central Daylight Savings Time year-round for Indiana is the solution.
I’m with T.
That’s the problem for y’all being on the western most edge of a time zone. Being on the eastern most part-I am DREADING November 1st. The mornings don’t gain much; if anything for me. And the nights start at 4:00 on cloudy, snowy days.
Rev,
My cold suggestion is to change your office hours at your church, and maybe to move your services.
God didn’t say when to be in the office. If you want to get up earlier, you’re free to do it regardless what the Department of Transportation says. :)
I’ll say it again, let’s do UTC (aka GMT) and be done with it, no Daylight Wasting Time.
As soon as we decided it was OK for solar noon to happen in Indiana almost 2 hours later than the clocks, we decided that the position of the sun has no relevance to the clock on the wall.
Either we should choose a time zone that puts us within 30 minutes of noon happening at noon, or go to a time zone that would actually be helpful for commerce.
(Sometimes I think I come here to get pissed off and vent. It is a sickness)
Jason:
Either
Sun overhead = noon; or
Global UMT.
I’m on board!
Daylight in the morning helps me wake up, LOL! I think it’s one thing to have some dark mornings for a couple of months during the winter, as you gradually become used to it through the fall. It’s quite another thing to have dark mornings from September through at least January. DST jerks us around. That experience of gradually receding daylight in late summer and fall and gradually increasing daylight in late winter and spring has disappeared. We no longer experience the seasons of the sun as we used to, and I miss that.
Anyway, 4:30 nightfall doesn’t sound too bad, as I like to hibernate on winter evenings.
Jason: Sounds like a good idea, but I’m not sure if the folks who insisted that most of us go on EDT could handle using UTC. They couldn’t even figure out the time zones when most of us were on EST year round, so do you think that they could figure out the 24-hour clock and dealing with how many hours plus or minus UTC they are? And yes, I think we’d still have to do that. I think it would be too much work for people who couldn’t add and subtract one, two, three, etc. just a few years ago. UTC is fine, but you still have to understand it and make some effort to realize what time you are on relative to UTC. I can’t see the OMG-NYC-is-one-hour-ahead-of-us-and-I-missed-my-conference-call-because-of-it crowd doing that.
I think the idea is that we’d all be on the same time. No one would be +/- UTC, it would just be 2400 hours all around the world at the same time.
Correct, Doug. Shows would say “Monday Night Football: 2300”, I would schedule an after-lunch meeting for 2000, etc.
All that you would have to consider is what time things occurred on a “normal” schedule. For example, Indiana schools might decide to start at 1400, but some people might start their workday at 1200 and get off work around the same time as their kids, while others might not get off work until 1600.
Businesses have forgotten that they can open and close at whatever time works best for their employees and customers. “8 to 5” is pretty stupid for a retail store, while it might be just fine for a software company.
Honestly, do you think that would EVER happen, LOL! It’s a nice fantasy, though. If people–at least the ones pushing for EDT–couldn’t figure out what time it was before (allegedly), they aren’t going to be able to follow UTC and a 24 hour clock, whether or not we would use plus/minus UTC.
Hey, everyone would know what time it is everywhere, there would be no such thing as + or – UTC since everyone is on UTC. The bitch would be figuring out what time people went to school, work, and slept in the varying parts of the world.
As we move and more away from a 9-5 workforce, though, that becomes less of a barrier. Someday, I think it won’t be a valid argument.
I get what you are saying Jason, but I don’t believe it will happen, at least not anytime soon. Nice dream though. :)
+/- UTC tells us where in the course of their day someone is likely to be. You know the old rule of thumb “You shouldn’t call after 9p.” – Even if we were all on UTC, you still need the *concept* of +/- so that you know the socially acceptable hours to call someone in London.
I think I’ve just established my hours of operation for my company!
Hours: Sunrise + 1:00 – Sunrise +10:00
Indianapolis, IN 46204
I agree, Brenda. I think you have to have some concept of what time it is for your location relative to UTC in order to function. Others don’t think so, however.
We’ve detached the clock from the position of the sun. (Indiana is 2 hours off, I believe). Once we agree that this is acceptable, I don’t know that there is any logical reason to necessarily care where a person is geographically as compared to the time on the person’s clock. This is particularly true the more we function as a 24/7 society with stores open round the clock, TV & radio broadcasts all the time, etc. Calling a third shifter at noon is probably as bad an idea as calling a first shifter at 3 a.m.
There’s always been a feeling that the clock should reflect the postion of the sun .I have an 1883 US time zone map ,one of the first dividing the country into time zones. At bottom was a chart of major US cities and how much they had to set forward or back their clocks,showing how much this new ‘standard time’ was not ‘real time’ .On that map all of Ohio and Michigan ,Georgia and Florida,and of course Indiana, were in the original CTZ. Chicago was behind the sun had and set clocks back 8 minutes from sun time.Detroit about 20 for CST.Other than that ,most cities set clocks forward for standard time: NYC and Philadelphia only a couple minutes.All of New England was behind the sun.
Lou,
I assume that no city was more than 30 minutes off of “real time”?
My point about UTC was exactly what Doug was saying. I can see where it would be a pain, but since we’re already 2 hours off of solar time, I don’t see why it is any more of a pain than what we are doing now.
Personally, I take care of computer networks around the world, so I have UTC and Indiana double-golf time on my wristwatch.
I don’t think we should detach the clock from the position of the sun. :)
Jason asked:
I assume that no city was more than 30 minutes off of “real time”?
“Real time’ would have been defined as sundial time in 1916 when standard time first became law,and all of Ohio officially began observing CST at that time so people would have had to set clocks back about a half hour to observe CST,so Eastern Ohio would have been slightly more than 30 minutes behind the sun with ST..DST was not an issue at that time. The ETZ is the only zone that has changed significally from the 1883 first map of observed ST,or ‘railroad time’. MTZ and PTZ have had only minor adjustments as had the CT/MT border. But from 1916 to 2005,many major cities,and entire states were moved to ETZ from CTZ. OH,MI,IN.KY,TN,GA and FL were moved all, or partially, to EST from CST.
My theory is that the unique alignment of the historic industrial corridor of Detroit- Toledo-Cleveland-Youngstown-Pittsburg and Detroit eventually brought ETZ to the IN/IL border as it is now,but it took a century of incremental progress. Probably was the key city and a, the one considered mandated DST,which was an issue only very late in process. It’s all seems logical now ,but logic is always clearer backwards than forwards when we have complete historical record all at once.
Youngstown OH would have had summer sunrises before 4 AM in June on CST and sunsets in Winter about 3:45 pm. Ohio ,obviously belonged more with EST,although EDT became and issue and was debatable in later years ,but now a moot debate.. A case for undoing the long unfolding TZ placement trend to ETZ is impossible to make to USDOT. Only what is now would be considered as an issue and time history would be set aside. USDOT is unwilling to deal with TZ and DST as one issue( my interpretation anyway).
What has always intrigued me is why the huge metropolis of Chicago and suburbs didnt exert more influence eastwards with CTZ.
OMIT the following,please:
Probably was the key city and a, the one considered mandated DST,which was an issue only very late in process