Saving Daylight

 Is it time to make a blog post this year? I guess so, and it's about time. Normally, this would be the time of year where WKTV's Jill Reale would point out that the term is Daylight Saving Time instead of Daylight Savings time, which is the kind of thing that either people ignore anyway or starts them thinking the world changed and only they noticed, like the "Berestein" Bears.

Anyway, I'm a strong opponent of DST because the timing has gotten worse for people who work before 7am since the change in the 90's. Even before that, the change had health impacts and vehicle impacts associated with it. There is now a bill in Congress to skip the five months of "fall back" and just stay sprung forward forever.

So, what does this mean? There's an observatory in England marking the start of longitudinal lines, making it 0 degrees. It is also the home of GMT, where time starts. Every 15 degrees of longitude is approximately in new time zone, where clocks are shifted by an hour. Depending on how closely this is observed, the 15 degrees of time zone falls right in the middle of the 15 degree mark. This means that solar time can be off by about a half hour in either direction. At the -75 degree mark in Rome, we are smack dab in the middle.

So, what do I mean? Basically, time zones try to put the apogee of the sun's movement as close to noon as possible in a time zone. When we fall back, the sun will be straight up at noon. Sunrise will start 5 hours before noon and end 5 hours after noon (this month). A permanent "spring forward" will shift solar noon relative to the clocks. 1pm will be the brightest part of the day. On the first days of Spring and Fall, sunrise will be at 7am and sunset will be at 7pm. This already happens because DST is in effect on both those days.

In my case, I don't have much of a dog in the fight anymore. I live close enough to work, there will be sunlight both ways and 90% of the drive is well-lit. The DST change basically marks the fact that people want to sleep in, stay out later and have jobs that start at 8 or 9.