Do not go quietly into that good night.
One thing I remember from Lancaster is just how short the days were in January and just how hard it was to sleep in June.
Crank alert: everyone needs to get over whining about the time change. Either you're getting a solid eight hours per night, in which case you're well rested and you'll adjust. Have some discipline and change your bedtime by half an hour for one night. Or you're not well rested because, say, you had kids, in which case the special suckiness of changing the clock is indistinguishable from the rest of your life. Either way we don't need to whine about it on Facebook.
There is talk of slicing off my part of the country from Eastern Time and making it Atlantic Time. I'm all for it, just as I am pro-DST.
Winter solstice is not when you get the earliest sunsets though.
Which solstice is the one where you burn virgins?
On research, that doesn't make much of a difference though. Earliest sunset in Ann Arbor is 5:02pm, Dec. 4-13.
We got our first snow last night. I'm against it.
I'm for all-year DST, which passed the California Assembly by a large supermajority this year. Later sunsets are more helpful to our degenerate society than earlier sunrises.
Winter solstice is not when you get the earliest sunsets though.
Wait, why not?
3: Well, you'd agree with the guy at the link, then. He also likes DLS.
11: I see there appears to be an equation of time to consider.
From October 23 until February 19 the length of the day up here at 52.5°N is shorter than the winter solstice where I grew up. Today in Berlin the sun made it up to about 20° above the horizon, down where I grew up it rose to more than twice that.
On the other hand, June. Long about the summer solstice, Berlin definitely has light from just before 4am until about 10:30pm, and it has twilight-ish conditions for all but about three hours of the night. (Even that is technically "astronomical twilight" and not full-on night.)
For heebie referencing, the sun made it as high as 30° in Ann Arbor today; at the solstice it will be 24°. For a large Alamo-containing city in Texas, the figures are 43° today and 37° at the solstice.
So yes, Michigan would definitely feel like sunset for more of the winter day, just because the sun never gets very far up into the sky. Where did teo used to be in Alaska? Solar high point today in Fairbanks is 6° above the horizon. Yeesh.
Sunset is 4.16pm here today.
I'm always a bit bemused by the fuss about the changeover, as my sleep patterns are so irregular I barely notice it. Also I don't mind dark evenings (and actively prefer dark mornings).
Does anybody really know what time it is?
Fucking hell. The idea of Lancaster as some kind of ultima Thule takes some getting used to. I did hate when it got dark at three and light shortly after nine but that was worst before the snow came. But I think dark evenings are worse than dark mornings: if you have to wake up in the dark it doesn't make much difference whether the sun comes up an hour after coffee ingestion or two hours, whereas going home in the dark is just a misery.
Mars, IIRC, has days that are 24 hours 40 minutes long.
18: Sounds like a great opportunity, heebie!
The EU is abolishing DST from 2021, much to the ire of the Tories, with one describing the European Commission as "wanting to become Time Lords". So if the UK maintains DST after Brexit, as seems likely, Northern Ireland will have an hour's time difference with the Republic for six months of the year. Should be fun.
Indiana used to do DST in only part of the state, which I found confusing.
I assume Westminster could pass legislation to harmonize NI with ROI, but I don't know if that would be too humiliating for the Tories. (It looks like in the past it's mostly been Dublin striving to harmonize.)
I don't care about the changeover in terms of lost sleep. But I hate how great the gap is between winter and summer sunset times. I like to go for my evening run when the sun has gone down behind the hills: in summer I can wait until after 8 p.m., but in winter I have to hustle to get home from work so I don't have to run in the dark.
If anything, at DST the clock should shift in the opposite direction, to better harmonize our winter and summer evenings. (I guess the tradeoff is that the differences between winter and summer sunrises would be greater, but I'm not a morning person, and I'm just going to work anyway, so who cares.)
I used the tool to work out how year-round DST would change sunrises/sunsets in California.
% of sunrises in the year before 7am: Bay Area would change from 59% to 49%, LA 91% to 59%
% of sunsets after 6pm: Bay Area 70% to 87%, LA 66% to 82%
Why not split the difference and go standard time plus thirty minutes.
Why not split the difference and go standard time plus thirty minutes.
India did that when it integrated its two colonial-era time zones into one. It makes for confusing deadline calculations when I'm working for a Mumbai-based client, as they're 5.5 hours ahead.
Australia looks even more confusing, though. I guess if people there can cope with some states using DST and some not, and not only 30-minute but 45-minute offsets, Northern Ireland should be fine.
It's snowing! It started yesterday! It will probably snow tomorrow!
I think the real problem is northerly and cloudy places. Ann Arbor boasts 180 sunny days per year, Heebieville has (I think?) 232. My corner has 161.
I was surprised how little this bothered me when we moved. I was expecting to be miserable going weeks without seeing the sun. I gather seasonal depression is awful.
I assume India did that because it makes their time zone approximate Delhi local time. Which is good for most of the country but not as great for its westernmost and easternmost states. (Not horrible either.)
My impression is that the people who most hate going off DST (they don't really "hate DST," as some have pointed out above) are those who live in the eastern end of their time zone, or at a high latitude, or both: Boston, for example. The problem is that unless MA can carry the rest of New England (and maybe even NY!) it would be an isolated outlier. People would laugh at us even more than they do already.
My modest proposal is that we do away with time zones altogether and go back to "sun time." Everyone has a GPS-enabled mobile, and an app that translated times from other "time zones" into the time where you currently are would just be an extension of what happens in a lot of apps today: you see your local time zone on something that was dated in another local time zone. We'd just be making the "zones" smaller. So, if someone sends me an email at 2am from CA, I should be able to see both the local time where the sender is, and the local time where I am, and it doesn't have to be in full or half-hour increments. It could be in seconds! It's the logical conclusion to everyone having their own personal everything: your own personal time zone!
27: Mostly I don't enjoy direct sunlight. Clouds are great.
27: I haven't lived in Pittsburgh in nearly two decades and I still react to sunny days as if they're rare and precious things where I should not be required to do work.
The sun is an asshole that makes you tired and red.
Where are you sticking your head?
The problem is that unless MA can carry the rest of New England (and maybe even NY!) it would be an isolated outlier.
I think if MA went with Atlantic Time - essentially permanent DST - ME, NH, and RI would follow. CT would go with NY, and I don't know what VT would do.
CT would go with NY
Agree. CT is part of NY.
I don't know what VT would do.
Declare independence. (Nah, not really. VT is just the NY version of NH, so they'd do what NY does.)
I vaguely remember hearing from a pilot that India's time zone is actually really convenient because you can adjust to it by just wearing your watch upside down.
I would like to be a northern latitude summer solstice year round. Equatorial days are no good, really: no light evenings. Switching hemispheres every six months doesn't really cut it either.
In a libertarian utopia each one of us could choose our own time zone.
Where did teo used to be in Alaska?
Anchorage, and still am.
36: And of course there's a just-so story on Twitter that this was the reason for the time zone being that way, which seems unlikely.
However, Indian time zones turn out to be a richer story than I assumed in 28. The Brits originally kept most of the railroads to Madras local time, which in current terms is about +5:21. They instituted India Standard Time +5:30 in 1905, with separate time zones for Calcutta and Bombay, and if I'm interpreting Wikipedia correctly, actually sited an observatory in Allahabad specifically to fall on the right meridian. The separate time zones were abolished a few years after independence.
38: Slogan: Government! Keep your hands off my clock!
There seems to be some interest on the west coast across borders to stop switching, both California and British Columbia now have laws that would allow the change, but haven't committed to it. Washington just passed something about sticking to DST - Oregon is looking too. I suspect the whole coast is going to drop the time changes.
Alaska has looked into dropping DST as well, but there was significant pushback having something to do with cruise ship schedules and it hasn't gone anywhere so far.
10 to 42. We passed an initiative with 60% of the vote to allow the Legislature to make this change (a decades-old initiative instituting DST had prevented this) but it hasn't yet. Even when it does, which seems decently likely for next year, it will be contingent on federal approval.
43: I don't think it would make sense for Alaska unless/until the rest of the coast did it. Up that far north you are kind of screwed for clocks matching daylight for chunks of the year anyway, and have to deal with it. In comparison urban populations in PNW and southern BC have enough shift to make for annoyingly early sunsets, say, but it feels like you could do something about it.
In Anchorage aren't the short days something like 10am - 3 pm in full sun? An correspondingly long in the summer.
44: Yes, BC just passed something similar. They are allowed to change, but don't have to. I can't see them doing it without at least most of WA/OR/CA. also changing.
It would be quite something if WA changes to not-changing, and then you have a 2 hour time change driving the 75 miles across the Idaho panhandle. I suppose the panhandle will follow Spokane, so then you have a 2 hour change at Lookout Pass (and Lolo Pass, but no time change (?) at Lost Trail Pass).
I've mentioned before having had a multi-lawyer case in Indiana in a different century, and, with lawyers all over that state, we spent as much time trying to get straight exactly when the next conference call was going to be made as one spends in a typical Los Angeles meeting discussing the best way to get from the meeting back to the office/hotel/airport.
I was going to say I doubt California will wait for its neighbors, but then I remembered the main reason the bill apparently halted before full passage this year was a San Diego senator wanting more clarity about how it would work along the border. (I assume Baja California would quickly follow suit, since half of the state is Tijuana; Sonora maintains the same harmonization with Arizona.)
Up that far north you are kind of screwed for clocks matching daylight for chunks of the year anyway, and have to deal with it.
Yeah, time is so weird here anyway that I don't think being on DST or not makes much difference to anything.
In Anchorage aren't the short days something like 10am - 3 pm in full sun? An correspondingly long in the summer.
Yeah, that's approximately right.
48: California is the only one I could see going unilaterally, and then probably only if they believed it would force others hands. People in governance seem to think time issues are harder than it seems (but, see 47 i guess).
I've mentioned before having had a multi-lawyer case in Indiana in a different century,
Now that's one hell of a time zone change.
I have to disagree with Cala here. I think there may be evidence that it can be bad for your health. Gaining the hour of sleep is good, but there's an increase in heart attacks in the Spring with the switch to DST.
They also celebrate White People Appreciation Day on MLK.
Sleep experts say permanent standard time is our best bet: http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/6534964/Open-letter-in-support-of-permanent-standard.pdf
The real sleep experts are too drowsy to to write papers.
55: Fuck those guys. Who cares if it's dark in the morning? Have to go to work regardless. I want that light in the evening after work for being outside.
But if you want to steal cars and still get up in the morning at a reasonable time, it's probably better to have it get dark earlier.
You can go back a century by driving for an hour if you start in Chicago.
Permanent DST with Double DST in the peak 8 weeks of summer. For 38° 51' N 77° 3' that'd be fine. Light in the early morning is a waste.
I finally used the map-thing at the first link in the OP. I came out "make no change." Also, if I were in Lincoln or Columbus, Ohio, I would still be in that zone. I think the secret is mostly that you should try to live in the middle of a time zone.
The code at the bottom is Python? I don't know what else it could be, but that's not my thing.
If you learned you could sell out more promiscuously.
I have been able to learn some R, which is how I felt able to guess about the code on that page.
I still find it odd that people complain that the sun sets too early and not that our work day isn't well distributed around the solar maximum. I'd prefer we have constant standard time and that workplaces, etc. that need seasonal hours adapt them. Especially as that need isn't uniform across a time zone. It's so weird that we find it easier to change the concept of time itself than the 9 to 5.
64: it is JavaScript with some specific add ons I think.
(I assume Baja California would quickly follow suit, since half of the state is Tijuana; Sonora maintains the same harmonization with Arizona.)
I could be remembering wrong, but I went north from Poland to Finland in 2001 and one of the Baltic states was either on a different timezone or just didn't change the clocks for daylight savings, which made for a bit of confusion. It looks like they're consistent with each other now, but at the cost of losing freedom and autonomy to the monstrous time-sucking EU.
67: I think the sequence is:
1) Schools want seasonal hours, because then sports teams get extra practice in the spring/fall without forcing kids to wait for the bus in the dark in the winter
2) If schools are on seasonal hours, then any business where the person with the power to set hours is a parent will also end up on seasonal hours
3) We're now back on DST, except half-assed and therefore even more terrible.
39: Oh! And that's only a degree or so further north than Helsinki, which I hadn't realized until now.
Agree with 3. My feelings about the recent change back to Standard time are entirely about its effect on Atossa's bedtime (a little better than three weeks ago, but there are still some rough nights) and getting her up in the morning (right after the change, she was getting up on her own when I did and I missed the time to myself in the morning; now, she's back to sleeping until we wake her up most school days, which is nice).
The season only really has two big effects on my life. First, it's harder to keep Atossa busy on non-school days. Parking her in front of the TV for 6 hours at a time would be bad parenting, but trekking around town by bus or bike would be miserable. In the summer we could just chase her around a park. Second, I have to think about my commute. I tell people mostly-seriously that December is the best time to bike to work because I don't have to shower and change clothes after arriving like I do in August. But I'm thinking more about safety after a minor accident a few weeks ago (got doored, a few bruises but never hit the ground) and am more worried about biking in the dark than I was last year or 5 years ago.
|| Who is trolling us? Slate headline, "Do I Have to Stop Masturbating to an Actor Now That He's Dead?"
https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/11/stop-masturbating-to-dead-actor-advice.html?via=taps_bottom
||
70: I don't fully buy that complete chain of reasoning. First, schools are institutions like any other and their needs will vary. There's no reason to force schools Miami and Boston to be in lockstep. Likewise, not all schools start around winter dawn and thus not all need season hours.
I'd also contend that there's a pretty deep psychological effect of changing the sun's position by an hour in a day. I often find it distressing when there's a strong discontinuity in how it changes throughout the year. Other people here have noted that they or people they know get seasonal affective disorder around the equinoxes, when the rate of perceived solar change is greatest, yet that pales in comparison to what DST does.
I don't think having seasonal hours has the same effect. Sometimes I have to get up an hour early, and that's just "oh I'm getting up an hour early, kinda sucks but nbd" and it's just a very different feel from my biannual experience of "holy shit somebody fucked with Time Itself." But I guess not everybody has that.
"holy shit somebody fucked with Time Itself."
Yeah, it's bad enough that Mother Earth is pissed at us, but now we're messing with Father Time too.
Sir Rod Stewart has a model railroad setup the size of a house that recreates midcentury Pittsburgh in detail.
You can see the Pirates not sucking.
76: honestly, there are a lot worse uses of screw-you-money.
Further to the earlier Sontag discussion, there is a nice anecdote in today's LRB:
James Wolcott writes that, to his knowledge, Susan Sontag never had a pet (LRB, 24 October). In fact she did. Sontag lived for a long time in the penthouse of the apartment building where my husband and I have lived for more than fifty years. We and our neighbours were all familiar with one of the not-so-nice Sontag stories. Apparently her son, David, said he would like to have a dog. Sontag agreed to let him have one. When she was forced out of the penthouse by a new owner, the superintendent went up to check on its general condition, only to discover that the entire, very large, wrap-around terrace was ankle-deep in dried dog shit. He and the doormen said they hadn't even realised there was a dog up there since nobody ever saw her son, or anyone else for that matter, walking a dog in the park or on the street. Deirdre Wulf New York James
39: Oh! And that's only a degree or so further north than Helsinki, which I hadn't realized until now.
Yeah, Anchorage is at 62 degrees, which is quite far north for a city its size—slightly further north than St. Petersburg and the big Scandinavian cities; the only cities further north that are larger are Murmansk and Arkhangelsk—but not particularly far north within Alaska.
Don't mind me, I'll just sit here in the dark with my university and my brewery. Not a proper city (hic!) No'prpr'shitty,heshaid.Wassheknow?I don't care.
Don't mind them Tromsø , here have some natsiq.
Have you guys met Fairbanks? I think you'd get along great.
More the merrier, there is lots of natsiq.
How long does it take for blood pressure medication to kick in? I'm not feeling a buzz.
It says "May impair ability to operate a vehicle," so I was expecting to feel like I had four beers or three good beers.
I think I need to ask for beta blockers or maybe Klonopin.
67: This.
The concept exists so assorted sub-cunts from hell* can have variations on the Spinal Tap "This one goes to 11" discussions without it being to readily apparent.
*Not in this thread of course ...
Having just driven a fair distance west-to-east, I was reminded of how that really shortens the already short days. Also, there is a tiny sliver of Oklahoma that does Mountain Time (I think just Kenton, population 17).
Having just driven a fair distance west-to-east, I was reminded of how that really shortens the already short days. Also, there is a tiny sliver of Oklahoma that does Mountain Time (I think just Kenton, population 17).