Dear All, John Pickard notes...
> As a consequence in summer you can > meet more than five different times > in Australia which means that on a > long trip you can spend a lot of > time changing the clocks in cameras, > etc. So why bother? The clock in my camera stays at UTC whether I am in Seattle, London or Hong Kong, whether DST is in force or not. > Most of us in the southern states like > DST ... and look forward to it at the > end of winter. Equally, we don't like > when it ends. That is probably true of most people in the U.K. but, in my view, they think that changing from DST "causes" dark evenings. > Of course the funniest thing about DST > are the arguments of opponents who seem > to think that the 24 hour clock is some > immutable thing handed down from the gods... Hang on a moment. Subject to a modicum of interpretation that is almost exactly my view... 24-hours is simply the mean time it takes the Earth to rotate relative to the sun. I don't care what time measurement system you use but this period IS handed down by the gods (or nature as I prefer to say). Still without caring what time system you use, we have a secondary problem of deciding on a reference point in the rotation to mark the end of one rotation and the start of the next. Two obvious reference points are sunrise and sunset. Even very low forms of life understand these times. Two less obvious reference points are noon and midnight, the instants of superior and inferior transit of the sun. All four reference points are given by nature (gods). That seems enough choice to me. > the only thing that changes is the > "time" you get out of bed. NO. NO. NO. The thing that changes is the definition that god-damn legislators decide to give to midnight. You can get out of bed whenever you wish on any day of the year so it is... UNNECESSARY TO TELL LIES ABOUT THE TIME? The arguments in favour of DST are all bogus in my view. A simple reductio ad absurdum proof will demonstrate this... Let us ACCEPT all the arguments in favour of DST. I have heard that there are fewer road accidents, that children are happier, the grass is greener and cows give more milk. Well, we can now look at a given time zone and, by this hypothesis, within that time zone, there should be fewer accidents in the west than in the east, and so on. This doesn't seem to happen. End of theory. Did you know that China uses ONE time zone for its 60-degree expanse of latitude? Are there fewer accidents in the west of China than in the east? No. In China they get out of bed at different clock times in different parts of the country but the clocks all say the same time (or should do). Good for China. I would go one better and have UTC worldwide. For an extreme BAD example take Iran. Iran has Daylight Saving [well on and off; it has it at the moment] but much of it is in the Tropics where the length of daylight doesn't change that much during the year. So what are you trying to save. MUCH worse than that... Iran is a seriously Muslim country and most people say their prayers five times a day. When the clocks change the whole pattern of the working day has to change because, by the clocks, the prayer times are shifted by an hour. Unlike when you get out of bed, you CAN'T change the prayer times. They are handed down by the gods! Remember what the Native American said when he heard about Daylight Saving: Only a white man could possibly believe that by cutting a foot off one end of a blanket and stitching it on to the other end you get a longer blanket. Frank King Cambridge, U.K. --------------------------------------------------- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial
