Hi Frank,
I have to take issue with your notion that God (in her infinite wisdom)
handed us a 24 hour clock. Why 24? Why not 29 just to have a prime number?
Or the decimal 100 hours per day? Or perhaps a more logical 360 units per
day? God may well have given us a daily rotation, but she didn't inflict the
24 hour subdivision on us, we did it to ourselves. A bit like the
abomination that is the Imperial system of measurement.
Cameras etc: I agree with you re the advantages of always using UTC, but I
have other constraints that require me to use local time (whatever that is),
and it's easier to change the time in the camera than do some
post-processing.
Getting out of bed: I'm sure that males past a certain age will agree with
me that it's not the clock that gets us out of bed in the morning,
regardless of DST being on or off!
Cheers, John
John Pickard
[email protected]
-----Original Message-----
From: Frank King
Sent: Monday, November 21, 2016 4:02 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Permanent DST
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.
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