Here is the article:
ANDY HORNING Ben Franklin had right idea about time April 22, 2002 For thousands of years, people have measured time from the motion of the Earth and stars in order to plan the work between waking up and going to sleep, between sowing and reaping. Since our Earth is about 24,000 miles in circumference and spins at about a thousand mph at the equator, we call a day about 24 hours. An hour might seem arbitrary, but it corresponds to 15 degrees of the Earth's 360-degree daily rotation, or four minutes per degree. Natural time zones therefore parallel the longitude lines that intersect the Earth's axis of rotation. Armed with these facts, a watch, a ruler and a sundial, a clever sort can determine his or her exact direction, longitude and latitude on any sunny day. There is a complication. The Earth's rotational axis isn't exactly perpendicular to the sun. As the Earth orbits around the sun (which takes about 365 days), the incidence of that axis wobbles relative to the sun, and this wobble changes the relative lengths of daylight and darkness. So winter days are short, and summer days are long. Plants and animals depend upon this, and we've developed rich science by observing these facts. Benjamin Franklin knew all of this, of course. But in 1784, as a delegate to France, the old "early to bed and early to rise" statesman wrote a series of hilarious doggerels that poked fun at almost everything he held dear: thrift, science, and of course, playing chess past midnight and sleeping past noon. When you open window shades, he claimed, you don't let light in; you let darkness out. After detailing the amount of lamp oil and candle wax wasted by lazy Frenchmen, Franklin proposed a tax on window coverings. Oh, and he proposed that twice a year, they change their clocks to spare the day. Not surprisingly, the old wit never saw that idea become law. While he was always serious about saving money, clock-changing was a joke. It took generations, and humorless Kaiser Wilhelm Germans, before Franklin's gag became the biannual ruse called "daylight-saving time." Now two candidates for Indiana's 7th Congressional District, Republican Brose McVey and Democratic incumbent Julia Carson, would force it on Hoosiers with a new federal law. Let's set something straight. Nobody cares about the time displayed on your clocks. And despite McVey's promise that DST will give us "greater economic security, and at the same time give us more time to enjoy it," the sun and Earth will not alter their pas de deux. DST aims to change when you wake up and go to bed, when you go to work and come home, when you watch TV and how you write business contracts. In order to reap energy and productivity savings promised by DST, you have to modify not your clock but your behavior. Franklin was, I repeat, joking about the clocks. Of course, since Franklin's time, we've adopted tax withholding, Social Security, Lotto, the Build Indiana Fund -- an apparently endless number of ways to swindle and entice us away from reality. Maybe it's time to fool ourselves about physics as well. And it follows that something that absurd would require a federal law. But I have a counterproposal: Why not federally standardize the international ISO 8601 time/date notation (we'd have to change to YYYY/MM/DD and 24-hour time, for example), draw time zones solely by longitude, and then use incorporation laws to shift between winter and summer work days for all government-chartered corporation entities? If we were really civilized, we'd finally use time-saving, productivity-enhancing technology for what it's worth, and we'd simply work an hour less each winter day. That would keep politics out of physics, promote business, innovation and shopping, save energy, open more jobs, and we could quit prying kids out of bed to stand them up at dark bus stops. People could leave all the clocks in their VCRs, coffee machines, dashboards and cell phones alone. And by really gaining an hour or so in winter when chronically sleep-deprived Americans are the sleepiest, we'd be healthier and so much more productive that employers would wonder why they didn't do it sooner. Who knows; perhaps we'd feel so sensible that we'd then go metric. I think Franklin would approve such a plan. More to the point, he would take it seriously. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Horning works for a medical ultrasound company by day and writes Libertarian musings by night. Contact him by e-mail at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
