DST Is One Big CF
By Jocelyn Geboy in News on Feb 16, 2007 7:15PM
There was finally one thing we heard President Bush did that we could get behind: he signed a bill changing Daylight Saving* Time (DST) so that it was longer. We get so excited for Daylight Saving Time to come and start to relieve our S.A.D., that anything that would hasten this process sounded great to us. Under the new Daylight Saving Time, DST will start March 11, 2007, (holy early!) and end November 4, 2007.
The whole idea of Daylight Saving Time was conceived by Benjamin Franklin as a way to conserve energy. The idea is that by shifting an hour of daylight to the end of the day, people will not have to turn on lights until later in the evening. From a sociological perspective, as summer goes on, people are less likely to be home using air conditioning, watching television and using energy, as they are doing more outside activities. There is some disagreement about whether or not DST really conserves energy, due to the fact that shifting an hour of daylight (especially with the new law), means that people are getting up to face darkness longer in the morning, forcing them to ... turn on the lights.
Since the idea was first introduced by Franklin, the idea has been jerked around a bit, being codified into law, not a law, an optional law ... that sort of thing. Arizona doesn't do it, Indiana is all janky cause they have two different time zones, and there have been all sorts of different interesting things that occur as a result of DST.
The latest big unforeseen hitch is this: computers, electronics, and airlines all have devices and programs that automatically compensate for Daylight Saving Time, and change the clock/time appropriately at the proper date. But, since they were all programmed for years to be the first Sunday of April to the second Sunday of October, they will all have to be reprogrammed, or be a little messed up. Oops.
More on Daylight Saving(s) Time* after the jump.
However, the Fire Department still wants you to change the batteries in your smoke detectors (and your carbon monoxide detectors, we suspect). They suggest that every time we change our clocks, we change our batteries in our fire protection devices so that they are guaranteed to work should we ever need them to.
Perhaps this put a little bit of a damper on things. Frankly, we're not morning people, anyway. We get going later in the day. So bring on the light! Sounds like just what we need. And maybe fixing all the computers will give some unemployed IT people some jobs. That's good, right?
"Tick Tock" by Grizzly!.
*That's Daylight Saving Time, not Daylight Savings Time. We got schooled by this website on that one. Of course Daylight Savings Time flows better off the tongue, and now is in dictionaries and considered fine (IRregardless, anyone?), but the proper phrase is Daylight Saving Time.
Also, the site points out something that has always bothered us — there is no daylight saving. They say it's daylight "shifting," because you can't save daylight. There's a predetermined amount of daylight each day, depending on where we are in our rotation around the sun. So, when we do our little arbitrary mindgame, we're just shifting the time of one hour of daylight and putting it at the end of the day instead of the beginning. No matter how much Jim Croce wanted it, we just can't save it up.