Daylight saving time

It occurred to me that the way we think about daylight saving time is tremendously confusing and in my modest opinion conceptually wrong.

Saying that we move the clock one hour forward at the start of spring and backwards at the start of autumn is insanely blind. Only a people as encompassed in the virtual nature of their existing social norms as Anglo Saxons and their cultural following could live under such a statement. The clock represents the passage of time. As such the present is a fixed point in time in the sense that it occurs at regularly occurring intervals displayed by the same number on the clock. In order for the same time interval to display a higher number on the clock (commonly known as moving forward), the frame of the clock itself is moved BACK relative to the regularly occurring present. Because the frame cannot move, we move the needle.

How deceptive of them to make you think you can turn time back when the change causes you to loose an hour of daylight.

Most people jump at this explanation so I've included a small diagram of what happens to daylight when we switch the clocks. Thank you Wikipedia !

As you can see, the daylight portion of the diagram appears to have been moved forward in the middle. Of course You and I know we can't move the sun forward so what really happens ? The scale moves back of course!

But that's a real pickle for our biological brain because we used to have X amount of time before sundown. Let's say 10 hours from 8 to 18. Now when standard time comes back, daylight lasts from 7 to 17 roughly. So while your brain and your body tell you that at at 17 you have 1 hour before sundown, you now have none. Not only is time supposed to have suddenly moved back by miracle. It's suddenly 17 pm while your body tells you it should be 18 pm, but you have one less hour of daylight according to the clock. confusing isn't it?

Hum... the opposite miracle occurs at the begging of daylight saving time, your body tells you it is 6 am, suddenly it is 7 am. What have you done from 6 to 7 am ? How exactly did you gain an hour ? You got marooned out of an hour in my opinion.

Does that bother people at all ? Why make a fuss about it ? Apart from the increase in the prevalence of skin cancer linked to longer sun exposure, the circadian cycles of the body, our natural clock that strangely does not switch around, is messed up. The effect is a sharp but temporary (known as the 3 day spike) rise in suicides and hearth attacks when your body thinks it is going to be 7 am and that it turns out to be 8 am in the Spring. Then in autumn the statistics spare lives in the equal amount when you think it is going to be 8 am and it turns out to be 7 am (pouf, you can sleep). Thus proving, ultimately through the beauty of statistics when time is being taken from us (killing by stress) and when it is being given back by the almighty clock (sparing lives due to reduced stress). Ahh the amazing things you see when they are billions of data points.


Why do we perpetrate this farce ? Common I'm sure you can guess that.

Money of course !

More daylight ? More time to shop !

But mostly, it was introduced by people with much the same concerns as us today, making enough electric power for everyone. In 1907 how could you make enough power plants to keep up with the light bulb frenzy ? The things were popping up everywhere using tons of current ! Not to mention the new machines and household appliances and street lighting and pumps and factories that were going electric all over the country, the radios and so on.

Edison had just finished inventing DC at the same time roughly that Tesla invented AC and suddenly everyone had use and need of this new network ! People were ready to pay any price to access current. Luxury hotels needed it, rich people wanted it, public places had to have it, and so on. So much more practical  and elegant that burning gas or wax or wood ! So the idea to push the day by an hour to save a lot of current by moving the daylight around seemed useful. So they moved it and it caused a huge and growing cost every year since, today up to 31 billion dollars in of loss in stocks and 2.5 billion of direct expense every time, and it never really saved much current. Less than 1%.

How do you feel about gaining an hour now ?