America’s turn to twist its clocks back comes this Sunday, November 2. Europe, slightly more sensible, did it on October 25.
To put it at its simplest: from March to October we have been required by law to call One “Two,” and likewise for all the other hours.
I will no doubt give my full rant about this bureaucratic foolery when it resumes next March. From now till then (35 percent of the year), the Sun will actually be highest at midday, and lowest at midnight.
I like the time shifting. As a software developer it gives me more opportunities for employment.
Turning the clocks back to Standard Time will be a relief, and maintaining Daylight “Saving” Time for eight months of the year is absurd. But I find that over the years I have less energy for outrage over this particular foolishness. Even Standard Time is only an approximation of true solar time, ignoring the effects of longitude and the equation of time. People do all sorts of presumptuous, stupid things, and there are only 24 hours in the day (or 23 or 25!) to get worked up about them.
I’m looking forward to retiring from work in a few years, when I’ll be able largely to ignore the annual clock time gyrations.
You’re of course right that standard time is itself only an approximation; it was because of wanting to be brief that I didn’t get into that; it will come into a fuller discussion if I do that in March.
One could say that complication is piled on complication and the shifting is the complication that’s the last straw!
You’re also right that there are many more acute issues to fight about, and we do. my own irritation with Daylight-Shifting Time keeps getting renewed because I’m in the business of explaining astronomical things, and this keeps making it more difficult.
I completely agree with you. Daylight Shifting Time, as you aptly call it, only serves to distort our already tenuous (vestigial?) relationship with the natural rhythms of the Earth and the cosmos. I’m just happy to notice that over the past couple of years I’m no longer apoplectic about it.