People everywhere hate the spring change in clocks for Daylight Saving Time.
First, it's annoyingly tiring having to get up one hour earlier. And feeling like you can stay up a whole hour later. And this leading to wanting to stay in bed that much longer even more. Annoying.
Second, the average effect of this annoyance on the population. This leads to, statistically, 'studies have been done', of reduced physical performance leading to accidents (lower light levels from sun than in the previous week), and an increase in heart attacks and strokes (not exactly excuses to lie in bed a bit longer).
DST changes things twice a year. In a preindustrial society, without fast travel and communication, time zones are not useful. DST is useful for... for what I'm not sure. More daylight in the evening? That's not for work, that's for ... I don't know, kids to stay outside and play longer?
But if that is desired, but also we'd like the feature of no changing of wakeup time, I have a radical new idea, which though it sounds strange, is not entirely a crackpot idea. My proposal:
Have clock time pegged to sunrise.
And call that time 6am. No matter where you are on Earth.
First there is the practical consideration, then there is the implementation. Practically, it fulfills the feature of never changing. You always get to wakeup at the same time. Nowadays we all choose to go to bed pretty much irrelevant to sunset anyways. And the farmers don't have their delivery schedules screwed up when the milking cows don't care about these crazy human practices.
Implementation may be the most difficult, and here is where some of the subtleties come out. However, this is the 21st century. The point is that sunrise is equivalent to longitude, and this is determinable now by any variety of methods but also by pure calculation (whose coefficients were determined by those methods or in the end skywatching).
We all have at our disposal computation devices that are minute in bulk (phones, watches, RFID chips) with GPS positioning (via satellites), that can determine longitude within a few meters (2?). So sunrise will be a few seconds off from someone 10 miles west (15 degrees = 1 hour sunrise difference, 1 degree ~= 60 miles ... 10 miles ~= 24 seconds). This continuous difference sounds like it is insurmountable... except by computation, which is currently trivially executable. You're having a phone meeting with someone at 9:30am, you're in downtown Chicago and they're in Kansas City, MO (~415 miles west). That's around 7 degrees or 28 minutes. If the appointment is at 9:30AM Chicago Loop time, in Kansas City it is ~9AM. The appointment making software would calculate the time for the recipient based on their address. For coordination there can still be a UTC which is the time at one particular longitude.
There are some very minor difficulties that are barely in the realm of practical considerations. Depending on your latitude, noon (or six hours after sunrise) may not correspond to the highest point of the sun in the sky, but that's the case now anyway (just not as much). Also for higher latitudes, sunset will change drastically in the spring in fall (sunset coming later one day to the next by up to 10 minutes, making the feel of the evening change within the week.
There's cultural precedence for this. Many ancient calendars count the change of day (but not when to rise or go to bed) to sunset, so why not sunrise. Our mental perception of the 'next day starting', despite the European style (derived from Roman) changeover at the sun point opposite to sun's zenith (yes, I'm avoiding 'midday' and 'noon' for the moment), is truly when we wake up around dawn or more naturally at dawn.
So that's it. Free idea. Go forth and implement. Just give me credit. If there are problems, I'd like to blame the future implementation.
Of course, this doesn't fix the problems of Jews and Muslims north of the Arctic Circle with practices on cooking or fasting concerning sundown.
No comments:
Post a Comment