Senate passes Sunshine Protection bill making Daylight Savings Time permanent
sprout said:
RTrent said:
In one 2017 study from Denmark, scientists analyzed a psychiatric database of more than 185,000 people from 1995 to 2012. They found that the fall transition to standard time was associated with an 11 percent increase in depressive episodes, an effect that took 10 weeks to dissipate. The spring switch, by contrast, had no similar effect.
FWIW, the timing of the Fall transition corresponds to the start of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) / seasonal depression. Would be interesting to see if the trend changes without having time shifts.
Isn't that so amazing? That SAD just happens to occur at the same exact time as the clock shift. And when congress changed the dates of the of the shift, the SAD date went right along.
mrincredible said:
Morganna said:
Interesting. Expensive to do?
if I was seriously talking about this, I’d have to do a lot of number crunching to figure it out. There would be a large initial investment required, but ultimately it would probably be cheaper than continuing to use the antiquated heating systems are schools possess.
sorry, no. Solar panels max out at about 21% efficiency. If you had a perfect roof and perfect unobstructed views of the southern sky and perfect sunny days every day you would not generate nearly enough power to heat or cool a school. I have solar and love it. I use mini split heat pumps and love them. My house is well insulated, I drive an electric car, and I really nerd out about this stuff. But people constantly overestimate the output available from panels.
Of all the issues facing the country that can't even get a vote in the Senate, this is the one that gets overwhelming bipartisan support. An issue that next to nobody is concerned about.
That's pretty much our politics in a nutshell isn't it?
RTrent said:
sprout said:
RTrent said:
In one 2017 study from Denmark, scientists analyzed a psychiatric database of more than 185,000 people from 1995 to 2012. They found that the fall transition to standard time was associated with an 11 percent increase in depressive episodes, an effect that took 10 weeks to dissipate. The spring switch, by contrast, had no similar effect.
FWIW, the timing of the Fall transition corresponds to the start of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) / seasonal depression. Would be interesting to see if the trend changes without having time shifts.
Isn't that so amazing? That SAD just happens to occur at the same exact time as the clock shift. And when congress changed the dates of the of the shift, the SAD date went right along.
I'm guessing you're not referring to the 2017 study you cited which uses data from the Danish Psychiatric Central Research Register (DPCRR). Are you referring to something specific, or is that sarcasm?
DanDietrich said:
sorry, no. Solar panels max out at about 21% efficiency. If you had a perfect roof and perfect unobstructed views of the southern sky and perfect sunny days every day you would not generate nearly enough power to heat or cool a school. I have solar and love it. I use mini split heat pumps and love them. My house is well insulated, I drive an electric car, and I really nerd out about this stuff. But people constantly overestimate the output available from panels.
I was surprised that my home was not a good candidate.
Jaytee said:
I say just stop DST entirely. Who needs sunlight at 8:30 pm?
Maplewoodstock
They had a referendum on this here in Alberta but it would have left sunrise in the dead of winter at sometime around 10:00 am. Personally, I would like to see it go the other way. Who cares if the sun goes down at 11:30 pm or 12:30am? It would be great to have an extra hour of darkness in the summer morning!
Plus, I detest "springing forward".
STANV said:
Maplewoodstock
the real fun starts after the sun goes down in memorial park… and the music is good.
STANV said:
Maplewoodstock
Nah. The stage lights don't take full effect until after dark.
Summer break was great as a kid because my parents (and my friends' parents) would say "come home at dark." That meant we could stay out pretty late for little kids.
When we lived in Michigan, with DST the sun didn't set until something like 9:30 pm. In the summer. As far as the a.m. times, the farmers kept reminding everyone that somehow it affected when the cows needed to be milked. This concern likely related more to when the farmers needed to leave to drive to their full time jobs.
If the schools open at 9, will the parents' work days start at 9:30/10?
Sunrise in December here in the frozen north will be about 8:30 (not full daylight, just sunrise). Maybe i'll finally pop for one of those sunrise alarm clocks.
My vote would be for year-round standard time, though like yahooyahoo i remember feeling the wonderfulness of daylight saving time as a child.
mjc said:
If the schools open at 9, will the parents' work days start at 9:30/10?
That's a good point. Then they will work later and end up missing the additional end-of-day daylight anyway.
I'd rather we keep switching, because those post-8-am sunrises are going to SUCK in the winter. Getting up in the dark blows. But if we're definitely going to have to stop changing clocks because people can't handle a week's worth of annoyance twice a year, I guess I'd rather we have permanent Daylight Savings Time than permanent standard time, because that extra hour of daylight in the evening in the summer is pretty great.
(Yes, I know it's not actually an additional hour of sunlight, stop being pedantic.)
I saw that map earlier.
It seems a half hour compromise shift is not so helpful considering some time zones have a 3 and 1/2 sunrise shift. For example in Central we have Alabama starting sunrise between 7:30 and 8:00 whereas part of Montana starts after 10:00.
Might we be better off if the zones some states are in were adjusted to align better with sunrise or sunset? Move ND, SD and Neb to mountain, Alabama and all of Florida to eastern, Michigan and Indiana to Central, Montana and Idaho to pacific.
DanDietrich said:
mrincredible said:
Morganna said:
Interesting. Expensive to do?
if I was seriously talking about this, I’d have to do a lot of number crunching to figure it out. There would be a large initial investment required, but ultimately it would probably be cheaper than continuing to use the antiquated heating systems are schools possess.
sorry, no. Solar panels max out at about 21% efficiency. If you had a perfect roof and perfect unobstructed views of the southern sky and perfect sunny days every day you would not generate nearly enough power to heat or cool a school. I have solar and love it. I use mini split heat pumps and love them. My house is well insulated, I drive an electric car, and I really nerd out about this stuff. But people constantly overestimate the output available from panels.
Also, heat pumps can get covered with snow and cease working. Yes, they are something to consider, but not a magic bullet.
Might be part of the solution though. One of the insane things about South Mountain Elementary is that they turn on the boiler in October and run it until May regardless of the temperature outside. It is literally always on. You haven't heard complaining until you've sat in a 3rd grade classroom when the temp outside is 90 degrees and the radiators are on. I understand that the school boiler is a blunt instrument but the level of waste is insane. A more flexible system might really make a difference both in terms of comfort and efficiency.
GoSlugs said:
Might be part of the solution though. One of the insane things about South Mountain Elementary is that they turn on the boiler in October and run it until May regardless of the temperature outside. It is literally always on. You haven't heard complaining until you've sat in a 3rd grade classroom when the temp outside is 90 degrees and the radiators are on. I understand that the school boiler is a blunt instrument but the level of waste is insane. A more flexible system might really make a difference both in terms of comfort and efficiency.
This happens in many NYC office buildings also. My spouse reports that in his building, his company is often forced to run their A/C (which they control) when the building still has the heat running and it is way too hot.
In looking at that map, I'm surprised at how many states have two different timezones cutting through them.
While I'm in complete agreement with stopping the biannual change, the clock time that best matches the majority of human's internal rhythms is standard time.
max_weisenfeld said:
While I'm in complete agreement with stopping the biannual change, the clock time that best matches the majority of human's internal rhythms is standard time.
My tendency is to agree with this. I know people gripe about how dark it gets by 5 in the winter but I think we’d all adjust better if the government stopped changing the Earth’s rotation twice a year.
Or however they do it.
What effect will this have on worldwide computer systems and code that have the time changes baked in for years to come?
mrincredible said:
My tendency is to agree with this. I know people gripe about how dark it gets by 5 in the winter but I think we’d all adjust better if the government stopped changing the Earth’s rotation twice a year.
Or however they do it.
What effect will this have on worldwide computer systems and code that have the time changes baked in for years to come?
Oh, time zones are already a mess for computer systems.
Basically, there's a database for this, and it generally ships with programming languages -- so needs regular updates. That's one of the sorts of things that'll end up triggering those updates to your browser or app or whatever (the other big one being security patches. And of course sometimes updates are for actual new features!).
https://www.iana.org/time-zones
ETA
That database needs changes all the time. For a sample, here's the mailing list discussions for this month: http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2022-March/thread.html
max_weisenfeld said:
While I'm in complete agreement with stopping the biannual change, the clock time that best matches the majority of human's internal rhythms is standard time.
From the above article -
“The reason it’s called standard time is because when they came up with these time zones, they did their best to pick the time when the sun was immediately overhead at noon"
They may have tried but they certainly did a lousy job of it considering what we see in the time zone map posted by PVW. Some U.S. time zones span over three hours of sunlight time. The actual times for most people are way off from noon when the sun is immediately overhead, which may be up to 1 1/2 hours either way.
So my question is, for those whose noon sun time is 1 1/2 hours earlier or 1 1/2 hours later, do we really notice a difference due our internal rhythms? If such, I would think it would have been noted and adjustments made.
Or is the internal rhythm effect so trivial that it doesn't really matter? That we should just pick a DST or standard for based on what convenient.
Why did we make DST 7 1/2 months of the year with standard time only being 4 1/2 if DST is bad for us? To me it seems yearly DST is more convenient, which is why we have it for 7 1/2 months. I often see that friends and acquaintances are happy when we go to DST (the yay, another hour of daylight) whereas going to standard leads to "ugh, its going to be dark so early."
I suspect after all the usual overthinking and worrying nothing will be done.
To add
Does your body really give a damn if at sun noon clocks say 12:00 or 1:00 pm? Why should your body care what some clocks say?
What counts is when you get up and when you go to sleep and possibly the middle of your work day is.
If the middle of your work day happens to be the same time as sun noon then maybe your internal rhythm may end up matching that work day. If your work day is 9:00 to 5:00 pm then you my prefer sun noon to be at 1:00 pm. If its 8:00 to 4:00 pm then 12:00 noon. If you work at home with flex hours the consideration would be when you get up ands when you go to sleep.
RTrent said:
To add
Does your body really give a damn if at sun noon clocks say 12:00 or 1:00 pm? Why should your body care what some clocks say?
What counts is when you get up and when you go to sleep and possibly the middle of your work day is.
If the middle of your work day happens to be the same time as sun noon then maybe your internal rhythm may end up matching that work day. If your work day is 9:00 to 5:00 pm then you my prefer sun noon to be at 1:00 pm. If its 8:00 to 4:00 pm then 12:00 noon. If you work at home with flex hours the consideration would be when you get up ands when you go to sleep.
New plan. Don't change the clocks, but twice a year change the start/end times of work and school ;-)
New, worse plan - constitutional amendment to redraw all the states as roughly north-south columns. We'll have 50 very long, very narrow states. Everyone will be on the right time zone, but it's really going to make the Senate malapportionment problem a lot worse.
RTrent said:
I saw that map earlier.
It seems a half hour compromise shift is not so helpful considering some time zones have a 3 and 1/2 sunrise shift. For example in Central we have Alabama starting sunrise between 7:30 and 8:00 whereas part of Montana starts after 10:00.
Might we be better off if the zones some states are in were adjusted to align better with sunrise or sunset? Move ND, SD and Neb to mountain, Alabama and all of Florida to eastern, Michigan and Indiana to Central, Montana and Idaho to pacific.
Indiana used to be one of the few states that did not observe Daylight Savings.
Now it's down to Arizona and Hawaii plus a handful of territories.
RTrent said:
max_weisenfeld said:
While I'm in complete agreement with stopping the biannual change, the clock time that best matches the majority of human's internal rhythms is standard time.
From the above article -
“The reason it’s called standard time is because when they came up with these time zones, they did their best to pick the time when the sun was immediately overhead at noon"They may have tried but they certainly did a lousy job of it considering what we see in the time zone map posted by PVW. Some U.S. time zones span over three hours of sunlight time. The actual times for most people are way off from noon when the sun is immediately overhead, which may be up to 1 1/2 hours either way.
So my question is, for those whose noon sun time is 1 1/2 hours earlier or 1 1/2 hours later, do we really notice a difference due our internal rhythms? If such, I would think it would have been noted and adjustments made.
Or is the internal rhythm effect so trivial that it doesn't really matter? That we should just pick a DST or standard for based on what convenient.
Why did we make DST 7 1/2 months of the year with standard time only being 4 1/2 if DST is bad for us? To me it seems yearly DST is more convenient, which is why we have it for 7 1/2 months. I often see that friends and acquaintances are happy when we go to DST (the yay, another hour of daylight) whereas going to standard leads to "ugh, its going to be dark so early."
I suspect after all the usual overthinking and worrying nothing will be done.
Each zone covers roughly one hour, not three. So in each zone, solar noon varies from standard time noon by less than 30 minutes, for a median of a 0 minute variance. The variance is 30 - 90 minutes for DST, with a median of 60.
There are some outliers, mostly due to politics, just like the Senate's ill-advised choice of DST over standard time.
As to your other point, it is addressed in the article.
max_weisenfeld said:
RTrent said:
They may have tried but they certainly did a lousy job of it considering what we see in the time zone map posted by PVW. Some U.S. time zones span over three hours of sunlight time. The actual times for most people are way off from noon when the sun is immediately overhead, which may be up to 1 1/2 hours either way.
Each zone covers roughly one hour, not three.
Maybe I didn't explain it well. I clarified with a highlight. But try, again, to read what I wrote.
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FWIW, the timing of the Fall transition corresponds to the start of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) / seasonal depression. Would be interesting to see if the trend changes without having time shifts.