Daylight Losing Time

?It’s that time of year again when we fall back one hour. And the annual question is asked: Why?

More and more appliances and clocks automatically reset themselves, and that really helps. But random things don’t. My cars are stupid. The grandfather clock in my hall has no idea. My wristwatch is not atomically connected, either. I have to recognize all of the stupid old devices and how to adjust all of them – and they are all different.

Inevitably there will be a device or two that is still on Daylight Saving Time a week or two after the change. Maybe it will be the sprinklers. Can I trust my thermostat?

I know I have covered this topic before. But the irritation has not abated.

Ever since there were time zones and train schedules there were good reasons to regulate the clocks. Local clock time was most obviously related to sun time. Noon should be when the sun is at its apogee. Someone divided each day into twenty four hours and – voila! - there were twenty four time zones.

My pets are not ready for clock changes twice a year. Their little internal animal wristwatches are set to sun time. If it is dawn, it is time to get up. And fed. If it is dark and they have not yet been fed, it is too late. It takes them weeks to recalibrate their internal clocks. And, not too many weeks later, we get to recalibrate all over again.

Wouldn’t it be simpler to have one time all over the world? We could agree to the historical primacy of the English Greenwich observatory and pick UMT, or Zulu time as our military calls it.

Longitude starts and ends at Greenwich. Why not time?

No computations required for travel between time zones. No time zones!

We would have to get used to what time of day it is wherever we are – when is dawn, when is dusk. But that is similar to what we have to do already with the changes in daylight based on our latitude, and what we had to do with daylight saving/losing time twice a year.

Let us rationaize what time it is!