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Comment by dorfsmay | Hacker News Reader

No! Let's keep time that make sense, I like the concept that the sun is at its highest at noon. Shit like drawing the shadow of a stick is stuff that kept me interested in school, as opposed to arbitrary/political things such as spelling (in french and english anyway).

If natural light matters, shift society to do everything earlier!

It shouldn't be very difficult, especially in Europe, where governments have such an influence, mandate that schools start earlier, shift transportation peak time (number and frequency of trains and buses) earlier, give some tax incentive for a year or two to companies who let their employees leave work earlier, etc...

I lived in countries where the currency was changed, people got used to it, it didn't turn out to be the end of the world. Some countries shifted on which side or the road cars drove, people adapted.

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> mandate that schools start earlier

You know it's bad for teenager health?

http://www.nj.com/education/2014/05/early_class_times_are_ba...

> Because their biological clocks push them into later sleep/later wake patterns, adolescents on average lose almost 3 hours a sleep on school days, the researchers found. In addition, they found that middle school students who start later in the morning had “clear test gains” over their peers.

That's a different problem though... So we could still society to start earlier (assuming it's a good thing, less car accidents etc...), but re-think the concept of the school day. Just making school start later but keeping as long, so finish later might not be a good solution for lots of reasons (don't want to go into this here, this is a different discussion).

The GP does not propose that teenagers wake up any earlier in the sense of solar time, just that we don't change the clocks. Right now they wake up an hour earlier than they did the previous day, the only difference is that their clock shows the same hour as it did the previous day.

Instead, they should just wake up an hour earlier and have the clock show that they woke up an hour earlier. There's no actual difference in the amount of sleep or daylight that the teenagers get, just a vastly simplified system for figuring out what they wall clock should say.

not if the whole day shifts permanently, it's like moving timezone, not starting your day earlier.

> No! Let's keep time that make sense, I like the concept that the sun is at its highest at noon.

But in how many places during 'normal time' is this even actually true? No where in Spain is this true, and even for territories within their timezone, only a tiny sliver of land actually meets the above criteria.

In England, the further east or west you get from GMT, the further you are from the Sun being the highest at noon by minutes, quarters and more.

Timezones aren't even really accurate currently if we ignore daylight savings time, so why pretend it is?

And honestly, if the purpose is for there to be more lighter hours during the evening, why not just adjust time so our current 14:00 is 12:00? And stick with that all year round?

Even in Greenwich, it is true only twice a year.

Do you mean the shortest of the year on summer solstice?

I'm confused by your statement... Isn't the shadow the shortest for any given day at (geographical noon) for that day?

On almost all days the sun does not reach its highest point (solar noon) exactly at 12 noon. Have a look at the graph on this site (The red line is the time of solar noon):

https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/greenwich-city

Even in Greenwich, 12 noon winter time can be off of solar noon by about 15 minutes in either direction throughout the year.

I'd love to understand why there is a variance from day to day...

> And honestly, if the purpose is for there to be more lighter hours during the evening, why not just adjust time so our current 14:00 is 12:00? And stick with that all year round?

Because that's aesthetically ugly. Can't we just change work hours to be 7:00-15:00 instead?

Generally, when a country changes its currency or changes the side of the road it drives on, that change is either permanent or very long term.

For lining up natural light with human activity, a shift that lines it up for the middle of summer throws it off for the middle winter, and vice versa, so if you want to keep things lined up it means shifting twice a year. That makes it quite different from a currency or road driving side change which happens very rarely.

If you are going to do it twice a year, it makes much more sense to change the clocks than to change the clock time that things occur, because changing the clock time of events means changing all of the places where we print the clock times of upcoming recurring events. It's easier, less expensive, and less error prone to change the clocks rather than the event times.

Maybe -- but we've already conceded so much to the notion that time moves at a constant rate that changing this one thing seems reasonable. The Romans had a twelve-hour day from sunup to sundown, regardless of the "length" of the day, but we've judged that to not be useful, especially once we have non-solar time-keeping devices.

I think we've reached the time when having a mostly-monotonic clock outweighs the benefits of adapting the clock to match human behavior.

On the other hand, the ubiquity of cell phones as timekeeping devices has made the transition a lot less noticeable, so maybe you have a point.

"No! Let's keep time that make sense, I like the concept that the sun is at its highest at noon"

The only way to do that is to live in a country that is mostly on the south-north axis, and is at the correct point of the timezone.

Actually while we're at it lets move westernmost Europe to GMT. Spain has no right to be at GMT+1 when its more westerly than England. And France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg are either entirely or to a great extent west of the 7.5° meridian.

Easy, right? Except now you have created a timezone border (multiple, actually, because what business does Bulgaria have in GMT+1?) splitting a somewhat borderless EU, just so it looks more logical on your map. "Everything has at least three side effects..."

The EU already has timezone borders, grumbles the Portuguese.

And the Romanian, the Finn, and the Balt. As well as the Frenchman taking the train to Britain. The Greek, too, though he doesn't share a land border with CET-using EU countries.

Or! Or! How about we don't try to control all of society by shoving long levers into its foundation stones and heaving on them as hard as we can?

If natural light matters, leave people alone to arrange their own schedules to make better use of it. Schools in the US will generally arrange their start times around bus schedules, because they don't have enough vehicles or enough drivers to transport every student in their county or municipality at once. If you start forcing mandates down their throats, they will lose the flexibility to implement locally-appropriate solutions to their own local problems.

In general, though, teenagers have a retarded diurnal cycle in comparison to younger children and adults. They naturally wake up later, and fall asleep later. Older students are already starting school too early (7 AM? Really?) The obsession some legislators have with the supposed benefits of daylight savings time has made that problem even worse.

Teenagers are miserable and irritable enough from the hormonal changes without throwing gasoline on the fire by making them continuously exhausted and sleep-deprived as well. And I'm sure any night-owl faculty are not happy about it either.

The optimal time solution for society (currently) is to make sure that civil time is the same as the nearest metropolis, and for the metropolises to set their clocks such that local mean solar noon lands somewhere between 11:30 AM and 12:30 PM, and the minute portion is synchronized to mean solar noon at 0 degrees longitude, and then leave the whole system the hell alone.

Time is a measurement system. Daylight savings makes as much sense as pulling the platinum-iridium standard meterstick out of its climate-controlled vault twice a year and pounding on it with hammers to make it longer or shorter. It allows us to lie to ourselves about what our facts are. And that leads to bad decisions by people who have been misinformed with incorrectly measured data.

if you want time that makes sense it's UTC everywhere.

While this really makes sense, it would require humans to completely rethink their concept of time as it relates to their day. We can't even get the US onto the metric system, so there's no way this can happen realistically.

> If natural light matters, shift society to do everything earlier!

Shift society so we can have the shortest shadows closer to noon than 1? No thanks. Depending on where you're located in your time zone, DST might actually put the shortest shadows closer to noon anyways.

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