Fellow anti-DSTers, this is a big win. Samoa might not have a large population but it is the future. In fact, it is already tomorrow there.
Fun fact that I just learned: if you work across the DST start transition, you get an hour’s extra pay: https://www.govt.nz/browse/recreation-and-the-environment/da....
But speaking of the anti-meridian, if one were at a pole, how is the date determined? Is tomorrow always a few steps away? Is there a non-calendar measure of days that applies to the whole planet at the same time? Is the number of days best described as the distance of the Earth from an arbitrary and invisible part of space representing New Years? Is that part of space best described by the “25,772-year axial precession of the earth?” [0]
0. https://medium.com/the-long-now-foundation/the-26-000-year-a...
Air traffic generally uses UTC for all purposes, and if there's no clear local time, it's highly likely that UTC will be chosen. Wikipedia's page on Air France 447 (which crashed in the Atlantic Ocean on route from Brazil to France) exclusively uses UTC for its crash timeline notes, while its page on MH17 uses local (Ukraine) of its shootdown and for MH370 uses Malaysian Time for its timeline.
Given that Alert is the northernmost continuous human settlement, I'd imagine that any search-and-rescue effort for an extreme polar crash would be coordinated out of there. Alert's timezone is (US/Canada) Eastern Time.
However, this is a trick question. To get an extreme polar flight, you're looking at something like LA-Dubai. No one on that flight would be bringing enough winter clothing to survive a crash at the North Pole, and so everyone would be dead of frostbite or hypothermia if not killed by the impact itself, and thus there are no survivors.
I think your reasoning is sound, but survival doesn't always follow reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguayan_Air_Force_Flight_571
And there would be rescue missions from Norway or Svalbard in a short time.
Rolls Royce (or was it GE?) figured out what exact combination of intake speed, pressure, humidity, temperature, and history caused the failure, and prevented it on subsequent flights. It had been considered (!), but they thought it would never be encountered on any real flight. The engines restarted because, at lower altitude, conditions were different enough.
The pilots found the event distressing. It is possible most passengers didn't notice.
Nice, and on the other side of Daylight savings you dont lose that hour's pay either. That's a good scam.
Mid-winter: 6h sunlight. Mid-summer: 18h sunlight.
One hour more or less really doesn't matter. I wonder which band of countries DST might actually make sense in.
The reason people like DST nowadays is quite different from the alleged reasons it has been set up. All people I asked claim that it's all about making the best use of their free time (and few think about the problem of dark mornings on the winter and thus many jump to the conclusion that DST should be abolished but by keeping the summer time of course)
Others can fight about what we call “5pm”, but for the love of everything holy, just stop moving the clocks. I’ll happily ally with whichever side (“anti-winter” or “anti-summer”) that appears most likely to deliver a political victory that ends the madness.
Start schools at the biologically optimal time, not the budgetary one.
I found it surprisingly difficult to find data. Not just data for or data against, but any data at all. What little I found organized by month seems to accurately show the percentage of the month typically on vacation (so people sleep later on average in August than September, or they sleep a lot later in Dec than in Oct due to holidays, at least in the north hemisphere).
I theorized that regardless of DST people would wake up later from June thru Nov (DST starts in Nov where I live). Unfortunately the graph shows the opposite trend of people tending to wake up on average almost 4 minutes earlier in Oct than in Sept. Or in spring our DST ends in March, so I expected people to wake up earlier in May than in April, but its the other way around by five minutes.
I'd theorize if required wake up times strictly followed solar elevation, then something like a graph of car accidents vs time of day would vary greatly by month, but it doesn't seem to in what little data I could find. "Most dangerous time to drive" graphs seem to imply evening rush hour is a little more than twice as dangerous as morning rush hour so that would seem to imply morning wakefullness problems are statistically insignificant.
(Edited to note: I'm not insisting you're wrong, but I am insisting I can't find much of any data on the topic, maybe you are right but nobody knows for certain...)
I think we are moving towards that somewhat, with companies becoming more flexible with working hours/locations in the past year and a half.
According to timeanddate.com, the latest sunrise in Durness (NW Scotland, on the mainland) is at 09:09, at the end of December, but "civil twilight" is then at 08:16, so if school starts at 09:00 a lot of people can presumably travel to school with at least some natural light. On the other hand, if they were using UTC+1 it would be civil twilight from 09:16 and sunrise at 10:09, which would be sort of horrible, surely, because then you really would be travelling at night?
The shortest day in Durness lasts 6 hours 18 minutes. In England typical school hours are 09:00-15:00. If those are the school hours in Scotland, and you're dealing with not much more than 6 hours of sunlight in the winter, then I would have thought that a good time for local noon would be around 12:00 rather than around 13:00.
So I hope that a lot of Scots will join me in asking for UTC+0 all year rather than UTC+1 all year!
But I think getting rid of the time change is a bigger deal, and I'll accept daylight savings time as the permanent one if that will help us to more quickly end the time change.
Unfortunately the switching itself causes enough extra casulties[1] that I can't say it's worth it.
1: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-accidents-daylight...
The shortest day for the absolute northernmost point in the continental US has sunrise just before 8:00 am and sunset just after 4:30 pm. With most schools starting at 7:30 and ending at 2:30 it works out for one way adjustment or not. I remember trying to get kids in extracurriculars heading home by sunset was actually a goal of scheduling but obviously that's not always possible particularly during in season due to the extra travel time prior to the game.
What I think really makes the most sense is just global time - UTC everywhere. Yes, I've seen the args against it and I think it would all be a lot more adaptable.
Either way, just stop it with moving the clocks. Not only is it a major PITA for everyone, studies have shown that it actually causes increases in road and work accidents. And, whatever rationale for energy savings has now been reversed, since air conditioning drives energy use far more than lighting. Just Stop It.
Note on the origin, from what I've read, one of the most likely origins is Ben Franklin's joke about the French, that they'd change the time system laws to save candle wax. I haven't read anything that substantially proves or refutes that, and I think we've honored Ben's joke enough already.
So more than half of the planet has "midnight" (i.e. the change of the calendar date because it's 00:00 UTC) happening during waking hours and each solar day is being split into two calendar days? No thank you.
Anywhere else and I'm pro summer time all the time.
Once a friend in China asked me about the time difference. She was highly amused when I followed up the response (15-16 hours) with the comment 中国就是美国的未来 ["China is the future of America"].
But this is a joke about the international date line, not a comment on whether you can redefine the difference between night and day by adjusting what your clock says.