Posted by Ben @ November 2nd, 2009 8:34 pm. Filed under: Duplicate Petitions,I Am A Brain!,I Could've Looked This Up But Instead I Watched Countdown,Maybe... but not for THAT reason,Stand Back! I'm Going To Try SCIENCE! — Tags: Tristan Wibberley —
by Tristan WibberleyThe late light on summer evenings is extremely welcome, and later light during the winter would also be welcome.
In addition, changing the clocks twice a year is a nuisance, costly, and error prone.
You seem to have forgotten a fundamental piece of information when considering your otherwise sterling idea, Tristan. I’ll leave you to figure out what it is.
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What I got from this petition, and you may forgive me if I misinterpreted it, is that Tristan seems to think that by abolishing Daylight Savings we will achieve the same number of daylight hours in the winter as we currently get in the summer. Short of having the planet on some kind of yoyo-based rocket orbital adjustment system I really can’t see that happening.
The clocks go back an hour in winter. You’d get “later light during the winter” by not changing the clocks so that sunset was an hour earlier. I think I’ve got this right. Thinking about Daylight Savings is confusing and breaks my head (which I think is another good reason not to bother with it).
But the petitioner is specifically comparing the later sunlight in the summer to the lack of later sunlight in the winter. To me that feels like the petitioner is saying, “Hey, stop fiddling with our clocks and it’ll be bright out until 9pm.”
I don’t know, it’s hard to say what the petitioner is thinking. But presumably we were on GMT all year round and at some point instigated BST to give later daylight in summer? It’s reasonable to suppose that later daylight in winter would be a good thing, and we could achieve that the same way: by moving the clocks forward an hour in winter, which would be the same as moving to BST all year.
I meant to compare the additional lateness of light in the summer with the lack of additional lateness in the winter, rather than the time of the disappearance of lightness in the summer.
Anyway, there is a much more popular equivalent petition which I have also signed and I encourage everybody else to do so.
Andrew reckons:
Is it the inconvenience of millions of people having to go into their phone and laptop settings and uncheck the little box marked ‘adjust for daylight savings’? Because that’s the only drawback I can see to switching from Icelandic time to French time. Have you seen a map of time zones? It’s ridiculous; we’re miles out of step with everyone else at our longitude. And we’ve been over this before — you posted one of these petitions already and instead of mocking the author I seem to remember signing it.
November 3, 2009 at 11:49 am