Arlo - You sed:
the general goal behind all of those specific purposes is to align more closely the clock day with the light day. For example, a clock says 0600; how light is it outside? Is it dawn? Earlier? Later? Well, that changes throughout the year because the Earth is tilted. It would not if the Earth was vertical (to clarify, if it's pole of rotation was parallel to the pole of orbit) and a year was exactly 365 days, and each day were exactly 24 hours, and if [a more minor factor] there were no precession, and so on). So what DST is really doing is shifting the time scale 'down' relative to the light scale (in the WM diagram [or perhaps *dia*gram]) to more closely 'fit' that sunset/sunrise curve.
I'm fine with referencing all activity to "sunrise" and setting clocks according to hours/minutes/seconds after sunrise (or before sunset or both)... I prefer to function that way myself... and do so as much as I can arrange easily.
I think throughout our pre-industrial history, people's lives *were* orchestrated according to roughly "first light", "sunrise", "early morning", "mid morning", "mid-day", "mid afternoon", "late afternoon", "sunset", "after dark" and occasionally perhaps "Midnight". So mid-morning was not just say ... 9 or 10 AM, it was "halfway-between sunrise and noon", a longer period in the summer than in the winter.
Mechanical clocks, I hypothesize, naturally were calibrated to a single earth rotation or "24 hours". Calibrating the time-shift to an easily identifiable reference such as *high noon* makes a great deal of sense. No other reference is as easily identified while keeping the 24 hour cycle?
With the advent of long-distance communication and/or fast travel, it naturally made sense to want more perfect (to the minute?) synchronization...
I'm not a proponent of making our sexigesimal clock system (60 minute hours, 60 second minutes, etc.) into decimal, but if we don't have the will or desire or focus to even do that kind of normalization, I can't imagine we could redefine "time" in this more radical way. I think GMT, the time zones, and DST are artifacts of the will of *governments* to impose common standards across political units. The Navajo Nation, which spans AZ and NM and whose tribal headquarters are in NM (Window Rock) have exercised *their* sovereignty by choosing to follow NM time throughout their boundaries. They could have chosen AZ (non DST) time but for whatever reason (liked DST? Window Rock is in the NM borders?) they choose not to.
I'd prefer to see people choose to use solar time instead of clock time for their daily activities. Rise at sunrise, begin your daily labor after a suitable period of preparation (coffee, shower, breakfast, newspaper, walk, run, etc.), break at suitable periods (lunch when you get hungry, maybe sometime around "high noon"), work until your work is done or you feel satisfied you have put in "a good day", maybe take a long mid-day "siesta" if you are in a hot climate without AC or perhaps just because you like a midday nap or a nice stroll along the Alhambra or the Alameda or around the Rotunda or up on the Veranda... Dinner is best eaten in my opinion, just at dusk, whether dusk is 4:30 in midwinter or 8 PM in mid summer... then at least a few hours to digest and relax before retiring to bed. And start all over again when the sun rises. Of course, I don't live in Portland OR or London, England or any of the other overcast/foggy/smoggy places where the sun's appearance is a crapshoot.
Maybe we will have resolved this amongst ourselves in time for the next clock shift in the Autumn whereupon we can start all over discussing it?! Meanwhile maybe we can hammer on the damned calendar of months? Why are they not moons? And who wants to deal with stoopid Leap Days and days of the month shifting around with days of the week? Isn't having 4 "weeks" aligned with 4 phases of the moon (new moon, waxing gibbous, full, waning gibbous) more sensible? Sure, the moons shift around with the sidereal time... the new/full moon doesn't reliably fall on solstice (summer nor winter) and the 3rd full moon after solstice isn't necessarily the right time to plant... it might be up to a half-a moon early by sidereal measures and your seedlings might freeze!
I'm afraid the moral of all this to me is that our (human?) need to measure and control and standardize everything is backfiring. It makes about as much sense as declaring "Pi" to be == 3 to make it easier to make calculations... as if the Kansas state legislature could warp space enough to make such a feature literally true! It *is* a dense enough idea that maybe those dense enough to try it actually *do* warp space close to themselves enough to make it so, while contracting the 4.5Byears of earth's existence into something like 3-5Kyears?
- Steve
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