h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Forced myself up far too early this morning with and this is what it's going to be for a while. I don't get tired and fall asleep earlier just because someone is messing with the clock.

I'm not good at adapting when travelling eastbound either. One hour can be enough as when going for a weekend trip to Finland. Guess I'm suffering a mini jet lag at the moment.

I can never work out why people get so worked up about this but hey ho.

I was chatting with the other half about this the other day and when I suggested we just change the time we all go to work/school instead of changing the clocks she came back with the idea that we just go to work/school during daylight hours.
Great in the winter buy in the summer! I think she may not have thunk that one through.

I've also never understood why farmers give a flying fig about it. Don't you just have to work 16 hour days, 7 days a week, come rain, sunshine, light or dark anyway? What does what the numbers say on a clockwork/digital device have to do with it?

BTW they normally switch the clocks back on or very near to my Birthday, maybe that explains my adaptability

I'm all for BST ... why would anyone want it to be dark at 8:30pm in the middle of summer which is what you'll get with GMT. Meanwhile you'll have lost 3+ hours of daylight before getting out of bed at 7pm.

I'm an early riser, but give me one of those morning hours in the evening so I can get out running, sitting in the garden, playing golf or whatever.

(That's just a south of England time perspective).

So how did we cope BEFORE we started measuring time.

We got on just fine.We woke and slept as we felt and the clockface had no sway in our lives.

So why having started using time do we have to muck about with it..

Was it not something to do with the Railway - and the need for timetables?

>> why would anyone want it to be dark at 8:30pm in the middle of summer which is what you'll get with GMT. <<

You're missing the point. What GMT is relative to your bedtime is completely arbitrary, and irrelevant (we can set midnight to any relationship to the sun we want). The issue is that the time gets changed twice a year for no bloody good reason.

I'm with the leave time to its own devices crowd.

It's getting dark here at 8.30pm. This time next week it'll be 7.30 for no good reason. What's the point?

I don't see the point, either. And railway timetables will do just fine, as we have different time zones even within Europe anyway.

They did this on TV the other day. Train timetables were not fine - they were very much the reason time got standardised to GMT.
People were missing trains because time was different in, say Bristol as it was to London and what time it said on the Guards watch was not what was on the watches of people who'd missed the train by a few minutes.

That's not really the same issue as daylight saving time though.

Maybe the point is just to give hootizens the opportunity to complain twice a year?

Well I got up this morning at 5.45am - in the dark. I walked the dog at 6am - in the dark. It's horrible enough all through the winter, but the joy of daylight at 6am has only just worn off and it's back to darkness again. It's miserable and pointless and my mood won't improve until I get daylight at 6am. So there.

Can you tell I'm in the "leave it alone" camp?

Deb

Measuring time meant much better organisation and navigation. I for one think it was a great step forward.

Moving time around twice a year* is a small step backwards then.

* and not even in a uniform fashion: the date on which it happens is country dependent, and some advances civilisations are completely free from it

>> You're missing the point. What GMT is relative to your bedtime is completely arbitrary, and irrelevant (we can set midnight to any relationship to the sun we want).

No Kea, you are missing BBS's point. He used the term GMT because that is the standard un-ajusted time used in the UK. The clue is in the name. The G refers to Greenwich in London.

London has a close alignment between its solar noon and its clock noon because it is is bang in the middle of its time zone. I noticed that Stockholm is a long way from the centre of its time zone, so its solar noon and its time noon are an hour or so adrift.

So in the UK, standard time (aka GMT) gives us a lot of daylight hours at the start of the day which we tend not to use because we are tardy risers in a largely urban economy, and comparatively few in the evening when we'd like more because we've finished work and want to kick back and enjoy the evening in the garden. BST is a way of making it simple and easy for us to use those un-used daylight hours in the morning and have finished work in time to enjoy the evenings.



Bel, the railway comment is about the origins of standard time. Before the railways, everyone who had a sundial thought that noon was when the sun was straight over-head. As a result a train that left London on time, and kept perfect time, would arrive four or five minutes "early" in Bristol. It wasn't early, it was just that London is that much further east than Bristol. This wasn't noticable before the Railways, but as a result of the railways standardised time was introduced across the UK. Some places had two clocks "real time" and "railway time".



I am in favour of it. The benefits aren't that obvious at the time the clocks change, and we've forgotten about the clock changes by the time the benefits actually kick in. I am glad that its not still dark at 9:30 am in December and January, and likewise, I like it that it is still light at 10:00pm in the summer.

Absolutely, Ben. If I could start work whenever I felt like it, then of course I could rise at 0500, get to work at 0600, finsh at 1400, and still make maximum use of the available daylight. Most people however (me included) are tied to work hours laid down by their company (granted sometimes with an hour or so's flexiblity in there, but not enough to take advantage of the light).

So if we didn't have BST, I'd have to start work at 0800 (GMT), by which point I've already lost 4 hours of daylight.

Or you could get up 4 hours earlier, do some of your daylight activites before work and then go to bed earlier in the evening...

My boys generally start to stir not long after it gets light regardless of what it says on the clock so I, for one, am grateful for BST.

Part of the problem for scottish farmers is that the shops still expect their new stock to turn up before the punters do so they can't just wait for the light when it is winter - or at least that is the argument that I've heard for setting the clock back in winter that most makes sense to me. Am not sure how true it really is in these days of multiple steps between provider and consumer - how often do we *really* buy something today that came off the farm this morning, as opposed to buying something that came off the farm 1-2 days ago, went for processing/packaging travelled via the distribution networks and finally arrived in the shop a day or so later?

What do people think to the idea, espoused in the link below, of changing the UK to GMT +1 and bringing us in line with continental Europe?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/mar/29/lighter-later-climate-change-campaign

I'm not sure I could cope with GMT +1 in winter, with it not getting light until 9am-ish. By 9 I've been working for 2 hours and I need the light to get me going. One of the things I hate most about the clocks going back is the mornings suddenly getting dark again.

My birthday is in the middle of December, so I've always been pretty happy with the dark evenings, but I need my morning light.

Same here (December birthday, OK with dark evenings). Definitely not a fan of the UK lining up with Europe - *they* should line up with *us*

Daylight Saving Time is if I remember correctly something that was introduced during World War I. I was about to say, so it's not probably really appropriate now, but thinking about it - national crisis plus need to maximise use of daylight so as to minimise need to generate artificial light What goes around comes around, eh?

Mol

Just to torpedo the theory, January baby here and I *hate* dark evenings

Torpedo? Nah, you're just the exception that proves the rule