Sunshine Protection Act of 2025

A few hundred years ago England switched from the Julian to Gregorian calendar to sync with the rest of Europe. It meant skipping a few weeks so all were on the same date. Some rioted because their lives were shorted by those weeks.
 
WDD said:
Noon will be when sun is overhead and at 12:00. Work is “9-5”. People aren’t going to leave that. Time zones will stay.
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Of course they will stay, with that attitude! Fight Big Time!

sarangan said:
We divided the world into 24 time zones because that was the average distance typically interacted with. But now we are interacting across the whole globe, so there is really no reason why we have to keep 1-hr blocks. We can still keep UTC for global time keeping, but there is really no reason why we can't divide up the globe into smaller chunks like 1 minute time zones. Scheduling meetings is not an issue now with 24 time zones, I don't see why it would become an issue if we had a 3600 time zones.
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I've never heard that explanation. The two I've heard (which are inconsistent with one another), were:

That night was ten hours, day was ten hours and then an hour of change between them.

That the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians used base 12 math, so it was logical to use that as the basis for time also.
 
I think North Korea has its own calendar. And St John’s Newfoundland hasits own time zone that is shifted 30 minutes.
 
(This passed Congress, but it won’t get past the Senate - it’s not going to happen).
 
I'm glad that they didn't change the value of Pi, like I think some state out west did once. Then physics would fail and buildings would fall down and such.

Or the speed of light! If anyone can get their senator to sponsor a bill to limit the speed of light in the continental US to save the children or something, I will buy them dinner.
 
172andyou said:
Of course they will stay, with that attitude! Fight Big Time!


I've never heard that explanation. The two I've heard (which are inconsistent with one another), were:

That night was ten hours, day was ten hours and then an hour of change between them.

That the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians used base 12 math, so it was logical to use that as the basis for time also.
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In my opinion, dividing up the time zones into 24 1-hr chunks is just as arbitrary as dividing it up into 1440 1-minute zones. It all comes down to which represents the natual world best. A gradual shift in time with location is more natural than a sudden 1 hr shift when you cross a zone.
 
sarangan said:
Who adjusts clocks these days anyway? My wall clock adjusts itself. My phone does the same. When I go somewhere, the phone tells me if the time zone is different.
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I ski a lot at Lookout Pass ski area, which straddles the border between North Idaho and Montana, and so also straddles the Mountain/Pacific time zone border. It also almost straddles the continental divide, which forms so much of that weird irregular border between the states, though the actual divide has wandered a bit east of the border where Lookout Pass is located.

The base lodge is on the Idaho side, most of the terrain is on the Montana side, and there is virtually no cell service anywhere on the hill. So it's really hard to know what time it is, if you are relying on a cell phone or linked watch. And you really want to get back to parking on the Idaho side before the lifts on the Montana side close for the day. The lifties seem to enjoy the confusion it causes, because there are no clocks visible on any of the lift shacks.

What makes it all the more fun is that there are small patches of mountain where just enough cell signal gets through to reset the time on a phone. But then you are locked into that time even when you cross the time zone, unless and until you happen to ski through another small patch of signal. So you never know if you are reading the time where you are, or the time where you were.

I've since bought a cheap analog watch just to wear at Lookout Pass.
 
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sarangan said:
In my opinion, dividing up the time zones into 24 1-hr chunks is just as arbitrary as dividing it up into 1440 1-minute zones. It all comes down to which represents the natual world best. A gradual shift in time with location is more natural than a sudden 1 hr shift when you cross a zone.
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Sure, but...

When my mom lived in a different time zone, every single phone call would consist of some form of "what time is it there?" "It's 4:30 here Mom." "Okay, well it's 5:30 here." Every single time.

Just imagine the fun times if it wasn't an even multiple of hours (for most of the world).
 
After the 7 thousandth occurrence of having to reset my bedside alarm clock after a power outage from a Florida thunderstorm, I got a self setting clock last year. I had no idea the government broadcasts a radio time signal. Works pretty darn well though. You do have to set the time zone. I handles DST automatically.
 
Ed Haywood said:
After the 7 thousandth occurrence of having to reset my bedside alarm clock after a power outage from a Florida thunderstorm, I got a self setting clock last year. I had no idea the government broadcasts a radio time signal. Works pretty darn well though. You do have to set the time zone. I handles DST automatically.
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I've had poor luck with those and use an old iPad instead. Maybe it has something to do with the way my house is built.
 
asicer said:
I've had poor luck with those and use an old iPad instead. Maybe it has something to do with the way my house is built.
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I didn't know they still did. It is/was an HF broadcast, at a precise frequency and with a countdown for the time plus coded tones, on a couple of frequencies. Believe it was the Naval Observatory in Colorado. Before GPS, that was the standard for time in the US. Nowdays, most computer things that need accurate time get it from a GPS receiver. Anyway, reception could be limited by your location, or house construction, or local RF noise in your area, etc.
 
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Albany Tom said:
I didn't know they still did. It is/was an HF broadcast, at a precise frequency
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VLF, actually. WWVB 60KHz signal that is received by radio/atomic clocks. Also sends a DST flag.
There's also WWV which broadcasts on multiple HF frequencies (2.5, 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25 MHz) in voice and simple digital encoding, but that's not usually used by consumer clocks.
 
asicer said:
I've had poor luck with those and use an old iPad instead. Maybe it has something to do with the way my house is built.
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I have 2 in my condo in CO and 2 in my house in FL. Just Walmart cheapos, maybe $15 each, but all are dead nuts on. My only complaint is the sequence to set the alarm might have been designed by Alan Turing to screen candidates to help crack Enigma.
 
sarangan said:
Who adjusts clocks these days anyway? My wall clock adjusts itself.
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You kids with your digital this, and digital that.

Back in the pre-digital era, clocks plugged into the 120 VAC line. The clock ran in sync with the 60 Hz. At the powerplant, there was a master clock that ran independently, and a separate clock hooked to the main power just like home. The operators would note if the power-line clock time was wrong (in relation to the master) and tweak the frequency of the power to bring the clock back into sync. They'd, of course, be tweaking EVERYONE'S power frequency, so that all the cheap electric clocks plugged into the wall kept near-perfect time.

Reminded of that by a digital clock on my nightstand. It plugs into the wall, but obviously doesn't use the 60 Hz reference frequency. The darn thing loses about a minute a week.

Ron Wanttaja
 
sarangan said:
In my opinion, dividing up the time zones into 24 1-hr chunks is just as arbitrary as dividing it up into 1440 1-minute zones. It all comes down to which represents the natual world best. A gradual shift in time with location is more natural than a sudden 1 hr shift when you cross a zone.
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Think about it. Right now unless you live near a time zone boundary everybody nearby is on the same time and you know when the store will open. People on the East Coast know that Central time is an hour behind. Can you imagine if everybody had to know and keep track of 60X more time zones?

I can remember tuning in WWV on our 'Zenith Trans-Oceanic" shortwave receiver and setting the clock to it... "On the tone, it will be 12:07, Coordinated Universal Time... beep-beep-beep-BEEEEP."
 
RussR said:
The argument about “school kids in the dark” is a lousy one. At least around here, they’re ALREADY going to school in the dark during the winter months. Another hour won’t make any difference. If it was that big of a deal, people would be insisting the school hours be changed instead of the clock. Actually, I’ve never heard of any of the “morning people” proposing we fall back an additional hour to help the school kids. :D
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yep.
My kid, well 2 years ago when she was still biking to school preferred the dark. It added to the sense of adventure riding in the dark with her friends.
and yeah, it would be pretty much dark either way in the dead of winter, but when the clocks actually do change in the spring, it would be just about dawn when they would hit the road...not nearly as much fun as the dark.
And there are crossing guards and officers at the intersections so I wouldn't be very worried anyway....
 
Time Change

"All discussions of daylight saving time policy are doomed by a mix of contradictory, inconsistent, and impossible preferences, which is why I think the only thing we can really hope to do is to make it worse."
 
Albany Tom said:
I didn't know they still did. It is/was an HF broadcast, at a precise frequency and with a countdown for the time plus coded tones, on a couple of frequencies. Believe it was the Naval Observatory in Colorado.
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Yes. WWV in Boulder, CO.

-Skip
 
Half Fast said:
...and then the dumbest place for the other half of the year. Hmmmm. Could be....
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That would make NY maybe 70-80% of that swing, and that kinda tracks, too.

On a only slightly more serious note, tying this thread in with the 6pack worth an airplane thread, the length of daylight/darkness shifts may impact happiness more than intelligence.
 
AV8R_87 said:
VLF, actually. WWVB 60KHz signal that is received by radio/atomic clocks. Also sends a DST flag.
There's also WWV which broadcasts on multiple HF frequencies (2.5, 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25 MHz) in voice and simple digital encoding, but that's not usually used by consumer clocks.
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And WWVH in Hawaii on 2.5, 5, 10, and 15 MHz.
 
When you consider there's about 130 different schemes in the world for setting and determining the time, all the fuss over this seems silly. That number comes from decades back when I worked for a company that made and installed batch schedulers for computer systems and they had to account for all the different ways that times could change.

You don't like getting up in the dark? Move somewhere it isn't dark 15 hours a day in the middle of the winter.
 
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