(back)

Its the semi-annual ritual of course -- Spring forward, fall back.

Who remembers when we didn't -- we just stayed on DST, ostensibly for energy consumption purposes.

I'm of mixed view on the entire "time zone" thing.  It doesn't, of course, change anything in terms of your circadian rhythm unless you always fight against it -- that is, you don't go to sleep when its dark and don't wake up when it isn't, generally.  After all if you're not a slave to the clock why do you care what it reads?  Ah, but most of us are, right?  School, work, etc.  Yeah that.

Plenty of people say "well pick one and stick on it" but the argument really isn't so much about that for one simple reason -- the closer you are to a pole, so for us the further you are north -- the more-extreme the shift in daylight .vs. night is with the seasons.  In Florida isn't that extreme at all; now go up to Marquette in MI in the summer and talk with me about it.  Its rather interesting in the summer to be at a campsite up north and there's still daylight beyond 10:00 PM.  Yeah, its twilight, but it not dark out -- official sunset just happened about a half-hour ago!

On the other hand try that stunt in the middle of December when sunset is at 5:00 and you won't see the giant flaming ball come over the horizon until 8:30 tomorrow!

If you wonder why ancient people feared the Sun might disappear entirely as they were freezing their butts off..... well that would be why.

Where I live is, from my point of view, the "right" compromise for me.  Everyone's different of course; there are seasons here but generally-speaking the stupid-cold (and attendant snow) if it happens in a given year is short and the snow amount rational.  I've lived where it snowed nearly every night from November until mid-March and that's a hard pass for me today.  Didn't really like it then, like it much less now.  On the other hand flat, hot and stupidly-humid has its bad sides too.  Florida prior to the widespread availability of A/C was a "very nice in February; not so much in July" type of place.

"Time zones" as we know them were introduced by the railroads; consider how difficult it is to publish a time when a train will get to your town (and when it will leave) when every town has a sundial and its "noon" when the sun is at the highest point in the sky for that day no matter where you are.  Exactly 12 hours later it's midnight, again no matter where you are.

That works out just fine -- and in fact is nearly ideal -- for towns where nobody can reasonably get between more than two of them in a given day.  You generally, absent technology, don't want to ride a horse at night both for natural calamity risk and of course predation (of you or the horse.)  Then here come railroads and suddenly knowing that the train travels at 40 or 50mph and the towns are 100 miles apart means that if every town has its own local time figuring out exactly when it gets there and when it departs becomes far more difficult than simply adding 2 hours to whatever time it is where you started.

So America was divvied up into four time zones (at the time); Eastern, Central, Mountain and Pacific -- which roughly corresponded to the the actual shifts between the centers.  Roughly is the correct word but "close enough" works better for transportation when you now have a fixed offset within a geographic area and you know where the lines of those shifts are.

What comes with transportation?  Wildly expanded commerce, of course, which we all really do like to have.

The amusing part of "everyone has tech on their person" is that we could now go back to every town being their own local time, and if we did we could compute transit differences too, since its simply a Lat/Long position and computation -- and we all seem to have that in our pocket at any point.  It was a serious PITA then -- today, it would be reasonable.

Something to think about on "Fall Back Day."