Nathan Myers > INTERNET:ncm@cantrip.org wrote:

Clearly the only sensible approach to time would be to leave the damn clocks alone, and change schedules to match reality. However, it's a waste of everybody's time and attention to discuss this here. We techies are constrained to chase after whatever foolish decisions are made in the parliaments and politburos of world. This list is about details of that chase.

Maybe there should be another list to help discover strategies to influence idiot politicians. I hope that those of you who are interested in the idea will create that list, instead of using this one.

The current list is divided many ways as to what relationship local mean time (LMT) should have to local clock time (LCT). One the one hand we have persons like yourself who advocate standard time throughout the year (at least I think that is what you are advocating) and alternatively we have advocates for up to three hours of year-round DST such as Peter Hullah, who stated that everyone "should add two hours to their current standard time" all year round. (Since he lives in France, that would be three hours ahead of local mean time.) (A thought: has anyone here in favor of DST in REVERSE?) Garrett Wollman > INTERNET:wollman@LCS.MIT.EDU wrote in reply to me:

On 20 Mar 97 23:41:37 EST, Chris Carrier <72157.3334@CompuServe.COM> said:

...

Unfortunately things seem to be going in the other direction, given the EU's decision to copy the US/UK bad habit of ending DST on the last Sunday in OCTOBER, by the end of which the sun is rising later than the large majority of day-shift workers get up.

And those of us who live in cities like Boston, which have ``night life'' rather than ``morning life'' think this is perfectly reasonable....

DST rules should not be determined by cities such as Boston, but by cities on the western edge of timezones such as Cleveland in the Eastern or Dallas in the Central (and places like Indiana and West Texas should go back an hour into their astronomically correct zone.) Sue Ann Bowling > INTERNET:sbowling@gi.alaska.edu wrote:

The dates of daylight savings shift, and the assymmetry between the spring shift (when we in Alaska are already pracitically going to bed in daylight) and October (when it's already dark when we're going home in the evening) have bothered me for years.

The problem in Alaska isn't DST but that ever since October 1983 most of the state, except for Southeast, has been on DST all year with a 2 hour advance during the DST period in the Lower 48.

I wonder if the politicos who first devised the shift thought that solar symmetry was around the middle of the winter and summer?

It seems to have been a thing that evolved. When DST first went US-national in 1918-9, it run from the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October. When many states and localities started using it in 1920 in the absence of national legislation, they shortened it by a month on each end, from the last Sunday in April (a ridiculously late date in Lower 48 latitudes) to the (very sensible) last Sunday in September. This went on until 1942-5 when DST was national and year round for the war. It should be noted here that the War Time Act of 1942 called for DST to last until six months after the end of the war, but when the war did end in the summer of 1945 a bill was quickly passed to end War Time on the last Sunday in September, 1945. What I call the "October problem" started in Massachusetts when the legislature there extended DST to the end of October, starting in 1954. (IMHO they should have left September alone and started a month earlier if they wanted an extended DST period.) The next year New York and the rest of New England got on the bandwagon, and by 1962 most places on DST were ending on the last Sunday in October. (A few, however, shortened the end to Labor Day - - Minnesota was one.) Then along came the Uniform Time Act of 1966 which set up the dates of the last Sunday in April to October, nationwide. It should be pointed out that when this bill was originally introduced it did not put the whole country on DST but only stated that anyone using DST had to abide by April Sun=>24 to October Sun =>25 switch dates. Unfortunately the bill was then rewritten to put the whole nation on DST unless states exempted themselves. An amendment to the bill reducing the DST period from Memorial to Labor Day unfortunately failed; this was reintroduced in 1970 and also failed. After the 1974-5 experience with a much earlier start to DST, bills were introduced in each Congress from 1976 on to increase the DST period until in 1987, one passed to move the start date from the last to the first Sunday in April. My position during those years was to support the earlier change if and only if the ending date was moved back to the last Sunday in September. In 1981 I was happy to see the EEC (later known as the EC, now known as the EU) adopt last Sunday March-September for its continental members, hoping this would inspire the UK and US to do likewise and create something like the Livingston worldwide-switch-day proposal (which is what the UTA of 1966 was and should have been). But alas, this was not to be.

Anyway, a popular science article I wrote on the topic 10 years ago is on the web at <http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF8/812.html>, pointing out some of the oddities of time zones here in our 60 degree wide state.

I used to write similar articles for the BARROW SUN and the ALEUTIAN EAGLE 1987-92 (when they folded). If you are interested I could send you one I wrote in October 1988 commenting on the fifth anniversary of the consolidation of time zones in Alaska five years earlier. Eric Ulevik > INTERNET:eau@ozemail.com.au wrote:

It is extremely unlikely that time zone rules will be simplified to make life easier for computers. For example: sunrise and sunset in Hobart vary sufficiently from Sydney that they are always going to want to have different summer time start/end dates. Another example: Adelaide has an offset of <hours>:30m from GMT.

Nor should they. Time zone rules should be set by wake-sleep patterns, not the perceived need of the business community to have everyone on the same time: (A fabulous letter to the London Times during the British Standard Time period (1968-71) put it thusly: "We have 3000 telephone links between Britain and the Continent. Why do we need to get 55 million people out of bed in the dark to answer them?")

Having said that, I have an idea for how to simplify time zone rules.

A 'mean local time' can be calculated based upon location on the earth's surface. This time can be algorithmically biased to allow for daylight savings, smoothly varying over the year. Clocks can use GPS and the standard algorithm to calculate this time.

Of course, this was the case before standard time, but transport and communications go faster these days.

Which is why it could never be practically adopted. If I were at the Meridian Convention in Washington, DC, USA, in (I believe) 1881, where they settled on Greenwich as the meridian, (a good decision IMHO) I would have advocated a planetwide version of what the German State Railways were doing. They had time zones based on Berlin, with each zone 10 minutes in time (2.5 degrees of longitude) apart. What I would have wanted would be such a system of 144 time zones, 10 minutes apart, centered on Greenwich.

The problem here is that administrative units - say Sydney - may wish to adopt a standard time, but then we end not having algorithmically determined time.

Actually the problem is that organizations which deal in a large area such as railways and, in our century, broadcasters, need to have uniform time over a large area. There were many standard 'railway times' before standard time was introduced to reduce confusion in this area.

3) Time near the poles probably needs a special case.

Would you believe the South Pole keeps DST? The first commander of the Pole Station wanted to keep GMT, but discovered it was more convenient to keep the time of their supply line; McMurdo Sound, which kept the same time as New Zealand. Since NZ has had a seasonal time change since 1974, McMurdo follows suit, and so does the Pole Station.