24 Comments
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Dr Ferdinand Santos III's avatar

Thanks, good article, entertaining. I have never understood why supposedly rational people play with time and clocks. Moving them forward, backwards, does nothing whatsoever in any domain except ensure that on the following day I am late or early for church. It is just another ritual - like wearing a face diaper, soaking your hands in 'gel', or getting a stabbination....

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Vxi7's avatar

I live in a country where time change makes sense. This way the daylight falls in a normal daytime period.

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BuelahMan's Revolt's avatar

I despise the time change, especially as I grow older. I am one of those that wakes every morning around 4:30 (central time). When the time changes in the fall, I wake up at what seems 3:30AM. That means that at 8 or 9 PM I am already falling sleep on the recliner after fighting sleepiness for 2 hours.

It is around 2-3 weeks of hell.

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Crash Pile's avatar

I always put a little extra Gaussian kernel local polynomial regression in my coffee during the clock shift and it perks me right up!

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Fukitol's avatar

All I have to say is that I lived in Arizona a few years, and it was nice not futzing with clocks. I can't see any reason why I should have to anywhere else. Nothing bad happened when I did not change my clock. The sun still rose, the day went on, businesses were still open, work was performed, and contrary to popular belief, no time was lost (by failing to save it).

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Compsci's avatar

I used to think so—briefly—myself, mainly when young. However, I am now convinced not changing time back and forth is worse than changing such. If all you care about is getting to work on time, fine. However, I worked in an environment where we needed to communicate to all those benighted States that moved their clocks back and forth. So I always had to try to remember whether my clock was reading CA time and conversely what exactly was the time in NYC—2 or 3 hours ahead. The age of ubiquitous computer access has lessened that burden quite a bit, but the annoyance remains.

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Fukitol's avatar

That is true. As long as somebody is doing it, you still have to deal with it. But this problem also exists if you *do* change your clocks, since in many places people don't, or they do it at different times of year. So "conform for convenience" doesn't really work here.

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David Sharples's avatar

I go to sleep early, get up before dawn waking naturally with no alarm. As such I'm pretty much unaffected be modular time constants...

(the only thing is meals.. my body knows when supper is supposed to happen.)

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Gwyneth's avatar

You have a very entertaining knack for finding some of the silliest research studies. It seems to me that if they didn't model in rainy days, the whole premise falls flat. And what about those poor worker ants who in the winter go to work in the dark, return home in the dark and spend their days in a windowless office?

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Christine Mayock's avatar

I have to do that little thing in my poor head: spring forward, fall back.. and yet I still forget but someone else eventually changes microwave and car clock.

It’s darker in the winter and I’ve got some Druid DNA so I always enjoyed the Easter candle ceremony.

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Robin B.'s avatar

Daylight Savings Time: the stupidity of our expert classes in a nutshell. The clock is supposed to reflect the position of the sun: at 12pm the sun it at its zenith. What if people get upset about having more or less sunlight during working hours as the seasons change? Instead of adopting a summer/winter schedule, the authorities change the clock, as if reality itself is somehow different.

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John's avatar

Put us back on Standard Time, and LEAVE IT THERE, forever.

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Tardigrade's avatar

For those of us with a timepiece fetish, Daylight Slaving Time* creates extra work, but it's only twice a year, and provides exercise.

The most stressful part is correcting the clock in the car, which invariably requires 30 minutes of consulting the owner's manual for the aftermarket CD player/radio, because the user interface was apparently designed by the programmers rather than an Actual Human.

As a result, I usually don't bother and instead subtract or add an hour at various times of the year. I figure it helps keep me sharp.

* Credit goes to Robert Heinlein for this.

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Tardigrade's avatar

Let's fix that title to make it more accurate:

“Ditching daylight saving time could prevent millions of obesity cases and thousands of strokes in Sim City, study says“.

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Scribbler's avatar

"The far-left political magazine Scientific American ..."

This made me sad because I am old and I remember what this magazine once used to be.

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Space Hamster Boo's avatar

That's so awful its almost impressive. I would love to toss DST, but not via pure GIGO like this.

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Lulubell111's avatar

"Because I have never felt the change of only a hour. Except to notice it’s darker a bit faster in fall."

Same. Never noticed. And now that my phone changes automatically I notice less than never

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Flippin’ Jersey's avatar

Just get rid of it. There’s no reason for it, at least one that makes any sense, so why must we endure it every year? Typical sclerotic polity.

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Crixcyon's avatar

Grrrrr! Changing the clock does not change the time. It only changes the measurement of time. I hate it. Simply because it wrecks my sleep patterns and those do not change because of some silly clock rearrangement.

There have been numerous studies done to pontificate the necessity of getting enough sleep and how many people are somewhat lacking. Why make it harder? It takes me about a month or more to adjust, if I ever do. It has become another of the millions of stupid things that government does.

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