Saturday, March 7, 2009

Daylight "saving" time

A quote from Yahoo Buzz:
Why do we have daylight-saving time?
Some folks believe it helps us save energy. With longer daylight hours, there's less of a need for folks to turn on the lights.
Notice the part I put in italics? It's not true, and it bugs me. We don't get more hours of daylight with DST. There isn't an extra hour of sunlight that we magically get starting tomorrow (except for Arizona, Hawaii, and assorted other non-continental U.S. areas). The amount of daytime we get is getting longer now, but it's nothing to do with DST. We will have practically the same number of minutes of sunlight tomorrow as we do today. It's just that we're all changing our clocks, so there are more daylight minutes in the afternoon, and we think that the day is longer. It's lousy science and fuzzy math. It's a trick, people.

Thus endeth my rant for the day.

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