Jay Honeck wrote:
> Personally, just the thought of being able to fly after supper all
> winter long is enough to make me vote for a MAJOR time-shift!
Then do like the cows: ignore the clocks and live by sunlight
alltogether. Who says you must eat at 18:00 ? And with VCR technology,
you can record shows while you sleep and watch them the next day.
As a matter of fact, with computers today, it is no big deal to have
some alarm clock combined with GPS that rings at exactly sunrise time
for where you are. They don't even need to show time.
Prior to Stanford Flemming developping the concept of standard time
zones, each city had its own time zone matched to that of the sun.
Compare this to today where Gaspé Québec on the east coast is in the
same time zone as Thunder Bay Ontario some 986nm almost exactly due west.
During one hour, the sun travels 21,600/ 24 = 900 nm in the
circumference of the earth. So thunder bay is more than one hours apart
from Gaspé according to the sun time, but they are in the same time
zone. Yet, go to the next town west of Thunder Bay and they are in the
central time zone.
So sunrise and sunset happen more than an hour apart between Gaspé and
Thunder bay, yet they are in the same time zone.
And back in 1988, NewFoundland experimented with a 2 hour daylight
savings. That meant that the town of Blanc Sablon , Québec (north short
of St-Lawrence), and Forteau Bay Labrador/NFLD a few km to the east
across the border, were 2.5 hours apart.
And when you look at Singapore, they are in the same time zone as Hong
Kong and Taiwan, mostly because of everyone wanting the same business
hours. Singarpore and Taipei are 1735km apart, 1423nm with the east-west
vector alone, more than 1:30 apart in sun time.
If the USA wants to save energy, it should instead focus on energy
efficiency. Changing lightbulbs to energy efficient ones would do a lot
more to save money and energy than shifting the time. |