Clocks going back / forward

 A friend pointed out that putting the clocks forward in spring empirically saves energy, but the practice still gets me wondering.

Let's take the usual 16 hour waking day as read - supposedly typical. Why don't we wake up 8 hours before noon and go to bed 8 hours after, so that our waking day is symmetrical around noon? (For 'noon' I will take solar noon where you are, or mean solar noon where you are, or some coordinates mean solar noon like GMT as appropriate. I'm not quibbling over minutes). Similarly why is the typical working day not symmetrical around noon (8am - 4pm GMT in the UK)?

When this proposition is expressed in clock times - get up at 4 in the morning and go to bed at 8 at might it sounds rather silly, but how did this come to be? Why does getting up at 7 and going to bed at 11 sound much more sensible? Why is early or late a feeling about what the clock says?

So it seems summer time is a con trick we reasonably willingly / knowingly fall for: We get up an hour earlier because the name of the time we get up is still 7am even though it is 5 hours before 'noon' instead of 4. If this works and is necessary, why don't we set our clocks so that 'noon' is at 3pm and leave it at that? We would get up at 7am (8 hours before 'noon') and go to bed at 11 (8 hours after 'noon'). All good?

OK, the issue might be that time of the year when there's not enough daylight to cover a whole waking day, there being some people who would rather have all  their daylight at the beginning of their waking day (morning people?) and others who would rather have it at the end (evening people?). I'm not sure that problem is eminently solvable by altering the clocks so that we can get up at a time that sounds right.

Where I am, between the September and March equinoxes (roughly) there aren't 16 hours between the two astronomical twilights. The latest astronomical twilight is 6am GMT, so logically (IIUC) that should be the latest I get up between those equinoxes.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

If I don't work I don't get paid

This is the indignant comment I sometimes used to hear from people who had stayed at home waiting for an operative who didn't show. Apart from the fact that it seems very unlikely that the person simply sat at home waiting and had nothing else to do - no unread books, housework up-to-date, admin all done  - there is a glaring mathematical fault behind this statement: Like is not being compared with like. Here are some simplified figures to make my point Let's say you earn £26K a year - £500 a week. That's £500 a week, and if you are salaried you probably get £26K/12 per month irrespective of how much leave you take in each of those months.  But let's also say you get 6 weeks leave. So per week worked you get £26K/46  = £565.22. And let's say your working week is 35 hours - you're getting £16.15 / hour. Now if you worked for that hourly rate for 35 hrs a week 52 weeks a year you'd earn £29,391.30 pa. You won't, but provided you don't take more tha
Read more

Phone tone

Before my current job I'd never used computer integrated telephony. Yes, Skype and other VoIP systems but not CIT proper. It's interesting to see the results of the system trying to understand the tones it is 'hearing' it really isn't very good at it. What I hear as a slight 'blip' in one network's ring tone (I think it's O2) the computer obviously hears as the ring tone stopping, so it serves up the next page ready for an answered call to be logged/coded, even though ring tone is continuing. Of course these tones were originally intended for human ears/brains and with the legacy public switched telephone network holding out this kind of lumpy system will continue. In the old analogue days the phone system worked by setting up a metallic speech path from caller to called party. The callers exchange (IIRC) would send ringing current down this path to the called party's phone toring the bell, and the called party's exchange would put ring ton
Read more