Fixing Daylight Savings Time
Listen To Me: I Am An Artist
What if, instead of Daylight Saving time, we had Organic or Roving time the world over?
To some degree, the reason we currently slip back and forth between Standard and Daylight Saving is in order to respect the fact that, first and foremost, time and days and nights all have something to do with the timing of the sun's appearance from our perspective. At least as near as I can tell, that's why.
There doesn't actually seem to be any real consensus as to why we do this; people argue and fight about it every year! Still, the sun is literally how human sleep--and therefore mental and physical health, and therefore ultimate well-being--is modulated. In life there is little more important than this, so the sun is as good or better a reason as any for me.
Permanent organic/roving time (I'll say OR time from here on) continues this observation of and respect for the sun's changes over the year, but does it smoothly and imperceptibly; not disruptively, in sudden herky-jerky one-hour increments that knock everyone off-kilter twice a year the way the Standard/Daylight switch does.
Say at a given time on Sunday March 12 2023 we need it to be 2pm, and at that same "time" on Sunday November 5 2023 we need it to be 1pm, so we're "losing" an hour in the interim. Instead of suddenly dropping that hour in one go with a big loud clunk that ruins everyone's week and causes a bunch of unnecessary automotive fatalities, how about we just amortise that lost/gained time over every second of that intervening period so we don't even notice it?
The squeeze-&-release of the Daylight Saving time concertina isn't an even, 6 months on/6 off thing; the March/November switchovers put it more like 4/8.
So at the "worst" of times during the 4-month November-to-March "squeeze" we'd be losing 30 seconds or so per day. More accurately, each of our new, organic seconds would be just a smidge shorter during that time: about 3/8640 of a second shorter than our current, static seconds.
March-to-November, we are gifted with about 15 extra standard seconds per day, meaning each of our organic seconds is like 1/5760 of a second longer.
At least by my crunk-artist math. Please let me know if I'm turned around and getting everything backward. Uh, in the comments.
OR time is like a Continually-Variable Transmission for time. Seems complex until you say "Screw it, let The Computers track it like they do everything else."
Happiness Is Mandatory.
I mean, computers: We have them! We could do it! Computers are already managing practically everything else that exists in the world at this point and no one's raised any alarm (or at least no one's listening!). Y2K flew by twenty-odd years ago without much of anything happening; why not allow our computer overlords to take over daylight saving time as well, for full, clean control and reckoning of our time?
A large portion of the world's population already has web-connected computers in their pockets--their phones--telling them the time anyway. And phones auto-update for daylight savings time already. Our phones could simply update their time more often--way more often, like every 10 minutes or even 1 minute on wireless--and it would be a smooth experience for the user.
People with old-school mechanical watches would lose/gain an average of what, 8-15 minutes per month if they didn't set their watches regularly. Like 2-4 minutes per week. Checking/setting your watch against your phone every week or so would feel basically like living with a mechanical watch already does today. And this is a worst-case personal scenario, not taking smart watches into account.
They may not be “smart”, but they’re pretty.
Would this be possible? Do people talk about this at all already? I can't possibly be the one who came up with this idea.
Twice a year the internet is inundated with articles about permanent Standard time or permanent Daylight time, both of which seem to be bad for different reasons: Have we considered permanent split-the-difference time on the half-hour? Murky, inconclusive histories of possibly why we have daylight savings time in the first place are also plentiful at switchover time: These seem to swing from "authoritative and conclusive" to "difficult to say" several times a year. But I don't remember reading about just chucking the entire problem and letting silicon work it out for us like every other dumb thing we hate managing and thinking about.
There are almost always good—or at least understandable—reasons for why any given thing hasn't been tried before, and the likely necessity of world-wide unanimous buy-in for OR time to work seems to quickly rise to the top of the pile. Maybe it would also be disastrous for air travel/air traffic control. Or would it be great?
Dunno. Can't stop thinking about it.
Oh poop, in Australia Winter is Summer and nothing will ever line up, never mind.
