Daylight Saving Time

As nice as it was on Sunday, Monday's forecast left little hope that it might continue even though the wee hours were still rather mild and partly sunny (notice I didn't use the term partly cloudy). Instead we were staring right down the barrel of a spiraling chilly ,cloudy, windy spring day. I suppose,too, the weather was fitting for a back to work Monday. I was up even before 5:30am despite the fact that we had just set our clocks ahead the day prior. If I had my druthers, we would set the clocks back Saturday morning in lieu of Sunday. That way each of us would have a day (Sunday) as a test run instead of going cold turkey on Monday. In fact, next year I may invoke DST one day earlier just in Scioto Woods. Yeah, I have the say so since I am the sitting President of the Civic association - or am I ? Do you know the history behind Day Light Saving Time (DST)? You have to know that I am going to tell you. Origin It is sometimes asserted that DST was first proposed by Benjamin Franklin in a letter to the editors of the Journal of Paris. Read the full text. However, the article was humorous; Franklin was not proposing DST, but rather that people should get up and go to bed earlier. It was first seriously proposed by William Willett in the "Waste of Daylight", published in 1907, but he was unable to get the British government to adopt it despite considerable lobbying. The idea of daylight saving time was first put into practice by the German government during the First World War between April 30 and October 1, 1916. Shortly afterward, the United Kingdom followed suit, first adopting DST between May 21 and October 1, 1916. Then on March 19, 1918, the U.S. Congress established several time zones (which were already in use by railroads and most cities since 1883) and made daylight saving time official (which went into effect on March 31) for the remainder of World War I. It was observed for seven months in 1918 and 1919. The law, however, proved so unpopular (mostly because people rose and went to bed earlier than in current times) that it was later repealed. Observation of DST Daylight saving time is generally a temperate zone practice; day lengths in the tropics do not vary enough to justify DST. Hawaii, the only U.S. state in the tropics, does not observe DST. The amount of the time shift varies, but one hour is the most common. The dates of the beginning and ending of DST also vary by country. With a few exceptions, switchovers between standard time and daylight saving time generally occur in the early morning hours of a Sunday morning, presumably because doing so then causes less disruption than a change on a weekday would. DST commonly begins in the northern hemisphere on either the first Sunday in April or the last Sunday in March, and ends on the last Sunday in October. However, beginning in 2007, the United States will begin observing DST on the second Sunday of March until the first Sunday in November, but if no energy savings can be shown from the extension after the U.S. Department of Energy completes a study of impact of the change, Congress may revert back to the schedule set in 1986 under Section 110 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Since 2002, the European Union has fixed the last Sunday in March and the last Sunday in October as start and end dates (European Summer Time). In the southern hemisphere, the beginning and ending dates are switched; therefore, the time difference between the United Kingdom and Chile may be three, four, or five hours, depending on the time of year. In the United States The schedule for 2006 in the United States is that DST begins on the first Sunday in April (April 2, 2006), and changes back to standard time on the last Sunday in October (October 29, 2006). Beginning in 2007, DST will start on the second Sunday in March, and change back to standard time on the first Sunday in November. Under Section 110 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the U.S. Department of Energy is required to study the impact of the daylight saving extension no later than nine months after the change takes effect. Congress has retained the right to revert back to the daylight saving schedule set in 1986 if it cannot be shown that there are significant energy savings from an extension of daylight saving time. Daylight saving time was reinstated in the United States on February 9, 1942, again as a wartime measure to conserve resources. This remained in effect until World War II began winding down and the requirement was removed on September 30, 1945. During this period, the official designation "War Time" was used for the year-round DST. From 1945 to 1966, U.S. federal law did not address daylight saving time. States and localities were free to observe daylight saving time or not, but the predominant national pattern was that the states and localities that did observe daylight saving time did so from the last Sunday in April to the last Sunday in September. In the mid-1950s, many states and localities in the northeastern United States began extending daylight saving time to the last Sunday in October. The absence of federal standardization resulted in a patchwork where some areas observed DST while adjacent areas did not, and it was not unheard of to have to reset one's clock several times during a relatively short trip (e.g., bus drivers operating between Moundsville, West Virginia, and Steubenville, Ohio had to reset their watches seven times over 35 miles). The U.S. federal Uniform Time Act of 1966 mandated that daylight saving time begin nationwide on the last Sunday of April and end on the last Sunday of October, effective in 1967. Any state that wanted to be exempt from daylight saving time could do so by passing a state law, provided that it exempt the entire state. The law was amended in 1972 to permit states that straddle a time zone boundary to exempt the entire area of the state lying in one time zone. On July 8, 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed the Federal Fire Prevention and Control Act of 1986 into law which amended the starting date of daylight saving time to the first Sunday in April, to take effect the following year. In response to the 1973 energy crisis, daylight saving in the United States was begun earlier in both 1974 and 1975, commencing on the first Sunday in January (January 6) in the former year and the last Sunday in February (February 23) in the latter. Starting March 11, 2007, daylight saving time will be extended another four to five weeks, from the second Sunday of March to the first Sunday of November. The change was introduced by the Energy Policy Act of 2005; the House had originally approved a motion that would have extended DST even further from the first Sunday in March to the last Sunday in November. Proponents claimed that the extension would save "the equivalent of" 10,000 barrels of oil per day, but this figure was based on U.S. Department of Energy information from the 1970s, the accuracy and relevance of which the DoE no longer stands by. There is very little recent research on what the actual positive effects, if any, might be. (See this article, for example.) The extension was greeted with criticism by those concerned for the safety of children traveling to school in the dark before the late sunrise. In addition, the airline industry was especially concerned if daylight saving time was extended through to the last Sunday in November, as this is very often the Sunday after Thanksgiving. The Sunday after Thanksgiving is one of the busiest travel days at American airports, and could have resulted in much havoc among travelers who forgot that the clocks were changing that day. If the original proposal to extend daylight saving time through the last Sunday in November had been adopted, the entire United States, with the exception of the states that exempted themselves, would have experienced the latest sunrises of the year during the month of November. An additional issue raised by this extension is that it may require the reconfiguration of some computers. Many computers are programmed to adjust automatically for DST, but do so based on static tables stored directly on the computer itself. In order to change the dates and times at which the automatic jump to or from DST occurs, these tables must be modified, or the user must manually specify that the computer's clock should operate in Daylight Saving Time mode. One potential issue related to this (though difficult to quantify) is the amount of labor and money that may be spent correcting errors that arise due to a failure to update computers. Certain types of information systems (those that schedule future events with reference to UTC, for example) may encounter problems arising from a lack of synchronization unless both computers and databases are carefully updated.

I went about my morning routine with the vigor of a man half my age, and it wasn't long before my exercise, walk with Ykraps, and coffee time were well behind me. I had the benefit of my eggs already being prepared since Mindy had scrambled 18 of those puppies yesterday. That chopped a good five minutes off my morning prep. With all that behind me, I left for work around 7:40am after stroking my guitar for a few short minutes. The work day began a little choppy like most Mondays, and like many days recently. We were still fighting through some difficult issues. As the morning wore on the weather outdoors only worsened. At one point rain began moving in and with that much cooler temperatures were not far behind. By the time I left for my run it was 49 degrees, cloudy, and very, very windy. The wind was almost directly out of the west and gusting to 40 mph. It made running a real challenge on a day when I didn't have a strong burning desire, but there will always be days like that. Bottom line, I made it. And the run in was hysterically easy. The afternoon went really fast. That can be attributed to another busy afternoon. So it would go, the end of the day came around quickly. I left work around 5:20pm and got home sometime close to 5:45pm. Mindy as luck would have it, was already a my home. She had planned a run with me but because of the cold temps and extreme wind, she folded. By the time I had gotten home the temperature had sunk to below 40 degrees. And the wind was blowing so hard it blew the top off my hot tub twice - once from the east and later from the west. I buckled it down to prevent it from happening again. For dinner we discussed going out but ended up deciding on a Minelli's pizza. It's right around the corner, fast, and very, very tasty! Mindy was insistent on some lovin' too but after our meal, and a fire we both fell asleep for two solid hours only to wake well beyond time for her to leave. After she departed, I locked house, filled my water glass and took my book to bed. By 10:45pm I was asleep for good.