Ross -
I haven't read the posts but I would have thought someone would have noticed
it's not a bi-annual time change and corrected the subject line.
BTW, the petition doesn't say biannual, does it?
Thanks for putting this straight. I was loathe to add *that* nitpick
(it *is* substantive but I assumed collectively understood) but I'm glad
you brought it up for one particular reason:
Josh just pointed out to us that in fact the government(s) have the
power to declare *official* time (and calendar and ...) note the Ge'ez
Calendar ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_calendar ) as
observed in Eritrea and Ethiopia... not all that different from our
"own" but is it 2013 or is it 2006 this year? Who knows really?
What probably irks me most about some of our discussions here is that
while I'm sure we are all fairly well educated, learned, sophisticated
people, we have a tendency to notice something that irks us (oops I
might be getting recursive here) and we treat it (in this case the
semiannual clock shift to create what we call Daylight Savings Time) as
if it were not already carefully thought through... then we offer a
*much more ill thought through* solution that *at best* optimizes one
feature that we might be focused on at the time as if *that* actually
helps anything.
Not to pick on Owen (too much) but when he took exception to another
hemisphere (not to mention culture yet) not aligning with us (or not
negotiating with us until agreement was reached?) in the choice of
timing of the clock change, he directly neglected the (obvious?) problem
of north/south hemispheres, just as I think he did when he suggested
year-round clock skew. He either is a natural early riser and doesn't
find trying to make 8AM appointments in the dark hard or doesn't have
8AM expectations and neglected to imagine that many people need to start
their day an hour or three before the rest of us (how else does your
newspaper make your doorstep before you wake or the coffee and
croissants be steaming hot when you arrive well before the magic 8AM, or
...). Nick I think, pointed out that school children trying to make a
7:30 or even 8:30 first period might be standing at the bus stop as much
as an hour before sunrise if we kept the hour-skew through the dead of
winter (at higher latitudes).
Arlo suggested registering the clock to the sunrise (managed by the
magic of computers I guess) might be more highly motivated and my
instincts agree but without shifting the length of hours (stretching
minutes and seconds with them?), we can't keep it registered on sunrise
*and* sunset simultaneously (I think he suggested that). If anyone
could do it, I suspect Arlo could actually build (or design anyway) an
analog mechanism to model the sunrise/sunset throughout the year (though
if you read the later diatribe on the Analemma, Apsides and Solstices,
it is likely his analog model would be no less than a full Orrery with
spinning, tilting, elliptically orbiting planets and moons and all!).
The map is not the territory.
My point, as much as I ever have (a succinct) one is that we seem to be
a group of people quick to notice the obvious flaws in one thing or
another (DST details, cell coverage, best plan, best phone, best design
for a tinfoil hat, Google responsiveness to buggy HW/SW, etc.) then
imply or even line out specifically our own remedy, which of course has
obvious (or to be fair, mildly hidden) flaws of it's own. Or more to
the point optimizes one or two features at the loss of *all of the others*.
Is this arrogance (that we assume our immediate knee-jerk intuitive
irritation and response-to-it is superior to more broadly considered
solutions) or is it our general self-selection (as members of the list
first and ones willing to speak up second) as optimizers and problems
solvers? Some would suggest that the psuedonymity or asynchronousness
of network communication supports this kind of
brainstorming-as-problem-solving. Perhaps it is just that, what occurs
here is really just brainstorming even if it often masquerades as
problem solving? No diss to brainstorming, just noticing my own
reactions to our discussions.
Many here are professional "modelers" so we know that "all models are
wrong, some are useful" which suggests we also understand that we can
only optimize what we model and that multi-variate optimization is
always a trade-off with combinations of muddied averages or hierarchies
of deference within the model space minimizing distances to Pareto
Frontiers or somesuch. For example, none of our DST discussions
acknowledged Nick's early (last Autumn?) mention of the Lemniscate
Analemma
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analemma#Times_of_sunrise_and_sunset> and
the misalignment of our apsides with our solstices leading to the days
getting longer or shorter asymmetrically throughout the year (sunrises
shifting faster or slower than sunsets).
I'm not really trying to bust anyone in particular (Owen and Doug can
take the heat) but rather seeking a meta-discussion on the question of
why/how groups like this (and we are our own Petri dish for
observation/experimentation?) have this tendency.
I enjoy the freewheeling nature of this list (why else would I often
read it in it's entirety and respond so voluminously?) so I'm not
necessarily trying to shut anything down or significantly change the
narrative (dialogue, multi-monolog?), just get a deeper
understanding/appreciation of it's true nature.
Hmmm,
- Steve
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