Having lost a precious hour of Sunday morning sleeping due to the moved up daylight savings time, I was grumbling about how daylight savings time can suck. We like to think of time as an absolute, but, of course, it’s not. It is more of an approximation and a malleable one at that, where when we don’t like the answer we change it. Further things I find troubling about all this time-shifting business:
- How humans measure time is a leaky abstraction. Normally a week has seven days, months have their alotted number of days, and then things like leap years poke through. Suddenly February gets a 29th day and things seem a little less certain. Like everything might be permitted, that nothing is known, and before long it's dogs and cats living together.
- There are disagreements about whether to even use daylight savings around the world, with Arizona bucking the trend in the US. Most of Indiana is on board now, but several counties have switched time zones. If it is down to counties now to decide what time it is, can I just make up my own personal time zone? And people went crazy back in the 1950s/60s with daylight savings madness.
- Questions like "was there a 2:30am on Sunday, March 11th?" make my head hurt. It's like trying to figure out what time it is on Mars. I pity the poor programmers who have to capture all these rules and get it right so trains don't collide and banks shut down. And to think this daylight savings thing was all started by a secret cabal of golfers who wanted more daylight to play. </ul>