Friday, 25 February 2011

In Passing

England tries becoming Indiana

Just in time!   Dept

Time addicts such as Fuzzy Curmudgeon Nathan may find this report on events across the pond of interest:
Hey Britain, steel yourself for Double Summer Time.  This is the Coalition’s latest wheeze to boost tourism/save energy/cut road deaths by making our evenings lighter later.  More specifically they’re considering changing from GMT to GMT+1 in the winter, and from GMT+1 to GMT+2 in the summer.  This doesn’t increase the amount of daylight we have, that's physically impossible, but it does shift more of the available daylight past breakfast to a time when you're actually awake.  In June Double Summer Time would mean it’d stay light until roughly 11pm, but conversely in late December the sun wouldn’t rise anywhere in Britain before 9am.  [Links in original. -O.G.]
In essence, the United Kingdom’s government wants to replicate should-be-CST Indiana by bumping its clocks ahead to match... Warsaw?
This is astronomically perverse. The sun takes precisely one hour to travel through 15 degrees of longitude, but the longitudes of Belfast and Warsaw are nearly 30 degrees apart.  We’d be joining a CET timezone that’s twice as wide as it ought to be, with the sun taking two hours to travel from one side to the other rather than just one.
...except that being further north, the effect would be even greater than it is in Indy.
•Sunrise (winter):  There’d be five (yes five) months of the year when the sun rises later than 8am, and two months when it rises later than 9am  (ugh, that’d be miserable)
•Sunrise (summer):  There’d only be one month of the year when the sun rises before 6am  (hurrah, this minimises the amount of wasted daylight while most people are asleep)
•Sunset (winter):  There’d be only three months of the year when the sun sets before 6pm, and just one when it sets before 5pm  (hurrah, that’d be great)
•Sunset (summer):  There’d be four months of the year when the sun sets later than 9pm, and two months when it sets later than 10pm  (hurrah if you're outdoors) (boo if you’re trying to get to sleep)
And what’s worse, if “London time” is actually to be an hour ahead of Greenwich, when do you celebrate New Years?  (Snappy answer:  Twice.)

Given the other important things presently going on in the world, the cynic in me suggests that the...erm...timing of Coalition’s focus on this issue may be an attempt at an “Hey, look, squirrels!” distraction for the British electorate.

Given that DG’s post already has 40-some comments, one fears they’ve succeeded.


Previously:

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 17:30:22 GMT | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 440 words, total size 6 kb.

1 People who mess with time deserve to be removed from it.

Posted by: Nathan at 02/25/11 19:13:15 (cBrDo)

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