4 ms·
The natural change in daylight hours is pretty sudden, actually. Either sunrise or noon (or both) have to move. DST is a compromise to keep them from moving too
by beefman 6y ago
The natural change in daylight hours is pretty sudden, actually. Either sunrise or noon (or both) have to move. DST is a compromise to keep them from moving too much. But sunrise is a more important time than noon.
So I've proposed something I call Sunrise Standard Time. It abolishes DST and splits the 24 primary longitudinal time zones into as many as 120 zones by cutting at the tropics and polar circles. Clocks adjust gradually each day to keep sunrise near 6am. The tropics would follow sunrise at the equator, and the temperate zones (between the tropics and polar circles) would follow sunrise at ~ 30deg N or S. That adjustment is about 1 minute per day.
To refine things slightly, sunrise can be fixed at the latitude which divides the population in half in each zone (with the constraint that the N and S zones are mirrored). Those latitudes are approximately: 13.5deg for the tropical zone, 34.5deg for the temperate zones, and 68.5deg for all 2 million people living in the polar zones.
A further refinement is to split the per-capita sunrise aberration instead. This pushes the boundaries to slightly higher latitudes. For the temperate zones, the minimum per-capita offset of sunrise from 6am on the solstice is achieved by following sunrise at 37.5deg. That's pretty close to Washington DC (39deg), Beijing (40deg), and Tokyo (36deg).
I suggest the tropics use the equator for simplicity.
SST will improve sun tracking for the vast majority of the world's population with no sudden changes. It will also be easier to understand than DST. There are no dates to remember and, because the N and S zones are mirrors, it's easy for someone in e.g. New York to understand what's going on in Sydney.
Supporting links:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Hours_of_daylight_vs_latitude_vs_day_of_year_cmglee.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Hours_of...
http://world.andersen.im/ http://world.andersen.im/
- jhardy54 6y agoObligatory: https://qntm.org/calendar https://qntm.org/calendar
- jhardy54 6y agoOops, I meant: https://qntm.org/continuous https://qntm.org/continuous
- thdrdt 6y ago"Clocks adjust gradually each day to keep sunrise near 6am" While your idea might be very good, this is the reason why it won't be used. Nobody is going to be happy to adjust their analog clock every day.
- jere 6y agoWho still uses analog clocks though? If you don't care for modern tech, just wake up with the sun and you're on time anyway. The idea of keeping track of this system in software sounds terrifying though. Getting rid of DST would simplify things, but this would ramp up the complexity a lot.
- enedil 6y agoWell, have you heard of hand watches?
- masklinn 6y agoYou can replace "analog clock" by "clock" in general. My computers update on their own, but none of my bedside clock, oven clock, HVAC clock, … do, and all of them are electronic. Also many people do, in fact, enjoy wristwatches or analog wall-clocks.
- wjsetzer 6y agoI would rather just not use clocks than do this. Yes, it would be "better" if we shifted clocks every day, but that's not practical for mechanical clocks. You may could get away with monthly realignment, but even with that I hate setting my watch even twice a year and I imagine others would too.
- beezle 6y agoMany (most?) people can remember a few time zone offsets (ie, EST -> PST = 3). From a practical and business standpoint, I don't see the current system changing, at least not by more than a small amount.