4 ms·

A map that also shows the difference between winter and summer for day length would be great. It is down right quaint hearing people bitch about the hour of ch

by taeric 11mo ago

A map that also shows the difference between winter and summer for day length would be great. It is down right quaint hearing people bitch about the hour of change that DST does compared to the near 6 hours that nature has already taken. (Note, this doesn't require contextualizing to across the ocean.) Similarly, for storms and such, knowing just how different the east coast of the US is compared to many of the places that people came from is amusing. What I thought of as normal rain is evidently comparable to the gods wanting to kill you. Always amusing when people ask, "doesn't it rain a lot in Seattle" for me. I don't know that I would have called what we get rain.

christophilus 11mo ago
I really missed the good, intense thunderstorms of the US southeast when I lived in Seattle. Seattle gets a good misting from time to time, but I almost never bothered with rain gear or an umbrella while living there.
- taeric 11mo ago
  Exactly. It really makes the discussions around how loud fireworks are kind of hard to listen to. It isn't that they are wrong. More that it was a regular thing for storms to shake the house. Our dogs were terrified of "what the F is happening out there." On the regular.
AlotOfReading 11mo ago
I mind DST because I have to consider clock changes, not because I care how many hours of sunlight are in the period between 6h and 18h. Even the extreme of Arctic winter is annoying only because 4h looking similar to 16h messes with your awareness of time until you adopt a structured schedule.
- taeric 11mo ago
  And that was largely a fair point back before we had everything managed by computers. Nowadays, I'd wager the vast majority of folks didn't realize their phone's changed overnight. My kids certainly didn't realize it. Not that I don't think we couldn't have a better system. But nobody likes my idea of "base it on the month with 6 going up 10 minutes and 6 going down." Well... I think some folks like the idea, but nobody (including me) thinks that is where we are headed.
  - jcattle 11mo ago
    I don't know about the poster before me, but it is not so much about actual clocks changing but about the biological clock changing.
    - taeric 11mo ago
      Right, and that I think is far easier to deal with than you realize. Easier if you don't try it in 1 hour jumps twice a year. But basically every animal already has to deal with the shift due to the nature of actual sunlight. And we do just fine by that. (I should add that I have also never used an alarm clock. The shift from DST has never really been difficult to manage. Only was hard when I would be awake, but not leave for work/school on time because I forgot to update the clock.)
      - AlotOfReading 11mo ago
        What time will X occur on a particular future date? E.g. meetings. What time will X occur in another time zone? What time will X occur across multiple time zones that shift at different times? What time will X occur across multiple time zones where one doesn't shift at all? E.g. meetings with people in Arizona. How long ago did X occur, across a transition? E.g. correlating Unix time to civil time. How long is X, where X is an event spanning multiple time zones that shift independently? E.g. plane flights. Does my cron job need to run intermittently every X hours, or at 24/X particular times every day, or every X hours but managed so that processing doesn't intrude into normal business hours? Personally, when I'm in the wilderness my circadian rhythm follows the sun. Up at sunrise and asleep not long after sunset. That's not how I work when I'm living in society, so I don't see why animal adaptations are particularly relevant here. On a social level, the shift causes tremendous levels of stress to people. It essentially creates a day of national jet lag, for no real benefit that I can see.
        taeric 11mo ago
        None of those are difficult in the modern world. Computers have pretty much solved all of them. There are confusing to talk about cases. But none that are truly problematic. Consider some of the most sensitive for people. Take your medication twice a day. What do people do when they fly across the country? Most don't keep the same schedule they had back home on the medication. They just start doing it at the new place. Folks that do have "take this exactly every 12 hours" rely on a timer, not a clock. Even talking about how long ago something was is just not that important for folks in most scenarios. Consider, when people move they don't change their birth date if it would have been a different day in the new location. (That is, nobody does their birthday by GMT.) Now, about the only idea I fully reject is that we could just tell all businesses to change their opening hours so that we don't have to change the clocks. This is mind numbingly crazy to me. The entire point of changing the clocks is to get everyone to update together.
madcaptenor 11mo ago
See the maps here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-17/this-simple-great-map-shows-that-seattle-is-far-from-america-s-rainiest-city https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-17/this-simp... Most of the eastern US gets more inches of precipitation than Seattle. But there are few places (mostly in a band from eastern Ohio and West Virginia, across Upstate New York, through to northern New England) that have more days with measurable precipitation than Seattle. Someone also pulled data on the fifty largest cities: https://www.acsh.org/news/2019/01/16/how-rainy-seattle-its-not-even-top-30-major-us-cities-13733 https://www.acsh.org/news/2019/01/16/how-rainy-seattle-its-n.... Seattle is 32nd for amount of rain but 5th (behind Buffalo, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh in the band I mentioned, and also its neighbor Portland) for number of rainy days.
- taeric 11mo ago
  I think that is basically the map I was asking for, so kudos on that. I still think it fails to capture what it means to be a rainy day. Is about like when Seattle has a snow day. If you are from a place that actually gets snow, you'd scoff at us calling it a snow storm. I think my favorite is the few times it thunders. People would all move to windows in a sort of awe at the loud noise.
  - madcaptenor 11mo ago
    Yeah, you want some threshold for amount of rain that's higher than "measurable precipitation".

by taeric 11mo ago

christophilus 11mo ago

I really missed the good, intense thunderstorms of the US southeast when I lived in Seattle. Seattle gets a good misting from time to time, but I almost never bothered with rain gear or an umbrella while living there.

taeric 11mo ago
Exactly. It really makes the discussions around how loud fireworks are kind of hard to listen to. It isn't that they are wrong. More that it was a regular thing for storms to shake the house. Our dogs were terrified of "what the F is happening out there." On the regular.

AlotOfReading 11mo ago

I mind DST because I have to consider clock changes, not because I care how many hours of sunlight are in the period between 6h and 18h. Even the extreme of Arctic winter is annoying only because 4h looking similar to 16h messes with your awareness of time until you adopt a structured schedule.

taeric 11mo ago
And that was largely a fair point back before we had everything managed by computers. Nowadays, I'd wager the vast majority of folks didn't realize their phone's changed overnight. My kids certainly didn't realize it. Not that I don't think we couldn't have a better system. But nobody likes my idea of "base it on the month with 6 going up 10 minutes and 6 going down." Well... I think some folks like the idea, but nobody (including me) thinks that is where we are headed.
- jcattle 11mo ago
  I don't know about the poster before me, but it is not so much about actual clocks changing but about the biological clock changing.
  - taeric 11mo ago
    Right, and that I think is far easier to deal with than you realize. Easier if you don't try it in 1 hour jumps twice a year. But basically every animal already has to deal with the shift due to the nature of actual sunlight. And we do just fine by that. (I should add that I have also never used an alarm clock. The shift from DST has never really been difficult to manage. Only was hard when I would be awake, but not leave for work/school on time because I forgot to update the clock.)
    - AlotOfReading 11mo ago
      What time will X occur on a particular future date? E.g. meetings. What time will X occur in another time zone? What time will X occur across multiple time zones that shift at different times? What time will X occur across multiple time zones where one doesn't shift at all? E.g. meetings with people in Arizona. How long ago did X occur, across a transition? E.g. correlating Unix time to civil time. How long is X, where X is an event spanning multiple time zones that shift independently? E.g. plane flights. Does my cron job need to run intermittently every X hours, or at 24/X particular times every day, or every X hours but managed so that processing doesn't intrude into normal business hours? Personally, when I'm in the wilderness my circadian rhythm follows the sun. Up at sunrise and asleep not long after sunset. That's not how I work when I'm living in society, so I don't see why animal adaptations are particularly relevant here. On a social level, the shift causes tremendous levels of stress to people. It essentially creates a day of national jet lag, for no real benefit that I can see.
      - taeric 11mo ago
        None of those are difficult in the modern world. Computers have pretty much solved all of them. There are confusing to talk about cases. But none that are truly problematic. Consider some of the most sensitive for people. Take your medication twice a day. What do people do when they fly across the country? Most don't keep the same schedule they had back home on the medication. They just start doing it at the new place. Folks that do have "take this exactly every 12 hours" rely on a timer, not a clock. Even talking about how long ago something was is just not that important for folks in most scenarios. Consider, when people move they don't change their birth date if it would have been a different day in the new location. (That is, nobody does their birthday by GMT.) Now, about the only idea I fully reject is that we could just tell all businesses to change their opening hours so that we don't have to change the clocks. This is mind numbingly crazy to me. The entire point of changing the clocks is to get everyone to update together.

madcaptenor 11mo ago

See the maps here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-17/this-simple-great-map-shows-that-seattle-is-far-from-america-s-rainiest-city https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-17/this-simp... Most of the eastern US gets more inches of precipitation than Seattle. But there are few places (mostly in a band from eastern Ohio and West Virginia, across Upstate New York, through to northern New England) that have more days with measurable precipitation than Seattle. Someone also pulled data on the fifty largest cities: https://www.acsh.org/news/2019/01/16/how-rainy-seattle-its-not-even-top-30-major-us-cities-13733 https://www.acsh.org/news/2019/01/16/how-rainy-seattle-its-n.... Seattle is 32nd for amount of rain but 5th (behind Buffalo, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh in the band I mentioned, and also its neighbor Portland) for number of rainy days.

taeric 11mo ago
I think that is basically the map I was asking for, so kudos on that. I still think it fails to capture what it means to be a rainy day. Is about like when Seattle has a snow day. If you are from a place that actually gets snow, you'd scoff at us calling it a snow storm. I think my favorite is the few times it thunders. People would all move to windows in a sort of awe at the loud noise.
- madcaptenor 11mo ago
  Yeah, you want some threshold for amount of rain that's higher than "measurable precipitation".