Foiled! I’m in New Zealand at present and it was still yesterday even here when you posted. WST = UTC+13, NZST = UTC+12, and New Zealand doesn’t move to NZDT (UTC+13) until this Sunday at 2am—unless they choose to scrap daylight savings time with even less notice than Samoa.
That amount of letters, numbers and date math is thankfully illegal this early in my time zone.
But speaking of the anti-meridian, if one were at a pole, how is the date determined? Is tomorrow always a few steps away? Is there a non-calendar measure of days that applies to the whole planet at the same time? Is the number of days best described as the distance of the Earth from an arbitrary and invisible part of space representing New Years? Is that part of space best described by the “25,772-year axial precession of the earth?” [0]
Because of the Amundsen-Scott base at the South Pole, and how it is supplied, local time at the South Pole is New Zealand time. The North Pole has no local time since there's no human presence there.
Air traffic generally uses UTC for all purposes, and if there's no clear local time, it's highly likely that UTC will be chosen. Wikipedia's page on Air France 447 (which crashed in the Atlantic Ocean on route from Brazil to France) exclusively uses UTC for its crash timeline notes, while its page on MH17 uses local (Ukraine) of its shootdown and for MH370 uses Malaysian Time for its timeline.
Given that Alert is the northernmost continuous human settlement, I'd imagine that any search-and-rescue effort for an extreme polar crash would be coordinated out of there. Alert's timezone is (US/Canada) Eastern Time.
However, this is a trick question. To get an extreme polar flight, you're looking at something like LA-Dubai. No one on that flight would be bringing enough winter clothing to survive a crash at the North Pole, and so everyone would be dead of frostbite or hypothermia if not killed by the impact itself, and thus there are no survivors.
It was not long ago that a 747 crossing the pole had all four engines die at the same moment. After losing tens of thousands of feet of altitude, they got the engines started again.
Rolls Royce (or was it GE?) figured out what exact combination of intake speed, pressure, humidity, temperature, and history caused the failure, and prevented it on subsequent flights. It had been considered (!), but they thought it would never be encountered on any real flight. The engines restarted because, at lower altitude, conditions were different enough.
The pilots found the event distressing. It is possible most passengers didn't notice.
If you’re not familiar with it, I was riffing on a popular riddle: “if a plane crashes precisely on the border of two countries, where do you bury the survivors?”
It was first brought in in Port Arthur, Ontario, 48 degrees north. It sort of works in London, 51 degrees. So around there I guess though I still don't like it much as a Londoner.
I live at 44 degrees and DST during summers does make evenings after work more enjoyable but if the same UTC offset was held through winter, I'd be waking kids to school in pitch dark and the extra afternoon sunlight hour will be during work days anyway.
The reason people like DST nowadays is quite different from the alleged reasons it has been set up. All people I asked claim that it's all about making the best use of their free time (and few think about the problem of dark mornings on the winter and thus many jump to the conclusion that DST should be abolished but by keeping the summer time of course)
Yeah I'm a bit in the all year DST crowd. I'd rather have sun at 4pm than at 8am in the winter as in the morning I'd generally either be snoozing or commuting by something motorized where the dark doesn't matter much.
Several Pacific island nations adopted DST so they could be the first into the year 2000 for tourist purposes. As a result, some countries are only in DST for a month or two out of the year.
Are you anti winter time or anti summer time though? I am anti the clocks going back in winter and making it even darker in the evenings, but some people want to scrap summer time so the evenings are darker all year round!
Others can fight about what we call “5pm”, but for the love of everything holy, just stop moving the clocks. I’ll happily ally with whichever side (“anti-winter” or “anti-summer”) that appears most likely to deliver a political victory that ends the madness.
The biologically optimal time moves around. People wake near sunrise. DST keeps sunrise at a more consistent time at the expense of moving sunset around.
I found it surprisingly difficult to find data. Not just data for or data against, but any data at all. What little I found organized by month seems to accurately show the percentage of the month typically on vacation (so people sleep later on average in August than September, or they sleep a lot later in Dec than in Oct due to holidays, at least in the north hemisphere).
I theorized that regardless of DST people would wake up later from June thru Nov (DST starts in Nov where I live). Unfortunately the graph shows the opposite trend of people tending to wake up on average almost 4 minutes earlier in Oct than in Sept. Or in spring our DST ends in March, so I expected people to wake up earlier in May than in April, but its the other way around by five minutes.
I'd theorize if required wake up times strictly followed solar elevation, then something like a graph of car accidents vs time of day would vary greatly by month, but it doesn't seem to in what little data I could find. "Most dangerous time to drive" graphs seem to imply evening rush hour is a little more than twice as dangerous as morning rush hour so that would seem to imply morning wakefullness problems are statistically insignificant.
(Edited to note: I'm not insisting you're wrong, but I am insisting I can't find much of any data on the topic, maybe you are right but nobody knows for certain...)
If school times are going to shuffle around, then ther parents' schedules will also shuffle around. Then we have to shuffle schedules for a big chunk of economy every 6 months. How can we optimize that process? Oh wait, let's just move the time around. Aha - now everyone is synchronized automatically.
The point I was trying to make is that choosing an optimum should be centered around the education of the world's children. Standard business hours are really a case of "well, we've always done it this way so why should we change," rather than "this the best thing for the everyone involved."
I think we are moving towards that somewhat, with companies becoming more flexible with working hours/locations in the past year and a half.
According to timeanddate.com, the latest sunrise in Durness (NW Scotland, on the mainland) is at 09:09, at the end of December, but "civil twilight" is then at 08:16, so if school starts at 09:00 a lot of people can presumably travel to school with at least some natural light. On the other hand, if they were using UTC+1 it would be civil twilight from 09:16 and sunrise at 10:09, which would be sort of horrible, surely, because then you really would be travelling at night?
The shortest day in Durness lasts 6 hours 18 minutes. In England typical school hours are 09:00-15:00. If those are the school hours in Scotland, and you're dealing with not much more than 6 hours of sunlight in the winter, then I would have thought that a good time for local noon would be around 12:00 rather than around 13:00.
So I hope that a lot of Scots will join me in asking for UTC+0 all year rather than UTC+1 all year!
For all of you who work in tech jobs with somewhat flexible hours, I'll let you in on a secret: There's nothing stopping you from doing that now. I banished the time change from my life and get up at the same physiological time all year. Half the year I do 8 to 4 and the other half I do 9 to 5. It's wonderful and I implore you all to try it!
My preference is that we just stay on standard time permanently -- when it's noon, the sun should be at (or near, given time zones) the highest point it's going to get that day.
But I think getting rid of the time change is a bigger deal, and I'll accept daylight savings time as the permanent one if that will help us to more quickly end the time change.
Gotta keep the evening lighter, especially now more people aren't traveling early mornings as much - which I always found a weird argument, not like you need the sunlight to be able to get somewhere. Most people (I would bet) want to finish work and be able to do things after.
At my latitude (northern part of the US), the changing clock doesn't affect that. It only affects whether they'll be traveling in the dark in the morning or evening. And, during the depths of winter, they'll be traveling in the dark both ways in any case.
As someone who grew up in Michigan the "both ways" claim seemed odd and upon checking unless "nothern part of the US" includes Alaska/the arctic circle (which seems a bit unfair) that doesn't seem true.
The shortest day for the absolute northernmost point in the continental US has sunrise just before 8:00 am and sunset just after 4:30 pm. With most schools starting at 7:30 and ending at 2:30 it works out for one way adjustment or not. I remember trying to get kids in extracurriculars heading home by sunset was actually a goal of scheduling but obviously that's not always possible particularly during in season due to the extra travel time prior to the game.
My basic take is that I'm mostly in the keep standard time ("winter time" in your parlance) camp. I want the sun up earlier to be able to run/bike in the morning, and I also like noon being somewhat close to where the sun crosses the meridian.
What I think really makes the most sense is just global time - UTC everywhere. Yes, I've seen the args against it and I think it would all be a lot more adaptable.
Either way, just stop it with moving the clocks. Not only is it a major PITA for everyone, studies have shown that it actually causes increases in road and work accidents. And, whatever rationale for energy savings has now been reversed, since air conditioning drives energy use far more than lighting. Just Stop It.
Note on the origin, from what I've read, one of the most likely origins is Ben Franklin's joke about the French, that they'd change the time system laws to save candle wax. I haven't read anything that substantially proves or refutes that, and I think we've honored Ben's joke enough already.
> What I think really makes the most sense is just global time - UTC everywhere. Yes, I've seen the args against it and I think it would all be a lot more adaptable.
So more than half of the planet has "midnight" (i.e. the change of the calendar date because it's 00:00 UTC) happening during waking hours and each solar day is being split into two calendar days? No thank you.
Like the sibling comment, I'm against moving clocks around. I used to ease my way into it by not changing clocks until keeping track of old time and new time got to be a hassle. Now-a-days my org does DR activation a few days before and reactivates when the time changes so I'm kind of resetting sleep that Sunday anyway.
As a South Australian I like that both our times are offensive so we can just split the difference and finally get an on the hour timezone like everywhere should be.
Anywhere else and I'm pro summer time all the time.
Anti DST for me. To the point that I'd rather just keep jumping back and forth rather than go permanent DST. Waking up and living your first hour in darkness ain't healthy.
Surely schedules would adjust, right? In northern latitudes I commonly see different summer hours for shops for instance, it's about time middle latitudes adopt this simple strategy instead of abrupt time changes.
Adjusting schedules is exactly what switching clocks around does. For example, you can't adjust school schedules and keep kids from walking to school in the dark without also changing work and daycare schedules, which means coffee shops have to change schedule, etc.
Switching clocks changes the schedule only by one hour, in a one-size-fits-all fashion. Even at 30deg north, summer and winter sunrises are multiple hours apart. This is why summer and winter schedules for businesses are multiple hours apart in far northern areas. Somehow enough coordination is managed organically.
I share your position on DST, but wouldn’t treat tropical nations as recommended guidance on DST issues in non-tropical parts of the world. There’s less variance (read: not zero, just substantially less) in their daytime hours than there is in ours.
Once a friend in China asked me about the time difference. She was highly amused when I followed up the response (15-16 hours) with the comment 中国就是美国的未来 ["China is the future of America"].
China, which spans 5 hours of "natural time" all operates on Beijing time. In Xinjiang it is dark very late into the morning, and light often well into the wee hours. That is the least of their problems just now.
Well, no, the morning begins around sunrise just like everywhere else. For example, today morning in Ürümqi began around 8 am. In contrast, morning in Beijing began around 6 am.
But this is a joke about the international date line, not a comment on whether you can redefine the difference between night and day by adjusting what your clock says.
https://time.is/Samoa