Timezones, Daylight savings and Astrology.

[thaiboxerken]

How does it all tie in?

[Yahweh]

Daylight savings is still a nuisance...
Astrology is still the same old crap...

:arrow:

[SteveGrenard]

Who came up with the idea for DST?

[thaiboxerken]

Originally posted by SteveGrenard
Who came up with the idea for DST?

I think it was the farmers in the USA. Instead of changing their schedule every summer, they decided it would be a good idea to change the clocks instead.

[arcticpenguin]

Originally posted by thaiboxerken

I think it was the farmers in the USA. Instead of changing their schedule every summer, they decided it would be a good idea to change the clocks instead.
Absolutely not. Farmers do not schedule their days around the clock. They will get up with the sun, or before, so the reading on the clock at that time would not matter much to them.

It says here (http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/c.html) that Ben Franklin came up with the idea:

The idea of daylight saving was first conceived by Benjamin Franklin during his sojourn as an American delegate in Paris in 1784, in an essay, "An Economical Project." Read more about Franklin's essay.

Some of Franklin's friends, inventors of the oil lamp, were so taken by the scheme that they continued corresponding with Franklin even after he returned to America.

The idea was first advocated seriously by a London builder, William Willett (1857-1915), in the pamphlet "Waste of Daylight" (1907) that proposed advancing clocks 20 minutes on each of four Sundays in April, and retarding them by the same amount on four Sundays in September.
...
The bill was drafted in 1909 and introduced in Parliament several times, but it met with ridicule and opposition, especially from farming interests.
...

[Ladewig]

The idea of daylight saving was first conceived by Benjamin Franklin during his sojourn as an American delegate in...


Hallelujah! At last, someone spelled it correctly. There is only one "s" in the phrase "daylight saving time."

[Bikewer]

I have no recall of the origins, but what you usually hear in this area, when someone wants to drop it, is howls of protest from parents who don't want thier kids to go to school in the dark.

[Keneke]

Originally posted by Bikewer
I have no recall of the origins, but what you usually hear in this area, when someone wants to drop it, is howls of protest from parents who don't want thier kids to go to school in the dark.

Which is ridiculous, because Daylight Saving Time occurs from Spring to Fall. What we just came back to is regular time. The kids would not be in the dark if we went back to year-round normal time. (I'm assuming you mean the morning, correct?)

[nick]

Most US school districts could address the issue of going to school in the dark (to the extent that not that many kids walk or bike to school these days, anyway) by having class start a bit later. The average teenager doesn't get enough sleep because his/her "sleep-time" chemicals don't kick in until 1030-1100 or later, so getting up for 0700 starts is just dumb.

The other thing wrong with DST is that for every hour gained at the start of the day, one is lost at the end. Studies have shown that people drive better in the morning than the evening, and it would be better to have more "darkness" miles done early in the day rather than later.

Most people like the "fall back" because you get an extra hour in bed on the Sunday. However, when my kids were small, I greatly preferred "spring forward". Why ? Well, small kids get up at 0600 anyway, only when they do it on the last Sunday in October the clock reads 0500 !!

[Psi Baba]

What I want to know is why, in this, the 21s Century, with all the rapidly advancing technology, we still don't have DIGITAL CLOCKS THAT YOU CAN TURN BACKWARDS!!! :mad: I mean, come on, it can't be that difficult.

[Zep]

DST is REAL BAD because, as every farmer knows, the chickens don't know when to lay their eggs and the extra sunlight fades the curtains.

:)

[sophia8]

DST started in Europe during WW1, as an emergency measure to get more work out of people; America adopted it in WW2. There's an article on DST's orgins here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#Origin)
Personally, I think there's no need for it these days. The usual excuse for keeping it here in the UK (or even adopting it all year round) is some bleating about how our businesses have to keep in step with European working hours - which is bull in these days of mobile electronic communication. Anyway, if its so vital to a company to have their workers be at their desks at the same time as their European counterparts why don't they simply shift their workers' hours to suit?
As to its relevance to astrology, astrologers consider Summer Time to be a damm nusiance. When an astrological birth chart is calculated, the LMT (Local Mean Time, which is the time that's showing on the nearest clock) of the birth is converted to UT (Universal Time, which is only about a second's difference from GMT). Having to find out whether the LMT is also local Summer Time (there are huge variations across the world) is just more complication than really needed.

[Goshawk]

My understanding is that astrologers, when casting horoscopes, go by "local time" for the person whose horoscope they're casting, whether it happens to be Daylight Savings Time, or a different time zone from the astrologer's time zone, or whatever.

So DST and different time zones aren't really an issue.

Here's a time zone conversion utility for astrologers.
http://www.zodiac-x-files.com/do-timezone.htm

[sophia8]

Originally posted by Goshawk
My understanding is that astrologers, when casting horoscopes, go by "local time" for the person whose horoscope they're casting, whether it happens to be Daylight Savings Time, or a different time zone from the astrologer's time zone, or whatever.
So DST and different time zones aren't really an issue.
That's what I explained. Astrological software nowadays include all the TZ and DST stuff so that charts can be calculated automatically, which is a help. But DSTs sometimes change, and there are times when a chart can't be calculated with a computer. So doing away with DST would help.