Hours Minuntes and Seconds of Time - Part 2

It is official.  In the United States on the 13th March 2011, the 02:00 will also be 03:00.  So if you have things that are set to local time that don't shift instantaneously from 02:00 to 03:00 you will have to do it yourself. In the past just making your time pieces spring forward an hour was enough.

I finally finished that humoungous NIST document on time.  Whew!  They even went through the concerns of whether or not time runs either forwards or backwards.  It seems that ever since the big bang and as the Universe has expanded entropy (randomness) has increased.  In fact it is the concern that if randomness could decrease that we could have been fooled and because of relativity that time could be going backwards.  Or it could even be that time could actually pulse backwards and forwards.  Then I confront this Darwin character who tells me that the Theory of Evolution does just that, that order comes out of chaos!  That makes me very suspicious that I should not accept Evolution.  Maybe the order was there from the beginning and still is.  I don't think Darwin gave the whole thing enough thought.  But then I doubt he knew all that much about Physics.

While doing other things and not even searching for something I run across this and at first thought it was just five things that would affect your health:

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/42030025/ns/today-today_health/

How they got five when I counted only four I don't know.  But it does show the problems that will be caused and that the time is upon us to yank the clock forward an hour, lose a precious hour of sleep, and have 02:00 instantaneously and mysteriously become 03:00.  Thanks goodness I do not have to worry about two programs at the same time since there will be no TV program from 02:00 to 03:00 since that hour doesn't even exist.  But the History Channel's on-line listing for MT will still be off and will be that forever.  I have no idea how they intend to resolve the Arizona versus the rest of MT zone issue, but my solution is simple - scrap DST!  Then the History Channel may finally get it correct but only if they finally calculate the local viewing time based on which of the two feeds given in UTC time that you get.  For the Universal Sports channel it is a little simpler. They have only one feed given in ET, so just subtract one hour in CT, two in MT, and three in PT. Okay, on to how we got hours, minutes, and seconds.

My avocation was to provide filters for people to protect them from
the abuses of the Internet:

http://www.SecureMecca.com
http://SecureMecca.BlogSpot.com

I regularly pulled down and studied dozens of malware files per week.  If I keep them (zipped with encryption naturally) there is an entry like this as one of the description lines to identify what it is:

Date:   2010-10-22 14:06   (35411)

This date corresponds with a file named WrongPopCorn.pdf.  Boy do they have the name right.  It is a PDF file where the malicious Javascript is obfuscated by coding / encryption.  It is designated by AV companies as being either a Trojan.Pidief or Exploit.JS.Pdfka.cuk.  Now you know why I backed up and looked into the year calendar problem.  You can also see that business calendar that was proposed by the US Congress has a problem.  What do I do for the timing if I pull down the sample on the end of year day between December 30 and January 1st?

Business-Calendar

The other one is the leap day, but on that one we already have a problem with a birth on February 29th.  Instead of some people celebrating their 92nd birthday it is only their 23rd.  That is the up side.  The down side is that they have to wait 72 years for their 18th birth date so they have the right to vote. For me the answer is simple:

Date:   2010/2011 15:33

So there is a way out of it. Similarly, I can also handle the leap day with:

Date:   2012-(06-30)/(07-01) 02:23

I am not going to get into how to identify a file pulled down at 02:27 local time on 7 Nov 2010 and another one almost an hour later at 02:22 on the same year month, and day. Why not?  Because I use UTC time on my computers.  It is the ONLY way to fly for an IT person if they have a choice.  DST just causes way too many problems, especially if you have Linux and Microsoft Windows on the same machine.  Linux makes the internal clock time UTC and calculates your local time based on how you set your TZ variable.  Microsoft makes the internal clock in local time.  You will never get the two to ever agree.  Microsoft did it wrong just like the History channel has it wrong.  Specify it in UTC time as long as possible performing the conversion to local time at the last instant.

Several years back I watched a humorous episode of Northern Exposure where Maurice J. Minnifield purchased an ancient German clock for a huge amount of money.  Holling Vincoeur and Shelly Marie Tambo come by to see the marvelous clock only to point out that it is at least one hour out of time according to their inexpensive wrist watches that probably lose or gain no more than a few seconds at best or just a few minutes at worst every year unless the battery dies. Maurice has to put up with his clicking lemon but it does illustrate just how bad older chronographs were.

Then how did people handle this way back when?  They used the sun!  The sun came up, they got up or at least closed their shutters if they wanted to sleep more.  Most people didn't have clocks until the end of the late 19th or early 20th centuries.  Only the rich had them and for most people it was much later than the development of the first accurate mechanical clock by Huygens.

Pendulum-Clock

Actually.  most of Tennessee didn't have electrification until the mid 20th century with the Corp of Engineers TVA project which was instrumental in the making of the nuclear bomb during World War II.  The amount of energy expended in extracting the right isotope of Uranium for the bombs used more electric power than almost all other uses of electric power in the United States combined.  So if DST was meant to minimize the use of electrical power the solution is simple.  Stop making nuclear bombs!

Now here comes the first myth.  I keep reading idiots who say that Benjamin Franklin proposed DST.  He did no such thing!  He observed Parisians burning candles until late in the night, snd then closing their shutters in the morning to sleep longer.  So he humorously suggested the passing of a law that shutters should be taxed and candles rationed.  He also suggested that cannons be fired at first ight in the morning as a sort of communal alarm clock that would shift a few seconds or minutes plus seconds each day. But Franklin couldn't possbily have suggested DST because nobody had any accurate time pieces. There were no time zone standards and much of the other work that needed to be done to even consider time zones wasn't done until more than a century after his death. Franklin did some work on discovering what electricity was but it took almost 50 more years before the work of Faraday in understanding electricity and magnetism took place.  It took another 50 plus years before James Clerk Maxwell created his unifying theory of electricity and magnetism along with his famous equations. After that came the telegraph. Another 25 plus years and we have Nikola Tesla who gave us the AC current we use today.  DC is fine locally but it just can't be used any time the distance exceeds 5+ miles.

So what brought about the accurate time pieces we take for granted today?  A disaster involving the loss of many seamen by the Britsh Navy although the French also made earlier efforts:

History-Of-Longitude
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_Act_1714

John Harrison was the brilliant man who stepped up to the almost impossible task of creating a mechanical chronometer to measure the longitude:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison

Basically a mechanical chronometer or later a Cesium based chronometer are nothing more than extremely accurate time pieces.  But if you read that long NIST document you eventually understand that if you have a fixed rate of either velocity or starting velocity plus acceleration then distance traveled which is the known can be used to measure time elapsed. But it also correlates to the angular rotation of the earth where the distances aren't fixed because the distance traveled to move fifteen degrees at the equator is far more than it is near the poles.  But degrees of rotation can be used to calculate the time and given the latitude and knowledge of the mean radius of the earth distance traveled as well.

Dava Sobel wrote a book about the effort that was turned into a joint BBC and Arts and Entertainment series to dramatize the effort, comprising mainly the work that John Harrison did. Some have compared what Harrison did with an analogy of somebody coming up today and saying I have created a car that gets a thousand kilometers on a measley 4 liters of petrol.  The accuracy of his chronometers was just too good to believe.

Longitude-Book

This is all fine and well but how does that align with normal people do things?  Did Benjamin Franklin have a good watch?  I doubt it.  He probably had a clock which was not very reliable.  I doubt that they could count on them.  The lubricants they had were awful, frequently gumming up and sometimes even turning completely solid within less than one to two years. John Harrison got around that problem by using a wood named lignum vitae to reduce the friction and then invented what is called the grasshopper escapement which reduced the friction of the regulator movement almost to zero.  Harrison also found a way to fight the effects of heat and cold in a pendulum clock by creating the gridiorn pendulum which used alternating brass and iron rods to have the effects of cold and heat to cancel out due to the nature of the different properties of the two metals.

Eventually, what Harrison created spread widedly, was copied and eventually less expensive mechanical chronometers were created.  But people still used the lunar method on land to calculate the longitude even well into the 19th century.  What drove the change for the wider spread use of accurate chronometers was first the needs of seamen to find their longitude to prevent disasters.  It was further enhanced by a need for synchronizing railroads in the 19th century so that multiple locomotives could share the railroad lines and avoid collisions.  Even in the early 20th century the Trans-Siberian railway which was created consisted of just one ribbon of two rails where one train going the opposite direction of another had to go off on a siding to allow another train going the opposite direction to pass. It was critical to have accurate time with telegraph and then telephone to avoid collisions.  But finally it was the industrialization that hastened the adoption of time keepers and schedules and the abandoning of when the sun is x amount of degrees up from either east or west, please show up.  Time zones were finally created, primarily for railroads in the United States and Russia to give some standardization to time.  Time zones were not needed in England and most of western Europe which was just set as one hour later than it was in England. But time zones were needed in India and throughout the rest of the British empire, the United States, the rest of Europe, and Russia.

The needs of the navies and the railroads finally led to the creation of the GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) and standardized time zones in the late 19th Century:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich_Mean_Time

DST was first implemented during World War I as an energy saving measure.  It was dropped almost immediately.  It should be obvious that World War II was what drove the US military to adopt Zulu time (GMT) as their standard time. It finally all led up with the invention of the Cesium atomic clock to create the replacement of GMT time with what we use today, UTC time which is now the standard:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time

Actually, the UTC acronym is a French designation which seems to be lost.  I think it was Universale Time Coordinaire.  Okay, what is going on here?  At the start we have seamen dying because of inaccurate chronometers (clocks / watches) who didn't know their correct longitude.  Before they had accurate chronometers seamen had to estimate their longitude solely by dead reckoning.  If they reckoned wrong, they frequently ended up dead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Reckoning

At the end we have Maurice Minnifield finding out just how far people had progressed in creating more accurate chronometers in just a few hundred years. An inexpensive wrist watch costing less than $15 beat out his expensive multi-thousand dollar German clock that wasn't more than 250 years old.

But we also have this monster called Daylight Saving Time smashing forward an entire hour every spring and yanking it back another hour every fall.  It is worse than that.  In America there is one hour on one day in spring that no longer exists:  02:00 ... 03:00. In the fall we have one hour repeated twice: 02:00 ... 03:00. In the fall we have one hour repeated twice: 01:00 ... 02:00. Why do that? Here the brains behind this time business have worked for centuries to the point you can frequently find your longitude by just using the GPS capabilities stuffed into your cell phone (using UTC time, not local time).  But we also have these idiots in the Congress of the United States and various other legal bodies in other countries around the world that pass this insane nonsense called DST with no thought for the problems it causes just to satisfy the retailing lobby.  The biggest part of that lobbying effort that accrues the greatest benefits are the petro-chemical and sporting industies. At the very apex is the Golf industry.  We have this thrashing and destroying of the carefully crafted time by some people just so they can increase their profits up to a whopping extra 50% for the golf industry by using DST to achieve it.  Talk about the tail wagging the dog!  And to prove the point that it is bipartisan, Senators Hatch and Kennedy argued with each other non-stop all day only to join each other on the golf course at the end of the day.  I don't mind them loving golf. But I KNOW this thrashing of the time clock MUST come to an end! Tell Senator Hatch to play his extra round of golf at the time it is really at, 8:00 PM rather than 7:00 PM (for me 20:00 local time).  If they want to make it any longer just be honest and schedule congressional meetings an hour earlier from spring through fall.

Here are some extra links on time:

http://www.nist.gov/pml/div688/faq.cfm
http://www.nist.gov/pml/div688/leapseconds.cfm
http://zapatopi.net/metrictime/

With metric time we have 24 hours per day versus 10 hours per day versus 30 which seems to be rather inconsistent.  Ten is definitely not enough.  Some of the time even 24 hours is not enough and we have some rather strange time zones at various places in the world.  Thirty may be even more appropriate measuring 12 degrees of longitude rather than 15 degrees with our current 24 hour days.

The main thing to remember is that compared to DST, there is a lot of very deep thinking going into measuring hours, minutes, and seconds extending all the way into the Theory of Relativity for the large (the cosmos) on down to Quantum Mechanics for the small (the atom and sub-atomic particles).  Compared to all of this deep thinking about time the thrashing around of Daylight Saving Time would be comical if it were not for the problems it causes.  But it is quite a contrast that highly skilled technical people have made great efforts to make time measurement better and better over hundreds of years.  But now we have Daylight Saving Time that is throwing a monkey wrench into the works.

Whew!  I am glad we got this out of the way.  Next we look at the safety issues and the effects of latitude.  What this is all leading up to is to say goodbye to DST and start with voluntarily doing things earlier that takes into account things like latitude and other things.

Hour Minutes and Seconds Of Time - Part 1

The HMS in the label does not stand for either "His Majesty's Service, nor "Her Majesty's Service.  It is a short-hand for Hours, Minutes and Seconds. It has been way too long since I last posted.  I am now going to show you the reason why.  NIST has some publications.  Here is their main URL on this:

NIST Timekeeping

Here is the short PDF file for you to look at:

NIST PDf (short)

I have of course already read it.  Now here is the long one which must have taken people a year to put together.  It is 300 pages long and even goes into the quantum physics among other things:

NIST PDF (long)

I saw a humorous episode of Black Adder the other day where the king was supposedly going to have to participate in a duel at 6:00 PM.  I wish it was true but for the time given it probably wasn't.  Time that accurate really didn't take off until the end of the 19th century.  They would have said, meet at sun-down. I am going to touch on that - how time in increments first of hours, then minutes, and then seconds came about.  At least now you can look at what goes into getting the time right.  Most people have never given it much thought but electric utility companies need ways of merging two power sources with each other so that both are in sync with each other which requires accurate time-keeping.  Ships at sea and railroads were the primary things that made it necessary for us to have more accurate time.  So read these and stay tuned.  I am just going to briefly summarize those 300 pages, most of which I already knew it but there are things that I am learning.

Days of Time

Before I get started on the next section I am going to take two more blog posts on how we got to where we are at today.

Mayan Calendar and Moon Cycles

I don't know how many times I have heard the Mayan Calendar is much more accurate than the Gregorian Calendar and that it ends in the year 2012. Please define the meaning of "more accurate" to me.  If by more accurate you mean that it does a better job of keeping in sync with how many actual days there are per year then the two Mayan Calendars are woefully inadequate compared to the Gregorian Calendar.  Two?  Yes, there are two of them.  Actually one could argue that the "Long Count" means they actually have three calendars. Here they are:

Mayan Calendars

The shorter calendar is the Tzolk'in.  It consists of 13 equal periods of 20 days.  Other than it perhaps being used for crop planting or for the theories it is rather misunderstood why they picked the cycles of 20 days.  In the old world, the numbering system of science was the sexagesimal (base 60) system. It does appear likely that the Mayans were using a modified base 20 system though. Note that 13 * 20 gives us only 260 days per cycle.  The main thing of interest here is that it is not aligned with the cycles of the moon.  This is of particular note because both the Jewish and the Islamic and many other calendar systems are tied to the cycles of the moon.  It wasn't until the Julian calendar was created that the days per year were being used, albeit wrongly.  Here is a short program I wrote that shows how the Tzolkin and the Haab calendars finally align again after 73 Tzolkin years and 52 Haab years:

Tzolkin & Haab Year Synchronization

Do not panic.  Mostly what you are seeing is the output of the program itself which I merged into the comment header.  The tiny little program is down at the bottom.

Moon Cycles

The other calendar is an eye opener.  It is called the Haab which consists of eighteen periods of 20 days each with an extra non year time of five days called the Wayeb.  The fact that it also uses 20 day cycles strengthens the idea that they may have used a base 20 number system.  But note that means these years always have 365 days, not the 365.25 days of the Julian Calendar nor the 365.2425 days per year of the Gregorian Calendar.  And thus my statement that it is not the most accurate calendar system if you intend to synchronize as closely as possible to the sun from one vernal equinox to the next vernal equinox.

So what is the significance of the year 2012?  You will note that these two calendars are almost always staggered from each other. By using haab years as a baseline, they synchronize every 52 years.  For longer periods of time they use what is called the long count.  What the date in the Gregorian calendar of December 21, 2012 corresponds to is just the first day of the fourteenth b'ak'tun.  I have studied this system extensively and the first thing I can say is that this day is nothing more than that.  Their calendars don't end then and can in fact go on into perpetuity not only forwards but backwards as well. Not only that, but if there would be any adjustments made it would be handled much the same as the Gregorian.  The problem with the Gregorian is coming up with how many days there really are in a year.  If the actual measurement is only 365.24219 days per year as I have read some place, then the Gregorian length of 365.2425 days per year is is too big.  In that case we would be adding an extra day every 3225.8 years and would need to drop a day.  But if it is like this Wikipedia page on leap years indicates:

Leap Year

we are supposedly not having too much added each year but too little. Come back in 3226 years and see if a day needs to be added or dropped.  In the mean time please realize the "Leap Year" article is probably correct because all of the leap seconds so far are being added, not subtracted.  The Gregorian calendar is about as accurate as you can get in terms of how many days (360 degree rotation of the earth) there are in a year (a complete 360 degree revolution of the earth around the sun to come back to the same position from one vernal equinox to the next vernal equinox).

Okay, what does this have to do with our DST problem?  It shows that time measurement has always had anomalies. It has always been limited by the ability to measure it, and first getting away from lunar cycles and instead using the length of a solar year as expressed in days per year.  But we had to get how many days there were per year with the Julian as the first attempt at getting it right followed by the Gregorian.  Next, we will be showing how we got hours, minutes and seconds done. This isn't as easy as you think.  Galileo Galilei didn't come up with the idea of the squared rule for falling bodies very easily until he put the balls on an inclined plane and used distances covered as a way for showing that acceleration was proportional to the square of the time and a constant.  That is because he had no accurate time-piece to measure things.  But you can actually use distance traveled to measure time. So, next, hours minutes and seconds.  We didn't even have accurate hours for everybody until the end of the 19th century and accurate clocks for everybody until the 20th century.  Only sea-farers had accurate chronographs from the time John Harrsion invented them up into the 19th century.

Marine Chronometers

Railroads also needed accurate chronometers.  Oh yes, I forgot to mention that all of my operating systems have had two more time zone updates due to DST.  If DST is so simple then why do we keep having these changes?

Fateful Fall Fiasco

Reset your Clocks

Well, the day has arrived for me except for GandalfTW that I am typing this on and Sauron who is experiencing a hiatus of sorts.  At 02:00 in the United States, reset your time back an hour to repeat the 01:00 to 02:00 hour a second time in the wee hours of the 7th of November, 2010.

Sauron is taking a rest to get some new feet on him for him to keep his cool but both of them are blissfully set to UTC time for Windows, Linux and BSD.  Most of you in the United States or Canada will be repeating the hour of 01:00 to 02:00 twice, but when it comes to when and how things move in DST it is a lot more complex than that!  There is no mention of the extra hour on one of my two PBS stations. But the other one has it in a rather strange fashion (click on the picture to enlarge it):

I don't know what to make of it. It shows the hour twice, but the first one which is the standard Austin City Limits shows a start time of 12:07 AM and the second one a start time of 1:05 AM. The second on-line PBS channel schedule ignores it altogether.  I don't know if that means Astrospies will be shown twice, whether they will have a filler and it doesn't show, or the rest of the schedule is out of line in some way. Such is the fiasco of DST in the new modern age.  The Internet is one of the biggest drives of showing the weaknesses of the DST way of doing things. In simpler times with less global communications DST may have sort of worked but in the modern era the flaws of DST should be readily apparent to everybody. Here, let me look at what Comcast provides with their menu schedule.  At least they have the History schedule correct.  Until DST bites the dust and the History channel shifts their way of computing the local time based off which feed you have based in UTC time they will never get it straight! For mountain time zone users select Pacific and add one hour except in Arizona in the summer. Comcast makes it a little clearer:

12:00 ... 01:00 Rosemary and Thyme
01:00 ... 02:00 NOVA - Astrospies
01:00 ... 02:00 Antiques Roadshow
02:00 ... 03:00 Lords of the Gourd

So the program I want to record in the morning is the first 01:00 ... 02:00 that is the DST hour. On that subject I list everything in 24 hour time. Just keep in mind for two twelve hour time periods that 12:00 PM is noon and 12:00 PM is midnight.  Or is it vice-versa?  Let the Wikipedia 12 hour time experts sort that one out:

12 Hour Clock

If you ask me, in addition to eliminating this clock thrashing, everybody in the world should standardize on a 24 hour clock.  The article also points out that frequently we end up with confusion due to the time in Internet forums. That just makes a good argument for or all things involving computers, do everything in UTC 24 hour time if you can help it.  Try it!  You will like it! Do we have this all sorted out?  No, because in the southern hemisphere they were (are?) jerking the time forward while in the northern hemisphere they are falling back. But surely they have it all straightened out now don't they?

iPhone DST bug (AGAIN)!

The one I originally put in the blog was for 2010 and it has disappeared.  But when I went to find a link for it in Google I found they have the same problem again in the year 2011.  Will the problem ever disappear?  Yes if we send to DST to the scrap heap.  No if we continue trying to use such an insane system as DST!  If the DST system is so simple, then why is the most modern device we have, the iPhone, experiencing problems?  I have news for you. Apple developers are a lot smarter than the now Republican controlled United States House of Representatives is and Apple still fouled up!  But having Republicans back in control in the US Congress does not bode well for reform.  Too many of them play golf. The people in favor of this clock thrashing are the retailers and most notably the sporting retailers and the apex of those thinking DST is a good thing is the golfing industry.  I hope some of the new Republicans are like the Republican who slept in his office, showered at the congressional athletic club and used the money he saved by not having a fancy town-house to finance his son's college education. Who thought what this Republican representative was doing was a bad idea?  The speaker of the House, Tom Foley, a Democrat. What we need are more creative people that can see we must come up with a better way of doing things! So don't let up people.  We need to get this standard time only way of doing things back on track.  I am going to digress in the next post and give a time keeping 101 so you know what that standardized time is.

A Better Way

What is the better alternative?  Put the clocks back to a standard time and leave them there.  The various national legislative bodies need to pass legislation that encourages but does not mandate when they shift to doing things earlier but tells them to probably do it in two separate time shifts of 30 minutes about three to four weeks apart in the spring.  You do that by showing up to work at 08:00, then 07:30, then finally 07:00. That may get rid of the spring suicides, accidents and other health problems caused by a too rapid shift forward in doing things.  Some may whine, that won't work. You will never know whether it works or not until you try it.  Nobody has tried it yet! But why should congress mandate when these shifts forward in doing things takes place?  Florida doesn't have that much extra daylight in the summer than the winter but Minnesota does.  Let the locale determine if and when to make these time shifts. The reason Arizona said it is dumb is two-fold.  First their summers are so blistering hot that they have a mid-day shut down of sorts in summer.  They work in the morning, do a siesta during the mid-day hours when it is too hot, then work again in the late afternoon, especially when they work outside.  I should know because I used to work in Arizona.  You only work all day long in the summer if you are up in the mountains like in Flagstaff or a place like that.  Second, shifting the clock forward and then backward really is a dumb idea!  Arizonans must be blessed with more intelligence because they saw that. For Alaskans it was a stupid idea anyway. If you only sleep at night you will be getting less than 3-4 hours of sleep during the summer in most places. Hawaiians just don't benefit from DST since like Florida but even more so they have almost no difference in the number of hours in summer or winter.  If you do not believe me start Google Earth and fly to Hilo, Hawaii. The latitude is only 19 degrees, 43' 47" North.  That is amazing detail!  "The times, they are a changing."

Falling back in the Fall

Well this year to quote a lady, "an election is coming and the fox has a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry."  But more than that this insane time that comes up twice a year is now staring us straight in the face.  Here are some links on the subject of DST:

Wikipedia Daylight Saving Time
About DST Article
Moderatrix hates DST
DuncanMac's VIews on DST

Okay, lets back up for a second.  When is the mysterious day going to occur in the fall of 2010 that we have 01:00 to 02:00 hour repeated twice?  In 2010 it is going to occur on 7 November.  In spring we don't have too much of a problem with schedules.  That is because nothing is scheduled during the hour of 02:00 to 03:00.  That is because it doesn't exist.  But you better be careful in the fall.  When somebody says, record this program that is on from 01:00 to 02:00 on channel 115 we have to retort, which one, the first one or the second one? It may have been tolerable back in the days before computers and instant communications with people all the around the globe.  But now it is causing extreme problems.  We need some standardization on time again and DST must be abolished!

The failling back in the falls hasn't come a moment too soon.  For the past four weeks I have watched children trudging off to school in darkness, no doubt with some being maimed or injured or even killed because they are going to school too early.  But I have no easy answer other than to say they should have shifted to going later much sooner than now.  Why didn't they do it sooner?  Because the darn golfers in the United States Congress have saw that with global warming they can get approximately twenty more extra hours of golfing in during the month of October.  In the year 2007 they changed the shift to go back from DT to ST to be the first Sunday in November rather than the first Sunday in October.

Okay, what will happen to my computers, especially since it used to take me almost a week of hashing out what time it is due to the differences between the way Linux and Microsoft Windows handle things?  Well from now on nothing will happen.  Things will go smoothly without any problems.  That is because I have shifted my computers over to UTC time which does not change.  I advise you go read those sections in the Wikipedia article on the TZ database and Microsoft Windows.  It will clue you in that it is much more complex than just falling back an hour in the Fall and springing forward an hour in the Spring.  How bad is the problem?  I noticed no less than two TZ updates for Ubuntu Linux, one for OpenSuse Linux, and one for Microsoft Windows in the past two months.  If DST is so simple, why do I have that many updates to the TZ database to handle this insanity?  Not only that but the extra month caused all sorts of problems with more than one piece of software that had all sorts of problems with this extra DST month.

There are both downsides and upsides to having my computer and networking clocks set to UTC time.  Humorously, the only downside was to see the online schedule for one TV channel properly displayed in UTC time, not local time.  I just checked and it is still doing it.  I can see a reason for them doing it that way since my body is in the MT time zone.  If they provided a feed to Arizona, what is showing in the rest of the MT zone at 13:00 is showing at 12:00 during the Saving Time Period in Arizona.  In just a few weeks we will be back in sync again.  So how do I handle the schedule snafu?  During the Saving time period I just subtract six hours and during the regular time period I will subtract seven hours.  If I had my choice I would always just subtract seven as long as I am in the MST time zone.  But the upsides are tremendous.  No thrashing of the clock.  No problems at all. It is rock hard stable.  Let them change that TZ data all they want to.  I am now immune from it.  But I also communicate with people all over the globe.  It is much better to just stabilize on one time that is rock hard stable.  There is a reason the US miliitary and other militaries have stabilized on using UTC (Zulu) time.  Quick, which time zone is the aircraft carrier or the long range bombers in right now?  They had tons of problems before they did that and that is even without the added complexity of DST being added into the mix.  Another thing is that it throws the Internet tracking of me for a loop.  My WAN IP is correctly identified but I notice that the UTC time does throw some of them off.  Would I ever go back to a local time zone time?  NEVER!  From now on all computing and networking equipment will be UTC time all the way.

So as you can see, this is much more complex than just a simple fall an hour back in the fall and spring an hour forward in the spring. TV and other schedules get all fouled up.  Here is my tentative plan for addressing the problems I see with Daylight Saving Time (DST):

1. Safety issues, latitude problems.

2. TV Schedules.

3. Energy Savings.

4. Circadian rhythms and health issues.

5. Military and other problems where multiple time zones are involved.
    12:00 PM / 12:00 AM versus 00:00 / 12:00

Z. Simplification and beyond.

So stay tuned.  This isn't just a random beef against DST.  I am firmly committed to a fight to kill this DST monster once and for all.  To clue you in where it is headed, I am not against doing things an hour earlier during the longer daylight hour months.  But you can easily do that by just doing it an hour earlier.  It is just that when that starts and ends will be later and sooner respectively in Canada or Minnesota than it is in Alabama.  Sorry golfers, this train is coming through and that is all there is to it.  I am dead serious about seeing DST to die the death that it deserves.  It is causing infinitely more problems than any good that comes from it.  Like that Gregorian calendar that replaced the flawed Julian calendar that should in turn be replaced by the business calendar, DST needs to be abolished from off the face of the earth.

Business Calendar (proposed)

Stay tuned.

A Better Calendar Part 2

So what is wrong with this calendar that the US Congress proposed?  We have this steady progression of every seven days and all of a sudden we have eight days between one Sunday at the end of the year which just happens to be the last day of the year and the next Sunday because of that extra day.  The same holds for Saturday or any the day of the week.  From one day of the week to the next they are always seven days during the year but from one year to the next we have eight days.  And then every leap year we have an additional eight days instead of seven.

I would think they could just adjust but tradition is far more powerful than intelligence.  I can remember watching the original Around the World in Eighty Days and watching Phileas Fogg arguing with Passepartout: "I have kept  a careful record and this is the 81st day."  But they had gone around the world, always traveling east. They had crossed the International Date Line.  But it does give one pause for thought.  How does this impinge on this insane idea of every seventh day?  If we are to be literal, Phileas Fogg is correct.  Sunday for him is now one day ahead of everybody else.  So they can stick that in their date calculations of what is when and perhaps move Christmas to that end of year day that is not part of any week.  What made Christmas to be on the 25th of December and Easter when it is?  People did and they can change it if they want to.

So what does this have to do with Daylight Saving Time?  You can see there are problems when you move around the earth.  You can also see that beliefs are much stronger in opposing something that works better.  Okay, now you at least know of an alternate calendar that could be used and IMHO, should be used.  I can guarantee that it won't be used for at least another 400 years though.

A Better Calendar

Before I continue on with this madness which for people in the US except for Arizona, Alaska, and Hawaii means they have to thrash their clock back this month there is an allied topic, the calendar we use.  Here is a Wiki article on a proposed modified calendar that could be used to replace the current Gregorian calendar:

World Calendar

The only major objection I have to it is that there are four Friday the 13ths in the accursed thing.  Well, guess what?  Those same people that gave us DST in the United States Congress tweaked this design so that it was even  better and had no Friday the 13ths.  Why didn't they refuse to take no on that one and push the calendar forward instead?  The sad thing is that the URL that I had that showed what that calendar looked like seems to have disappeared.  So if somebody who reads this knows anything about it I would appreciate you adding the URL in a comment.  The calendar was created in the 1950s.  Let me do one more search to see if I can find it.  All I can come up with is this:

Calendar Reform

It seems that the US Congress wants their lovely calendar that had no Friday the 13ths, and was business oriented to never be seen again.  The main arguments against the Congress Calendar came from the various religious factions.  But those arguments apply equally against the World Calendar and the International Calendar that has thirteen months and each one has a Friday the Thirteenth. Gasp, thirteen Friday the Thirteenths every year! Given the fact that even the Eastern Orthodox and Russian Orthodox Easter is sometimes not on the same Sunday with their calendar as it is in the Gregorian I think these religious arguments are already off to a bad start because we can't even get them to correlate.  Don't get me started on the Muslims or the Jews because both of them also have a lunar calendar.  I just remembered what the tweak was and I hope this gets put into the Calendar Reform Wiki article.  Here is what it looked like:

US Congress Calendar (proposed in the 1950s)

Why did I include this blog entry?  Because it shows that in the issue of time there are a lot of beliefs and very little rational thinking is going on.  If people were thinking rationally they would dig up that Calendar system the US Congress created and ram that thing through just like they did with DST. At least then we would have a calendar system that makes since.  Or does it make sense?

There is one more thing. The Mayan Calendar is not the most accurate calendar in the world.  Not only that but it isn't just one calendar but two calendars instead.  Finding an Easter in either the Haab' or Tzolk'in would be almost impossible:

Mayan Calendars

Not only does it have two calendars but it takes a time cycle of 53 Haab' years before the Haab' and the Tzolk'in mesh again due to the difference of 260 days versus 365 days. The year 2012 is not the end of either calendar.  It is just when the two coincide again.  So like the year 2000 when some idiotic reporters didn't understand why some place in Italy shifted the year to 1972 you can rest assured there will not be some magical melt-down.  Why did they use 1972?  Because the days aligned the same as they did for the year 2000 which was the first end of century year since 1600 to have a leap day per the formual set up for the Gregorian calendar.  The idiots that wrote the original Gregorian leap year calculation in their software didn't implement it right.  They said there was a leap year if the year was evenly divisble by four (no remainder) unless it was a century year, The forgot the calculation that century years that are evenly divisible by 400 are also leap years.  Given how simple the algorithm is I am shocked they did such a bad job of implementing it.  I can understand the two digit years which could be stored in just one byte with BCD (Binary Coded Decimal) since memory was very scarce when they wrote the code.  Even the computer instructions that are being coded for posterity are getting fouled up when it comes to good accurate time.  Everybody coding for time needs to take the oppootunity to get it correct right now.  They should code for UTC (also called GMT despite the two implementations being different) time and ignore local time.  At least that way they can throw the DST nonsense out the door right now.  There is no DST for UTC time.  Isn't stability wonderful?

The next post will tidy up on this subject and then I will make one on the upcoming thrashing that will go on this month and repeats itself every year with another one ever spring. It includes what Linux distros need to do that was a choice and should be a choice once again of UTC time when you do a system install.