October 31, 2004

  • What did you do with the DST ‘extra hour’ last night? I sat wondering what to do with an ‘extra’ hour.


     


    Actually, I wish the powers-that-pretend wouldn’t fuck with the time. ‘Savings’ time,‘leap days’, ‘leap seconds’. We’d lead more natural lives but letting it all slide. Learn to live by the cosmic clock instead of imposing an order that constantly requires mechanical adjustments.

    Face it: withouttime-keeping, days still occur. Today, tomorrow,…the day beyond. What we lose are ‘weekends’ and days with repetitive names. So what? “Ah” you say, “But what about birthdays? Paydays? Holidays?Periodic health checks? The precise timing of rituals?”


     


    Well...yes, okay. Time is an invention and we mostly live by it. But inventions can be improved. Did you know that there was no notion of ‘time zones’ before 1883? They were invented for the benefit of the train industry in scheduling trains. Finally, trains could take passengers from one location to another so ‘quickly’ that prevailing local astronomical times became confusing. But that was the age of analog, spring-wound clocks that couldn’t possibly be ‘programmed’ to be self-adjusting. Clocks can now be synched atomically and geo-spatially.


     


    So what I’d like to see is time that graduates around the world not in ‘zones’ but by inches. Flying from Ohio to California and having to set my watch “back” 3 hours is ridiculous. Surely, given modern technology, we could invent ‘smart clocks’ that would adjust time by seconds of increments based on our inch-by-inch geospatial repositioning?


     


    And Daylight Savings Time? It’s been around for only about a century and has been mainly used in support of war efforts!


     


    In 1918, in order to conserve resources for the war effort, Congress placed the country on Daylight Saving Time for the remainder of WW I. It was observed for seven months in 1918 and 1919. The law, however, proved so unpopular (mostly because people rose earlier and went to bed earlier than we do today) that the law was later repealed.


    When the country went to war again, Congress reinstated Daylight Saving Time on February 2, 1942. Time in the U.S. was advanced one hour to save energy. It remained advanced one hour forward year- round until September 30, 1945.


    From 1945 to 1966, there was no federal law about Daylight Saving Time. So, states and localities were free to observe Daylight Saving Time or not.


    -History of Daylight Savings Time


    The Uniform Time Act of 1966 (15 U.S. Code Section 260a) created Daylight Saving Time to begin on the last Sunday of April and to end on the last Sunday of October.Do we need a ‘Uniform’ DST because the country envisions always being at war?


     


    Time as the expositor of our timelines, our lives, is sacred.Quit legislating it. Quit chopping it into ‘zones’. Quit mechanically adjusting it. Let it flow. And find better ways with advanced technologies to track it as a hallowed cosmological process.


     


    Yes Hallowed. Happy Eve.



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