daylight

If I'm going to spend most of my daylight around people, I want to enjoy it. I generally like people, so this one isn't too hard for me.

I'd be happy if daylight savings were gone -- that's much more cost than it's worth. But even if it were possible to switch everyone to UTC, it'd be awful.

The printed page only achieves this level of high-contrast when you're in broad daylight, like on the beach. And of course, most people wear sunglasses in that case, because it's too much.

So we're talking 50-100 square miles to create the output of a GW power plant for say 8 hours of daylight. Figure a 200 square mile plant to withdraw 1 GW worth of fuel continuously.

It is as clear as daylight if you actually read the documents and not a bunch of pro-government rants on hacker news.

I often went out expecting to reminisce under the star-laden sky, only to find out it's broad daylight out.

Letting the daylight in: reviewing the reviewers and other ways to maximize transparency in science. Front.

Or introducing/abolishing/moving around daylight savings time. Or "super daylight savings time" with a 2 hour offset.

This effect washes out in daylight, or in a place with normal background light. Or if a light source interferes with the delicate balancing act responsible for the synchronization -- like the headlights on a passing car.

And a fun fact: it even calculates it correctly across a daylight savings time change. I noticed that when the clocks went back; instead of just subtracting the times, my Android phone accounted for the change and added the hour that I was getting back.

Out of all the possible ways of dividing up my time, spending all daylight hours indoors writing code is perhaps the worst I can imagine. I know I don't have all the answers, but I think that after a decade of work, I'm starting to know what questions to ask.

One way this is put to the test is by letting people relax in a comfortable reclining chair in a quiet, dark room during daylight working hours. Many people fall asleep in this condition, signaling that they are sleep-deprived, even if they have no regular habit of taking a nap in the daytime.

It is the kind of place where it is not uncommon to be knifed/hacked/soundly beaten in a public place in broad daylight for being on the wrong end of the political spectrum or even just for being bothersome. It was eye opening for the young and somewhat naive me that very very few people were willing to interfere in this.

This mindset, along with the police behavior that motivates it, will eventually turn the US into a mind-your-own-business country, where crimes can happen in broad daylight and people get in trouble while passersby do nothing. We've seen a similar culture in action in news stories from China.

One real problem with daylight savings is that it goes the wrong way. The idea was that in the winter there would be fewer hours with the sun up, and it made sense to put those hours in a more useful part of the day. When daylight savings was introduced, that "more useful part of the day" was earlier in the day. That doesn't hold today, though - as TFA says, most people work indoors under artificial lighting, and shifting daylight hours earlier into the day just means they're wasted while we're behind desks. What we really need is more daylight in the evening, so we can make productive use of our leisure time playing catch with our kids, practicing with the football club, drinking beer on the porch etc. Still, killing daylight savings would probably be better than "reverse daylight savings", and more politically feasible.