Daylight Savings Time Is So Bad, It's Messing With Our View of the Cosmos (gizmodo.com) 61
An anonymous reader shares a report: In a preprint titled "Can LIGO Detect Daylight Savings Time?," Reed Essick, former LIGO member and now a physicist at the University of Toronto, gives a simple answer to the paper's title: "Yes, it can." The paper, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, was recently uploaded to arXiv. That might seem like an odd connection. It's true that observational astronomy must contend with noise from light pollution, satellites, and communication signals. But these are tangible sources of noise that scientists can sink their teeth into, whereas daylight savings time is considerably more nebulous and abstract as a potential problem.
To be clear, and as the paper points out, daylight savings time does not influence actual signals from merging black holes billions of light-years away -- which, as far as we know, don't operate on daylight savings time. The "detection" here refers to the "non-trivial" changes in human activity having to do with the researchers involved in this kind of work, among other work- and process-related factors tied to the sudden shift in time. The presence of individuals -- whether through operational workflows or even their physical activity at the observatories -- has a measurable impact on the data collected by LIGO and its sister institutions, Virgo in Italy and KAGRA in Japan, the new paper argues.
To see why this might be the case, consider again the definition of gravitational waves: ripples in space-time. A very broad interpretation of this definition implies that any object in space-time affected by gravity can cause ripples, like a researcher opening a door or the rumble of a car moving across the LIGO parking lot. Of course, these ripples are so tiny and insignificant that LIGO doesn't register them as gravitational waves. But continued exposure to various seismic and human vibrations does have some effect on the detector -- which, again, engineers and physicists have attempted to account for. What they forgot to consider, however, were the irregular shifts in daily activity as researchers moved back and forth from daylight savings time. The bi-annual time adjustment shifted LIGO's expected sensitivity pattern by roughly 75 minutes, the paper noted. Weekends, and even the time of day, also influenced the integrity of the collected data, but these factors had been raised by the community in the past.
To be clear, and as the paper points out, daylight savings time does not influence actual signals from merging black holes billions of light-years away -- which, as far as we know, don't operate on daylight savings time. The "detection" here refers to the "non-trivial" changes in human activity having to do with the researchers involved in this kind of work, among other work- and process-related factors tied to the sudden shift in time. The presence of individuals -- whether through operational workflows or even their physical activity at the observatories -- has a measurable impact on the data collected by LIGO and its sister institutions, Virgo in Italy and KAGRA in Japan, the new paper argues.
To see why this might be the case, consider again the definition of gravitational waves: ripples in space-time. A very broad interpretation of this definition implies that any object in space-time affected by gravity can cause ripples, like a researcher opening a door or the rumble of a car moving across the LIGO parking lot. Of course, these ripples are so tiny and insignificant that LIGO doesn't register them as gravitational waves. But continued exposure to various seismic and human vibrations does have some effect on the detector -- which, again, engineers and physicists have attempted to account for. What they forgot to consider, however, were the irregular shifts in daily activity as researchers moved back and forth from daylight savings time. The bi-annual time adjustment shifted LIGO's expected sensitivity pattern by roughly 75 minutes, the paper noted. Weekends, and even the time of day, also influenced the integrity of the collected data, but these factors had been raised by the community in the past.
Yeah but it's good for brick and mortar retail (Score:1)
Basically adding an extra hour of daylight increases retail sales. So every time there's any serious attempt to eliminate daylight savings for a raft of good reasons there's a huge push from local retail outlets to keep it.
Usually they buy a bunch of advertisements talking about your kids walking to school in the dark. Think of the children always works after all
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Make all the clocks world wide set to UTC.
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So what if it's pitch black outside at noon? You'll adjust!
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From my region, I might start work at 0200, take a lunch break at 0530, leave work at 1000. Not too hard to work out.
It does mean stores might have to have different signage depending on longitude. But that doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me.
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Notions of "noon" is a relic of a preindustrial lifestyle.
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Make all the clocks world wide set to UTC.
As a Brit that sounds just fine to me. Why not decimalise time while we're at it? [swatch.com] But let's leave the Russians [wikipedia.org] out of it this time.
Lost me at the second word... (Score:5, Informative)
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That's good. Its nice to weed the grammar nazis out early since people want to debate the subject not the spelling. See you on the next article *waves*
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You know, since we're slinging insults...
Not Bad (Score:5, Interesting)
I wish the media would stop trying to insert their own subjective political biases into scientific stories where they do not belong. This should be a story about how incredibly sensitive LIGO is that it can detect when we all wake up and drive to work, it's not the place for a supposedly objective "journalist" to grind their axe about daylight savings time.
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The "bad" part is related to the fact that something periodically changes that is hard to account for. Also the relative "badness" of something is related to its utility vs cost. If I sold you a 1080p TV for $5000 right now you'd say it was a bad deal. If I sold it to you for $50 it would be a good deal. The device is the same. The utility is the same. The cost is different.
In this case the cost is the same: you need to compensate. But the utility is vastly different: People need to travel from Geneva to Pa
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People need to travel from Geneva to Paris. People don't need to fuck around with clocks arbitrarily twice a year.
People do not _need_ to do either. They want to do both. You may not want to change the clocks and that's fine but that's a personal preference and has literally nothing to do with the story. It is appallingly bad journalism to use a story you are writing as a vehicle to air your personal views. As for 'bad' the 'cost' in this case is almost certianly nothing: the algorithm that identifies and filters the noise from traffic will simply identify an filter the noise an hour later. Indeed, it is potentially a
It's that time of the year (Score:5, Insightful)
The article seems to be a dumb-as-a-rock attempt to cash in on the semi-annual time change bitch fest. The actual paper is about LIGO's sensitivity varying over time. That's pretty straightforward: when there's more noise-causing human activity going on around the detectors they're less sensitive. Noise-causing human activity has "clear differences between weekends and weekdays, between day and night (at the sites), and even between daylight-savings and standard time."
That is the point (Score:4, Informative)
On the other hand... (Score:4, Interesting)
If human activity was on a fixed time, that point in time could never be visible to astronomers, at least not unless LIGO was rebuilt on the moon. This doesn't necessarily offer benefits, but it would be sensible if this was a possibility that was considered.
True, it means we can't use gravitational triangulation, but the detector is nothing like close enough to being sensitive enough to be useful there.
Either way, between radio astronomy, optical astronony, and gravitational astronomy now being largely defunct on Earth due to humans messing things up, we really need detectors on the moon or on Mars before we can do anything significantly beyond what we've already done. Space telescopes are just too small and although you could precisely measure 3D positions with sufficient precision to do interferometry, it would not be easy.
Basically, each space telescope would need to measure acceleration with incredible sensitivity and time with incredible precision, record over a very long time, then have a means of collecting the data on physical media and bring it back to Earth for combining with the other recordings. Real-time interferometry wouldn't be possible.
You're much much better off building your telescopes on the surface of a solid planetary mass like the moon or Mars.
JWST (Score:2)
Of all of the reasons to complain about daylight saving this is not a good one.
TBH (Score:2)
I have always considered myself anti-DST, but with these sensationalist headlines as of late I think I may be on the other side now.
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Re: TBH (Score:2)
I just wouldnâ(TM)t change the clocks to accomplish this. That seems like a solution designed for a role when timepieces were rarer and less precise anyway. Iâ(TM)d just say âoesunâ(TM)s getting up later, now school bumps an hour laterâ as makes sense locally, or whatever is appropriate, without adjusting the actual clocks and then expecting some things to counterscale and most things to not. Mid-day doesnâ(TM)t have to be 12:00 PM everywhere and frankly it mostly isnâ(
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When you live somewhere they don't do the semi-annual DST dance people are equally productive, and generally just adapt to the change in length of day the same as humans have for around a million years. The original plan for DST was to get an extra hour of work out of factory workers before the adoption of incandescent lighting, now that we have lights everywhere it serves no purpose at all.
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Interesting idea, what latitude was this? So schools, offices. factories, shops, restaurants, pubs, public transport, doctors, museums, galleries, and so on all publish schedules and timetables that are based not just on day of week (eg Sunday 9am–5pm) but also season or month of year (eg June Sunday 7:30am–3:30pm)? Or it’s just a few people getting out of bed at different time of day when they feel like it, and the rest of society remains coordinated and largely synchronised?
In London
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In Hong Kong, we get seasonal school hours and timetables, where each school publish their own timetable and decide their own day of switching. Horse racing (gambling) stop at the hottest days of the summer. Otherwise, no change of timetable for other facilities.
Moving the clock instead of proper timetable shift always sounds dumb to me. Clock shifting may look like a clever trick in the pre-globalization era, when everything happened locally. But nowadays it is just an invitation of trouble. The clock c
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Apart from the old clock on the oven, everything is automatic for most people. Conversion from UTC to local is handled by virtually every electronic device with a clock. Each school, work or shop changing schedule sounds like a major faff, worse than the oft-quoted inconvenience of summer time.
To be honest, it is not surprising that the advantages of summer time are not readily apparent to a Hong Kong resident. The problem it solves does not exist in Hong Kong, being only 21N and having virtually constant
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Holy shit dude. I just looked it up. Sunrise and sunset times in Hong Kong only vary by just over an hour throughout the entire year?! Try London where they each vary by 4.5 hours, and total daylight varies by nearly nine hours, then get back to us.
Maybe people that live in the tropics should be automatically disqualified from having an opinion on summer time clock changes, unless they do the most basic research.
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Umm, what?
I’m genuinely confused how everyone can be so confused by this stuff. We literally have the GMT Greenwich meantime meridian line running through the city. I work in a company operating on four continents across a dozen locations, and schedule meetings accordingly.
That is quite separate from wanting an extra hour of sunlight in summer at 9pm at the pub, restaurant, park, etc rather than at 3am while most people (including myself) are usually asleep.
Do you people ever leave your basement g
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iceland doesn't mess with the clock. Saskatchewan and Yukon in Canada don't mess with the clock. Russia and Belarus don't mess with the clock. Argentine doesn't mess with the clock. Some of them are further away from equator than you.
Please put the discussion onto summer/winter office hour vs summer/winter clock time. Put down your strawman. My standpoint is if your geolocation requires a shift of timetable, do it properly. Let clock time stay continuous and international communication reliable.
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Anywhere factories were lit by ambient light, so London, Hamburg,Detroit, New York, Bergen Glasgow, etc. Most people, including factory workers, got up when the sun came up and went to bed when it went down, only rich people could afford to burn candles until all hours every day. People see Hollyweird movies and think that's how life was in the past. Here's a hint: when you see the princess walking down a hallway lit with torches in sconces every few feet that's utter bullshit, a torch last an hour or on
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When you live somewhere they don't do the semi-annual DST dance people are equally productive, and generally just adapt to the change in length of day the same as humans have for around a million years.
So you weren’t talk
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"Somewhere" includes where most of the world's population resides, from as far south as Argentina through India and China and north to Russia. Moscow at 55 degrees north and Yakutsk at 62 degrees don't feel the need to change the hour, nor does the province of Yukon in Canada which stretches as far north as 64 degrees.
DST was invented because factories were lit by ambient light until the turn of the 20th century, since then any "advantages" have been in the heads of its advocates.
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Scared of the dark? That's the only thing I can figure about why an extra hour of evening light is somehow important. Doesn't bother me a bit, I go walk the dog at 11:00 pm sometimes, and there aren't any street lights where I live.
If people in the Yukon or frelling Svalbard survive without DST then I think you probably can.
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You know your views aren’t normal, right? Like, someone has told you, right? Genuine question.
It’s not a matter of survival, it’s a matter of betterment. Yes, we could SURVIVE with an extra hour of sunlight arbitrarily given to street cleaners at 3am at the behest of some autists on the Internet that do not understand or appreciate the real world ramifications of time zones.
But we can and do THRIVE with an extra hour in the evening when the vast proportion of normal people in society c
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BHST? (Score:1)
So, you're saying there is a chance?
Use a Control (Score:1)
Daylight savings is superior to standard time (Score:2)
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During winter (as per your example) no change occurs and sunlight is symmetrical on solar noon (at centre of timezone). In that case, your complaint is about nature rather than DST.
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Good point. My example was bad.
London has latest sunset time of 9:21pm at summer solstice, with sunrise of 4:42am. Without BST it would be 8:21pm and sunrise of 3:42am.
For the lighter six months, countless sunlight hours would be mostly lost between 4am and 6am, benefitting few people, and subjecting the majority to an extra hour of darkness in the evening.
Re: Daylight savings is superior to standard time (Score:2)
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I'm opposite! What depresses me is waking up still in the dark. I enjoy the switch back to winter time, which gives me sunlight when I need it: early morning.
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But (Score:1)
Can it detect me taking a dump after having a few bean burritos from Taco Bell? I mean the toilet seat sure as hell can. It drops the lid and flushes itself as soon as I walk into the bathroom.
I understand Big Oil and Big Pharma (Score:2)
But no one has yet to explain to me Big Hour.
What a nonsense! (Score:2)
For everyone to chisel it in marble: Just because you can detect it does not mean it is bad.
Wild idea. (Score:2)
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Dear msmash... (Score:2)
It would have been a kindness to, in your summary, define the acronym 'LIGO'. It's a good practice to define acronyms so that the audience can be informed and understand the text.
Sincerely,
One of so many /. users who appreciate effective communications, and put their name on their opinions despite the risk of specious insults and attacks.