Saving Time A Tough Sell
Everett Taylor
By EVERETT TAYLOR
Time changes everything, but no matter how hard people might try, nobody has ever been able to change the course of time.
People may talk about "killing time," "buying time" or "saving time," and efforts in that regard could create the impression of being legitimate, but they really don't alter time at all.
Some pretty smart folks, a long time ago, figured out how to measure time in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks and years, and as you grow older it is amazing how all of those things mount up.
Most people living today have even witnessed the passing of a century. It might seem like only yesterday, but it has been more than seven years now as time is measured.
Even though it is an expression heard on occasion, it has never been verified that anyone has ever managed to make "time stand still," although in sports there is such a thing as "time out." In football and basketball they even "put time back on the clock," occasionally, but the clock involved is just the game timepiece and it doesn't have any impact at all on real time.
The idea of saving time is one a lot of people seem to think they can really make happen. Especially politicians, although they might be better at "wasting time," something they often appear to manage quite well.
Daylight-saving time is an example of the political effort to tinker with time. This plan is utilized during the period of the year when there is the most daylight because of the position of the sun.
It doesn't involve being able to actually put daylight into some kind of savings vault to be tapped into on demand, but just the rotation of the 24-hour clock that measures the time in a single day forward one hour to encourage getting up an hour earlier in the morning.
The idea behind DST is that moving the clocks forward an hour creates an extra hour of daylight in the afternoon. Of course, the same thing could be accomplished by simply getting up an hour earlier and staying with standard time if everybody would just agree to that.
Perhaps there could be a claim of saving time by the switch since one hour is cut off the day that DST begins and in theory perhaps is "put away" to be restored on the day of the switch back to standard time.
This subject is timely because the 2007 date to switch back is close. But if you guessed it is today, the last Sunday in October as it has been for years, your timing is off. Don't feel too bad, because even some calendar makers who might have printed their 2007 versions early designated Oct. 28 as the day.
A few months ago, Congress decided adding a few more weeks of DST would help save energy, a point that has been debated. But they went ahead and made a change anyway.
So this year instead of starting on the first Sunday in April, DST began the second Sunday in March. And instead of ending on the last Sunday of October, the change back will come the first Sunday in November.
That means next Sunday, Nov. 4, will be the 25-hour day this year as clocks "fall back" officially at 2 a.m.
The big cheers you might hear for the delayed change date this year could be from parents of youngsters planning to "trick or treat" Wednesday on Halloween. They will still have that extra hour of evening daylight this year to help make their rounds before it gets too dark.
But the timing is not so good for people who vote late on Election Day, Nov. 6. Darkness could catch those who put off their voting duties until just before 7 p.m. closing time.
It's the early voters who might benefit from the extra daylight.
Despite all this tinkering in its name, real time advances steadily at its same unwavering pace.
Time changes everything, but no matter how hard people might try, nobody has ever been able to change the course of time.
People may talk about "killing time," "buying time" or "saving time," and efforts in that regard could create the impression of being legitimate, but they really don't alter time at all.
Some pretty smart folks, a long time ago, figured out how to measure time in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks and years, and as you grow older it is amazing how all of those things mount up.
Most people living today have even witnessed the passing of a century. It might seem like only yesterday, but it has been more than seven years now as time is measured.
Even though it is an expression heard on occasion, it has never been verified that anyone has ever managed to make "time stand still," although in sports there is such a thing as "time out." In football and basketball they even "put time back on the clock," occasionally, but the clock involved is just the game timepiece and it doesn't have any impact at all on real time.
The idea of saving time is one a lot of people seem to think they can really make happen. Especially politicians, although they might be better at "wasting time," something they often appear to manage quite well.
Daylight-saving time is an example of the political effort to tinker with time. This plan is utilized during the period of the year when there is the most daylight because of the position of the sun.
It doesn't involve being able to actually put daylight into some kind of savings vault to be tapped into on demand, but just the rotation of the 24-hour clock that measures the time in a single day forward one hour to encourage getting up an hour earlier in the morning.
The idea behind DST is that moving the clocks forward an hour creates an extra hour of daylight in the afternoon. Of course, the same thing could be accomplished by simply getting up an hour earlier and staying with standard time if everybody would just agree to that.
Perhaps there could be a claim of saving time by the switch since one hour is cut off the day that DST begins and in theory perhaps is "put away" to be restored on the day of the switch back to standard time.
This subject is timely because the 2007 date to switch back is close. But if you guessed it is today, the last Sunday in October as it has been for years, your timing is off. Don't feel too bad, because even some calendar makers who might have printed their 2007 versions early designated Oct. 28 as the day.
A few months ago, Congress decided adding a few more weeks of DST would help save energy, a point that has been debated. But they went ahead and made a change anyway.
So this year instead of starting on the first Sunday in April, DST began the second Sunday in March. And instead of ending on the last Sunday of October, the change back will come the first Sunday in November.
That means next Sunday, Nov. 4, will be the 25-hour day this year as clocks "fall back" officially at 2 a.m.
The big cheers you might hear for the delayed change date this year could be from parents of youngsters planning to "trick or treat" Wednesday on Halloween. They will still have that extra hour of evening daylight this year to help make their rounds before it gets too dark.
But the timing is not so good for people who vote late on Election Day, Nov. 6. Darkness could catch those who put off their voting duties until just before 7 p.m. closing time.
It's the early voters who might benefit from the extra daylight.
Despite all this tinkering in its name, real time advances steadily at its same unwavering pace.
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