Set Your Clocks Forward One Hour. Like a Moron.

[Stephen]

Changing the time to "save" daylight is the intellectual equivalent of unplugging your clock to prevent nightfall.

Freakin' idiots.

standardtime.com/

[Michael]

Hey, know who first proposed daylight savings? Good ol' "Common Sense" Benjamin Franklin.

[Stephen]

From David Cinque...

Supposedly, DST is good for business because it gets people spending more money on leisure activities such as sporting equipment, bar-b-queing, etc. So, DST helps us be good little consumers.

However, this deliberate deviation from real solar time hurts us all, but some suffer more than others depending on where they live. I will explain, but first let's look at why DST is such a harmful practice.

Like other creatures, humans are circadian beings, meaning that our biological rhythms are timed with the earth's rotation around the sun. The most obvious example is the wake/sleep cycle, but there are others, for example, hormonal secretion. In men, DHEA and Testosterone are pumped out in copious amounts in the morning; melatonin pours out in the evening after the sun goes down; and it's during deep sleep at night that Growth Hormone is released. In women, it is more complicated because of the menstrual cycle. But, it is vital for both sexes to remain in sync with real solar time. Dire consequences follow if we don't. For instance, we know now that night workers have a much higher incidence of cancer, and it's believed to result from melatonin suppression. Melatonin is a hormone that is most often associated with inducing sleep, but it does so much more. Melatonin is the most potent antioxidant in your body, meaning that, milligram per milligram, it is by far the strongest. It is also the most global antioxidant, meaning that it goes everywhere, protecting everything. Melatonin is also anti-mutagenic. It prevents abnormal cell divisions, and it encourages apoptosis, which is how deviant cells self-destruct. But staying up at night in the artificial light shuts down melatonin secretion – almost completely.

But, it isn't just our sleep and our hormones that have a circadian bias. So do our patterns of eating, digesting, thinking, responding sexually, and ultimately our entire mood depends on being in sync with Nature's clock. There is no question that Daylight Saving Time puts a needless strain on everyone. But, it's worse for some than for others.

Let's take Central Time as an example. The meridian for the Central Time zone goes through New Orleans, Louisiana, which means that during Standard Time, official time matches solar time – in New Orleans. Perfect! But, for every degree of longitude that you move west of New Orleans within the Central Time Zone, you have to put the clock back 4 minutes to remain in sync with real solar time. So for me, for instance, living in Austin, Texas, which is 7.5 degrees of longitude west of New Orleans, 7.5 x 4 = 30 minutes of deviation. So, even during Standard Time, my clock is skewed by half an hour. When it says 12 Noon, it's really 11:30 AM. But, during Daylight Saving Time, our time is further skewed by an additional hour. So, in the summer when we say it's 12 Noon, it's really only 10:30 AM! That's ridiculous. It's no wonder that people marvel at how hot it is here at 5 PM in the summer. It's because it's really only 3:30!