Having a seriously geek moment tonight I was perusing the ‘official’ time zone data file found at ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/ There are two files there, a tzcode* archive and a tzdata* archive see (http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm for info).  My wandering there came about from a recent biongbiong.net post.

What I found interesting was the comment in the northamerica file located in the tzdata archive, qouting:

#    I don’t really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some
#    agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving
#    daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind.
#    I even object to the implication that I am wasting something
#    valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen.  As an admirer
#    of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to
#    reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the Daylight Saving
#    scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager
#    to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make
#    them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves.
#
#    – Robertson Davies, The diary of Samuel Marchbanks,
#       Clarke, Irwin (1947), XIX, Sunday

Emphasis added by me,  I could not have said it better myself. So as everyone gets shocked again by the sudden loss of an hour of daylight, I ask “What do we gain by doing this daylight savings time crap?”.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 26th, 2009 at 9:13 pm and is filed under General, Night Sky. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.