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?”.
