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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 10-Mar-07
The Daylight Savings Time mess

Web Log - March, 2007

The Daylight Savings Time mess

Plan on spending time on Sunday, and again in three weeks, dealing with this.

Congress has been pretty incompetent for several years, ever since the Boomers took over, and the little that they accomplish is based on sheer ignorance of any actual facts.

No other description could possibly apply to the "The Energy Policy Act of 2005," which moved up the date of Daylight Savings Time in the U.S. by three weeks, starting this weekend.

I shuddered when I first heard about this in 2005 because I couldn't believe that even Congress could be that stupid, but never underestimate the stupidity of Congress.

Today is the day we'll have to pay. Here are some of the consequences:

We're the only country in the world doing this, so we'll be out of sync with every other country. Thus, if you telephone someone in another country, there'll be an unexpected time difference. (A reader has informed me that Canada is also adopting the same change. I took the word of a TV anchor that we were the only country making this change, but that's no excuse - I should have researched it on my own. I apologize for the error.)(Last sentences added on 11-Mar)

If you travel to another country by plane, you may miss a plane connection.

If you purchased a computer prior to 2005 and it hasn't been patched, then you'll have to manually adjust the date.

If you purchased a VCR prior to 2005, then you'll have to manually adjust the date.

There's a whole raft of other devices -- hand-held computers, DVD players, alarm clocks, thermostats, etc., etc. -- that can't be patched, and so you'll have to change the date manually if they were manufactured before 2005.

If you miss one of these devices, it will operate at the wrong time. If it's your alarm clock, they you'll get up an hour late.

And if that isn't bad enough, then get this: These devices will try to adjust to DST three weeks from now, since that's what they're supposed to do. So, on Sunday morning in three weeks, you'll have to go and reset all those devices again.

If you forget to adjust your alarm clock three weeks from now, then you'll get up an hour too early.

And when fall comes, you'll have to go through these two sets of adjustments all over again.

So have fun, folks.

All these devices were designed so that consumers wouldn't have to remember to make all these changes, and wouldn't have to figure out how to adjust all of them. That's how progress is supposed to work -- we have engineers design these high-tech devices to work properly. For the last ten years or so, devices containing clocks have been properly adjusting for DST. So Congress has just set technology back ten years.

I have an anecdote related to this issue.

Back in the 1970s, I was in a group of programmers developing IBM's mainframe operating system VM/CMS. Clyde, a friend of mine on the team was responsible for writing all the timing algorithms.

Well, he was furious at the government because of "leap seconds." Now, a leap second is a one second adjustment that NIST makes every now and then to account for tiny irregularities in the earth's orbit.

The first leap second was added on June 30, 1972. There have been a total of 23 leap seconds added, most recently on December 31, 2005. (Remember how that New Year's Eve party seemed longer than usual? That's because you had to wait an extra second for the new year!)

Well, Clyde was angry because there's no way to predict when the next leap second will occur, and so there was no way to program the operating system in advance to handle them properly. If you're writing a computer operating system that might have to schedule things far in advance, and schedule them to the precise second, then leap seconds matter very much.

I don't remember how Clyde resolved the leap second problem, but there's a big difference between that problem and the DST change: The leap second was implemented by international agreement, while the DST change was mandated by Congress in 2005.

Congress has created a big mess, one of many. Get your fingers warmed up to re-set the correct time on all these devices, because you're going to have to spend a lot of time doing it.

And if you're looking for someone to blame, then blame the Boomers. But don't blame me, even though I'm a Boomer, because I'm as furious as anyone about it. (10-Mar-07) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 10-Mar-07 The Daylight Savings Time mess

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 10-Mar-07
The Daylight Savings Time mess