Category Archives: technology

Daylight Savings Time

Looks like we’re changing over to daylight savings time tonight.
I didn’t get around to setting some of the clocks in my house to standard time in the first place, so I don’t have to reset those, yay!  But, there’s still several I do have to reset, plus, there’s an hour less sleep tonight, boo.

With the changes that took place a few years ago, “Daylight Savings Time” now takes up nearly 8 months of the year, so it’s really more “standard” than standard time is now.  So, that raises an interesting question:  Why are our days so asymmetrical around noonday?

If you work from 9:00 to 5:00, the midpoint of your workday is 1:00, not noon (so, once we shift to DST, your workday will be symmetrical around the middle of the day).  If we look at the rest of the things that people do during the day, the asymmetry really displays itself.  For example, if you get up at 6:00 and go to bed at 10:00, the midpoint of your day would be 2:00 pm.  If you get up later and go to bed later, the midpoint of your day would get later and later.

Has this always been the case?  I’m not sure, but I don’t think so.  Back before electricity and before gas lighting, the only particularly efficient lighting that we had was from the sun.  I assume that this would cause humans to be awake when the sun was up and go to bed when the sun was down, since there wouldn’t be too much else to do.  This would result in the middle of the day being high noon (give or take a few minutes), not 1:00 pm or 2:00 pm or something later.

So, with the advent of artificial light, why has our day elongated itself in the evening rather than the early morning?  I would suggest that it’s because humans are, well, lazy.  It’s easy to just stay up a little later, which in turn results in sleeping in.  It takes discipline to get up a little earlier, which in turn would require going to bed earlier.  And that is why we turn the clocks forward in the spring (actually, it’s still winter) and not back.

Anyway, some food for thought.  I hope you enjoyed…

abstentious

Robots of War

As I mentioned in the last entry, I saw some stories last week that I wanted to comment on. This is the second one of them. I’m going to ignore the rest as we’re getting on to next week

Anyway, I saw an article in the New York Times last week about the U.S. Army seeing robots in the future of war.  I won’t summarize the article here, but I want to ask the question:  Is this line of research a good idea or not?

On the plus side, military research has led to advancements in civilian technology and advances in robotics have the potential for significant advances in civilian life.  Robotics certainly is a field that would be highly useful in civilian life and is an area that could use some more development.  Unfortunately, the machines described in the article appear to be more like more like remote-controlled toys than autonomous robots, requiring a human operator, so unfortunately they won’t advance robotics as much as I would like to see.

One negative that I see about this initiative is that it doesn’t reduce manpower requirements, so the extra machinery would increase the U.S. Army’s budget, and therefore U.S. taxes.  Or will it?  Perhaps these robots will result in fewer soldier deaths.  This would have the obvious personal benefits of fewer dead soldiers as well as the associated financial benefits.

I think that there is a more significant danger.  Will the operators controlling robots on the front line (something not explicitly discussed in the article, but which is an obvious conclusion to the development of this technology) have the same respect for human life as they would if they themselves were on the front line?  Will they be able to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions?  Think of the book Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card.  In this book, Ender destroys a threat against the human population while believing he is just playing war games in a simulator.  Had the military brass been upfront about the real nature of the simulation, Ender no doubt would have refused to participate.  Similarly, will soldiers of the future lose sight of the fact that they are not just playing, and kill enemies and even friends that they wouldn’t otherwise?  To me, that’s the biggest danger of this exploration.