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…