All American readers who are affected should remember to push their clocks one hour ahead because March 9th at 2 A.M. local time is the start of Daylight Saving Time.
The idea is American in origin, invented by Benjamin Franklin to save lamp oil and aid the economy. The reason the change is at 2 A.M. is because most people are asleep, bars are already closing, and few trains operate.
Daylight Saving Time is an international thing and very political. This map page has information about countries which use DST. Some countries adopt it to be Western while others drop it to be independent like Kazakhstan breaking away from Russia or the Palestinian Territories changing the dates to be different from Israel.
Allowing more daylight is desirable for much of the world away from the equator. Web Exhibits continues their great DST explanation with a neat interactive map showing daylight versus nighttime.
3 comments:
One simple way to eliminate DST is to advance all clocks in North America by 30 minutes from local Standard Time and never reset them. With that advance there would be no need to advance them in the Spring or return to Standard Time in the Fall. Sure, North America would then be thirty minutes ahead of the rest of the world, but I suspect they'd soon follow the trend.
Sadly it seems that I am the only one who likes the current DST/ST system.
i think that DST is not usefull, more countries leaves it.
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