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Time Zone Idea: Continuous Mean Time

I’ve been thinking about the clocks going forwards/backwards twice a year. At the moment, the mornings are still dark at 7ish. That’ll get better over the next month or two, and then the clocks will change and the mornings will be dark again until late spring.

This bi-annual change routine seems clunky to me. Why the sudden step changes? Presumably because more frequent changes would just have been more too much hassle back when they were thinking about how to deal with time and seasons. Clocks would all have to have been wound manually and getting out of sync was hell for the railways.

Well, the pain of changing clocks is going away. All smartphones automatically adjust to the exact time as do most things with radios. Give it a few years and it’ll be quaint to manually change a clock.

So… isn’t that an opportunity? What if time was adjusted slightly every day rather than twice a year? We could agree that a minute each day was altered such that it was sunrise at, say, 6 am every day of the year. Sure, sunset would vary with day length, so there’d be no monotony, but we’d always wake up to daylight. No-one needs the 4am daylight of June and no-one likes it being dark near 9am in December.

There’s probably something about farmers in Scotland that means it would be unpopular up there, so it can wait until after Independence and then they can do what they like.

By carlosfandango

My favourite biscuits are custard creams