noon is when the sun is highest in the sky.
for half the year, we are going to collectively lie about where the ball of fire in the sky is.
it’s insanity.
Comment on Everyday, as an American
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 4 months agoI don’t give the first two half-flaccid thrusts of a reluctant pity fuck what number the clock says when the sun rises or sets. 4, 5, 6, 11, don’t care. It’s the practice of changing the clocks twice a year that needs to die in a fire.
The logic should be “Let’s open our business from 7 to 4 instead of 8 to 5 so that we have more free time during sunlight hours in the evening” not “Let’s change all the clocks everywhere so that the sun is two fingers higher in the sky when the clocks say 5 so that we have more free time during the sunlight hours in the evening.” You want to vary YOUR routine with the seasonal change in sunlight hours? Great. “Summer hours 7 to 4, winter hours 8 to 5” or whatever. Managing this by changing all clocks everywhere causes more problems than it solves. I don’t know if I could intentionally invent a stupider solution to the “problem.”
ASeriesOfPoorChoices@lemmy.world 4 months ago
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
I was a pilot in a past life. Night flight is quite different than day flight, because it’s darker up there than you think. A lot of nations outright don’t allow night VFR requiring night flight to be done IFR, some others have optional night flight endorsements or ratings for night VFR. But it’s a training requirement for American private pilots.
Because it is a regulatory matter, there has to be a strict definition of “night time.” Which is where we get the concept of “civil twilight” which IIRC is the moment when the center point of the sun’s disc is between 0 and 6 degrees below the horizon. “Night time” is officially the time when the sun is 6 or more degrees below the horizon. Exactly when this happens changes every single day as the days get longer and shorter, so you still have to look it up. The exact moment of local solar noon is even less important unless you’re navigating by sextant, and the way we currently solve this kind of problem is we maintain an accurate clock calibrated in GMT, UTC or Unix Timecode depending on your exact use case, and then we do the math on the fly to convert to local time. When is local solar noon today at my exact location? 18:32:40 GMT.
ASeriesOfPoorChoices@lemmy.world 4 months ago
that’s why I said noon, since that doesn’t (really) change through the year (much).
It’s the one real constant with time.
So people changing their clocks are like saying “the sky is green today, and I refuse to look to actually know”
bitwaba@lemmy.world 4 months ago
This has been the thought in my head when the argument comes up. Glad I’m not alone.
Preach on brother!