Is one less hour less tedious?

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I grew up with Daylight Saving Time. I won't go so far as to day that it made immediate sense when I first encountered it, but it was clear to me that the passage of time and the way time is registered on a clock or via a calendar were two separate concepts. (There was, to the best of my knowledge, time before there were clocks.) Thus, I had no problem with the idea of resetting our clocks in order to have more waking hours available to me when the sun was shining. And because of this it was rather strange to me to discover, not very many years ago, when Israel started debating the desirability of Daylight Saving Time, that many people here felt that resetting clocks somehow went against some sort of primordial universal order.

And that being the case, it seems fitting to note that it was on this day, in 1918, less than a century ago, that Daylight Saving Time was first put into use in North America. The story of its adoption, and the adjustment to it, makes fascinating reading (as, to my mind, do all issues relating to calendaric changes). But though losing an hour in the spring when we put our clocks forward doesn't necessarily mean one less hour of conferences, we do have one less hour to devote to pleasurable, but not particularly productive, reading about Daylight Saving Time - such as a very comprehensive page from the Energy Commission of California, or this site, which includes a page with a number of interesting anecdotes (including one well known item from the middle east which I'd always assumed was an urban legend).

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Go to: The tedium of real time.