Time Inflation

August 10th, 2012
ideas, time
On average the sun is up 6am to 6pm, but people's schedules are later. [1] We try to fix this with Daylight Savings Time, moving solar noon to ~1pm. Britain has considered a Single-Double system where solar noon would be ~1pm in the winter (like DST) and ~2pm in the summer (double DST). We can take this further, and match our society better to the daylight hours: every year survey people to find out the middle time point of the average day. If that's more than an hour away from solar noon, add or remove an hour to move us closer to matching the sun.

(Why do people stay up later than the sun? What happens when you try to fight that? Do people just stay up later? Do we like it to be dark out? Do we have trouble getting ourselves to go to bed?)


[1] If you surveyed Americans my guess is you'd get something like 7am to midnight.

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