WTH is Daylight Saving

May 15th, 2024 (5 months ago) • 2 minutes

Huh time travel?

Daylight saving was a hot topic about a couple months ago. I remembered talking to my friend on what the heck is it, why do we need it and how does it work. It was confusing but now the same question popped up in my brain again.

So here's my notes for future me.

What? Daylight saving time (DST) is the practice of setting the clock forward by one hour during the warmer months of the year, so that evenings have more daylight and mornings have less.

Since we can't change the sunrise/sunset time, we change the clock so it appears to the human brain that sunrise happened at 9am instead of 8am for instance and sunset at 8pm instead of 7pm.

Why? Mainly to help save energy and offset the amount of time people spend indoors during the winter. It was primarily introduced for the benefit of farmers, who needed daylight hours to get the harvest in.

The Confusion. Some parts of the world don't experience Winter so DST doesn't make sense for them. Even in the US, some states don't follow DST like Hawaii and Arizona. In Australia, only 3 states follow DST out of 6.

The Hard Part. Since DST is a human concept, it's hard for physical clock / software clock to follow. At work, this meant that time sensitive jobs like collecting loans from users need to be adjusted/monitored closely twice yearly.

References

• Spot on video
• Falsehoods about time