Twice a year, there are lots of comments in social media about the stupidity of daylight savings time. Israel has DST too, and keeps in step with Europe and North America with regard to the date of the change-over. But many nations, like India and China, don’t bother with DST. Those two huge nations also impose a single time zone from east to west, regardless of the inconvenience it must cause to areas distant from the capital.
In Israel, achieving D.S.T. on those dates was a hard-won battle fought by the secular parties against the religious parties in the Knesset, who made many of the arguments being made today by Europeans and Americans, whereas actually they were interested in making it more convenient for early morning prayer times.
My own opinion is that if DST saves energy and emissions, even by a little, then DST is worthwhile. But research seems to be inconclusive, with most studies pointing to a small saving in lighting in the evening hours, when DST begins in the Spring. Obviously more work needs to be done.
I sometimes think about trying to live my life more in tune with daylight, because really, what’s stopping me? One way to do it would be personally to instate universal time, and break the connection between local clock time and bedtime. If I know that sunrise comes locally at a certain hour, even if it’s non-intuitive like currently 04:00 U.S.T. (06:00 local time, after moving the clock back), then that’s the time to begin my day. In order to get 7 hours sleep, I need to get to bed by 08:00 U.S.T. (22:00 local time). That gives me eight hours, because I usually wake up for an hour in the middle to do some writing or reading. The only thing stopping me is that it’s inconvenient to be on a different time zone from everyone else, or even to go to bed earlier than they do. For example, my kids call me to do baby-sitting once or twice a week – which means staying up till about midnight locally.
The 24 hour clock
Americans are about the only people who still almost universally go according to the 12 hour clock and write “8 pm”. Everywhere else, the 24 hour clock is favored. I noticed that in France, and perhaps in some other countries, people have even got used to saying the time according to the 24 hour clock: They will often say that “dinner will be at 19,” or at “20 hours” for example. Israelis will still say “4 in the afternoon” or “8 in the evening”. It would sound funny to say “at 20” or “at 20 hours” in Hebrew. Perhaps that’s what they say in the army, I don’t know, just as British and American soldiers do?
Date notation
The ISO 8601 extended format date, 2022-10-31 is the only format for me. It avoids the confusion between international and American formats; it’s readable, makes sense, and, as a file-naming convention, helps to keep files in order by name. Unfortunately, Israel is not among the countries that has accepted it.
My phone camera names photos according to the ISO 8601 standard format (without the human-friendly dashes), though it makes a (permitted) custom variation for adding the time “20221028[underscore]105411.jpg”. My other camera uses a sequential naming format (P1234567.JPG). As a result, it’s a struggle, in applications like Darktable, to put the image files in order. Camera file-naming conventions too should be standardized according to the ISO date and time too.