BST? Why?

[hmmm_tea]

So, what is the point of BST?

Surely all this putting the clocks back/forwards is all a pointless waste of time?

Can understand the switch from BST to GMT makes it lighter in the morning... ...and hence darker in the evening so perhaps that doesn't make sense after all?

But (putting that to one side and going back to what I was originally trying to say), why the switch from GMT to BST. Surely in the summer the length of day is getting so long that the hour this side or that doesn't really make a lot of difference?

Comments

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

What's even more random than cabbages and carpenteres, badgers and their kings? All of the above plus marmite :)

Hmmm. I agree it might be easier not to bother, but isn't the idea that in the summer it's light from something like 4 - 8 GMT or more, whereas most people are up something like 6/7/8/9 to 10/11/12/1, which means there's daylight when people are asleep and dark when people are awake, whereas if you shift it you lose an hour of that?

[hmmm-tea.livejournal.com]

but I like marmite...

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I didn't say I didn't like it, I said it was random :)

[hmmm-tea.livejournal.com]

I didn't say you didn't like it either...

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

You said "But [i like marmite]" -- doesn't this imply "I like marmite" in some way contradicts what I said?

[hmmm-tea.livejournal.com]

Yes, but that is a different issue.

"But I like marmite" may contradict what you said, but it definitely doesn't say "you don't like marmite"...

[atreic.livejournal.com]

People are really bad at waking up in the dark, but quite good at staying awake in the dark. So if you want your workforce to continue to work 8 hour days despite there only being 6 hours of daylight, you want to try and align the available daylight with the working day as much as possible.

OK, that makes GMT make sense. But I have no idea why switch to BST in the summer...

[atreic.livejournal.com]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time

I'm still not sure I understand it, but I didn't realise it was such a recent invention!

[hmmm-tea.livejournal.com]

http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/willett.html

"I therefore venture to propose that at 2 a.m. on each of four Sunday mornings in April, standard time shall advance 20 minutes; and on each of four Sundays in September, shall recede 20 minutes, or in other words that for eight Sundays of 24 hours each, we shall substitute four, each 20 minutes less than 24 hours, and four each 20 minutes more than 24 hours."

hmmm... sounds like a recipe for complete and utter chaos to me...

[hmmm-tea.livejournal.com]

Surely there must be a centre of the enlargement/reduction that happens to the daylight. Surely all we need to do is align that with the center of our ideal day?

[numberland.livejournal.com]

I've always been told that it had to do with when we were an agricultural society, having longer after the kids finished school to work in the fields.

[atreic.livejournal.com]

As it wasn't proposed until long after the industrial revolution (1909?), this theory seems flawed...