Uncivil Twilight

That's it! I can't take it any more!  Every daylight savings shift, people start saying we're just kidding ourselves, we're moving time around and thinking we're getting more.  I've become accustomed to that, but I expect better from Neil deGrasse Tyson:

What would aliens say if told that Earthlings shift clocks by an hour to fool themselves into thinking there's more sunlight
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) March 9, 2014

Sure, he's probably intellectually exhausted after weeks of talking Seth MacFarlane out of writing fart jokes into the new Cosmos.  But still, usually he's the one convincing the great unwashed that experts know what they're doing. Now he's contributing to it.

So let me explain.  Here's a chart showing how the hours of daylight change through the year.  Daylight hours are in orange, night in blue.  This is based on New York, but the principle is the same anywhere:

Now I'll overlay the typical person's waking hours (represented by the black striped hours.) I've picked 7:00am to 11:00pm.

As you can see, that has the effect that in the summer, there is a fair amount of daylight that goes by before this person even gets up.  That's rather unfortunate, given that the person also has several waking hours after the sun goes down.  How can we take advantage of that extra "wasted" daylight?

One way is to change your waking time through the year, getting up with the sun.  But that's inconvenient, since we are creatures of habit, and many parts of our days can't be easily shifted (like working hours.) 

Another way would be to shift our entire day forward.  Wake up at, say, 4:00am each day throughout the year, then going to bed at 8:00pm, and splitting our non-working hours between before and after work.  But that doesn't seem to fit human nature: for whatever reason, we have a strong preference to doing our work first and recreation afterwards.

So the only remaining approach is to shift our day forward in the middle of the year.  That moves our waking hours earlier, so that we're awake for more of the daylight.  Here's what that looks like, again with the black-striped area representing a typical set of waking hours:

See?  Now less of the daylight hours goes unused.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying daylight savings time is perfect, or even that it's a good idea.  For instance, one could argue that we should just shift the day an hour or two forward and be done leave it there all year, and we just learn to deal with getting up in the dark in the winter.  Just stop it with the obtuse arguments that science/the government/Ben Franklin thinks we're getting free daylight.