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 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.

Duly Noted

Whenever I had to write essays in high school or university, I had trouble with the footnotes.¹ The impression I got from teachers' instructions was to footnote anything that I got out of a book or any other source. But that always led to dozens of notes; far more than anyone else. And, far more than the teachers expected, since they would dock marks for using too many.

Occasionally I would back off and try to footnote fewer things, but without fail I would then get an angry message that I hadn't noted enough things. This was made worse by the fact that teachers and profs would always deliver that particular message through an abstruse accusation of plagiarism.²

I think now I have a better handle on it: you're noting anything the reader should know the original source of, whether it's a little known fact, or the ideas and opinions of others. Too bad I don't have a chance to ever use that knowledge now.

I mention this because it occurs to me that the web can be seen as a big set of essays, with the links as the footnotes. And often those notes are added for the same reasons: credit where credit is due, our backing up facts.

Usually in this blog I've added links to other topics to provide background for readers who may not be familiar with a topic. Sometimes I've used a link to provide evidence of a fact I've mentioned. I wonder if I should do more of that. In the throbbing vortex of misinformation that is the Internet, the definition of "disputed information" is much bigger than it would be in am academic essay.³ It might be a good idea if we all started working harder to link to sources just to stop the nightmare scenario of everyone providing their own facts and simply trying to out yell each other.


1. Or endnotes
2. Keep in mind that in those pre-internet days, actual plagiarism was rare, so the teacher could do this schtick with everyone understanding the accusation wasn't real. I don't know what they do now that real plagiarism is much more common.
3. Consider how many web sites and the communities around them would consider evolution, global warming, or equality of the races and genders to be open questions.

From Russia With Insecurity

When the Soviet Union collapsed, i was still in high school. I had just learnt about World War II in history class, and it seemed there was a disturbing parallel: we learnt about how the Treaty of Versailles, which ended WWI, had set punitive terms on Germany, and that sense of victimhood had fueled the nationalism the Nazis drew on.

The Russians hadn't lost a war, nor was there a one-sided treaty. But they were plunged into hardship and weakness just months after being a world power. It seemed there was fertile ground for extremist politics there. I was quite disappointed that there wasn't more concern over this in the west. I wasn't expecting a new Marshall Plan or something, but it seemed to me that offering the Russians a little help making the transition to capitalism would have been a wise investment in world stability.

When hard-right Vladimir Zhirinovsky appeared on the scene in the mid 90's, I thought my worst fears were playing out. Fortunately, only a few Russians took the bait.

But now, it occurs to me that I was right, it's just that Russia's lashing out wasn't nearly as dramatic as I had assumed. Instead of a transition to radical politics, it has played out as a angry streak in their dealings with others.  Putin seems to understand this, and is good at exploiting it.  If the results never get worse than the Crimean invasion, we'll be pretty lucky overall.

A Tight-Knit Community

I've seen a yarn bombing in downtown Kitchener.

I applaud their efforts, though I'm not sure we can say it fully detonated.  Hopefully our phantom knitters will work their way up to covering some other local items, like the old city hall clock tower, or Onkel Hans.

It Gets Mediocre

You may have seen the "It Gets Better" campaign. It's an initiative by sex advice columnist and gay rights activist Dan Savage. The idea is to tell gay (and bi, trans, etc.) youths that their school experiences are not necessarily an indication of how the rest of their lives will go. That's especially true for gay kids in small towns, red states, or conservative families. Certainly, when I look back at the on-average one student in every class who wasn't straight, I can't imagine what they went through. The shift from that experience to a modern gay neighborhood in a big city would have to be a huge positive change in one's life.

When I think about that, I find myself thinking, I wish I was gay. Can you imagine what that would be like: you become an adult and don't just move out of your parents' place, you move to a place where suddenly everyone understands you and accepts you?

We should all have our own gay community. You suffer through high school, but then you get to move to the jock neighborhood, or the goth neighborhood, or geek town. There, you're surrounded by people who accept you and appreciate you for who you really are, even more than your closest friends and family did. Of course, for those of us who grew up in the pre-internet era, modern life is kind of like that. Online, you can find that personal community.  So if you're over forty, you have something in common with the homosexual community.

Let's See Who's On Fallon

I watched tonight's interview with Rob Ford on Jimmy Kimmel Live!.  Well, I only watched part of it.  Eventually I grew sick of watching that amoral clown who'll do anything for attention.  And Rob Ford was annoying too.

This incident really crossed a few lines:  First, from Rob Ford's perspective.  It's one thing to be the butt of jokes.  That's part of being a politician (not usually this big a part, but always a part.)  But actually going out of your way to go on a show to be the butt of jokes is something else.  He seems to have transitioned from mayor to full-time publicity-seeker.

And for Jimmy Kimmel.  Sure, comedians often joke about liking politicians who provide them with material.  But they don't actually help those politicians out.  They may say they're going to vote for Anthony Weiner, but they don't actually do it. Yes, I know Kimmel didn't volunteer to work on his re-election or anything, but a softball interview in which Ford is allowed to repeat his usual lies without challenge certainly helps him out more than a campaign contribution.  Even Ford's former allies in the Sun wouldn't do that much for him.

When a comedian makes fun of a person, it should be because that person has done something to genuinely deserve it. And if that person genuinely deserves to be targeted, we want to see them actually get ridiculed. Suddenly giving them a free pass makes it seem like you're not a comedian so much as a jerk who'll strike out at anyone when it's convenient, and it's not satisfying to watch that.

The irony is that Kimmel famously disliked Jay Leno, and yet this sort of ideologically empty comedy was something Leno was often accused of: He'd make any joke about any public figure, no matter whether it was fair or accurate or contradicting the joke he made the night before.  But now Kimmel seems to have taken up the anything-for-a-laugh (and ratings) mantel.

Back To The Brink

I mentioned earlier that several countries seemed to be tearing themselves apart because large blocks of voters can't agree. Since then, we've seen Ukraine get even more polarized, eventually leading to a new government and Russian military intervention.

I thought it was interesting that during the Ukraine crisis, there seemed to be a real case for splitting the country, since the Ukrainian west and Russian east seemed to differ on culture, politics and economics. But all politicians shrank away from the idea, saying that such a young country (~23 years) didn't want to open that can of worms.

Well, Putin's troops seem to have imposed the separation idea. And at the risk of sounding Chamberlain-y, I'm optimistic that it won't escalate.  Some sort of autonomy for the country's two sides was probably the only way out of the impasse, but too scary to choose voluntarily. Of course, that's assuming Putin isn't crazy enough to grab more or all of the country than the Russian-dominated areas just to spite/embarrass the west. And I don't know too much about make-up of the country; if there are large Russian/Ukrainian minorities on the other sides, it could lead to Balkan-style retribution, which is the country argument to my give-separation-a-chance philosophy.