Hey… can you believe it? I almost forgot to post my semi-annual rant about having to change to daylight saving time. Fortunately for you, I remembered. 🙂

This evening most of North America sets its clocks forward an hour in a vain attempt to save energy. I say vain attempt because there hasn’t been any sound evidence that adjusting the clocks to chase the sunshine has actually resulted in any reduction in the demand for energy. There is, however, evidence that shows an increase in accidents in the days immediately following the switch.

Research from the University of Alabama at Birmingham published a couple of days ago reveals that there is a 10% increase in the risk of having a heart attack on the Monday and Tuesday following the time change in March. (The risk decreases by about 10% for a couple of days when the clocks are set back an hour in the fall.)

If you want to learn more about the history of daylight saving time, check out David Prerau’s book Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time (hardcover: 1560256559; softcover: 1560257962). It’s actually more interesting than it sounds. (more…)

I almost forgot about it, but fortunately someone (Thanks, Ken!) reminded me earlier this week: This is the weekend that we set our clocks forward an hour (unless you live in Saskatchewan in which case don’t worry about it). As I’ve mentioned once or twice in the past, there isn’t any reliable evidence that daylight saving time has resulted in energy savings (ever) and there is research that shows an increase in accidents in the days immediately following the switch.

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I was checking out the aviation forecast for Ottawa and saw this:

TAF CYOW 201438Z 2015/2112 31006KT P6SM FEW030 TEMPO 2015/2022 BKN030 BECMG 2016/2018 06005KT
FM202200 06012KT P6SM FEW015 OVC090
FM210200 08015G25KT 4SM -SN BKN030 OVC070
FM210500 08015G25KT 1SM -SN BLSN OVC010 PROB40 2105/2107 3SM -FZRA BR
FM210700 08015G25KT 1/2SM SN BLSN VV005 PROB30 2107/2110 2SM -PLSN -FZRA BR
FM211000 07018G28KT 1/4SM +SN BLSN VV002
RMK NXT FCST BY 201800Z=

Apart from the fact that it’s fairly disgusting weather in general with gusting winds, snow, blowing snow and the possibility of freezing rain and snow pellets, it also shows that it’s supposed to be very windy with excessive amounts of snow and blowing snow starting at 1100UTC, which you can see in red.

The Mayan calendar purportedly indicates that the world is supposed to end at 11:11UTC tomorrow morning and the forecast period doesn’t extend past 12:00UTC tomorrow morning (highlighted in fuchia). Coincidence or proof? (Hint: It’s a coincidence.)

It’s time for my semi-annual rant about having to adjust the clocks by an hour for no particularly good reason. It’s also a good time to change the batteries in your battery-powered smoke detectors.

I rant on a semi-annual basis because daylight saving time has been promoted as a means to save energy, it’s generally accepted that it doesn’t. In fact, it almost certainly costs more to implement than it would save and the increase in accidents in the days immediately following the time change aren’t worth it. Check out David Prerau’s book Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time (hardcover: 1560256559; softcover: 1560257962) if you want to learn more about the history of daylight saving time.

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I decided to ride my bike to the pub trivia session this evening so that I could hopefully see Venus transiting the Sun, something it won’t do again until 2117.

My setup was very simple: my Canon SD850IS point-and-shoot and a piece of #14 welder’s glass.

Basically, I held the #14 glass in front of the lens and hoped for the best. The challenge was getting the camera to focus properly. I was happily surprised to see that the first picture I took was the best one. Other than cropping the image, I haven’t done any processing or enhancement.

If you look closely, you can see the little disc of Venus just clockwise of of the 12 o’clock position. The photo was taken at 18:18 Eastern, which was about 9 minutes after the start of the transit.

Yup, it’s that time of year again. The time when we adjust our clocks forward by an hour. Unless, of course, you live in one of the more enlightened parts of the country like Saskatchewan, in which case carry on with whatever you were doing.

I, however, don’t live in Saskatchewan (or certain parts of Alberta, British Columbia, northwestern Ontario or Quebec), so come Sunday morning at 2am I’m going to set my clocks forward. (Actually, I’ll probably do it a little earlier because I hope to be asleep at 2am.) Fortunately, with the exception of my alarm clock, microwave and the little clock in my car, the various things that tell time in my life automatically adjust themselves when the clocks change.

Unfortunately, people don’t cope with time change quite so readily. This means that in the days immediately following the time change, there will be more accidents as a result of people being tired because their bodies haven’t adapted to the new schedule.

And given that the clocks are changed ostensibly to save energy, people are going to be disappointed because there’s never been any reliable proof that it has saved energy. Mostly, it just results in people shifting when they use the energy they’re using.

If you want to learn more about the history of daylight saving time, check out David Prerau’s book Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time (hardcover: 1560256559; softcover: 1560257962). It’s actually more interesting than it sounds. (But don’t tell Ken because he doesn’t want to hear about it!)

If you’re a *NIX system administrator you probably updated your systems a couple of years ago, but in case you haven’t you probably should take a look at this. The zdump command should give you something like this:

[gordon@seedling gordon]$ /usr/sbin/zdump -v /etc/localtime |grep 2012

/etc/localtime  Sun Mar 11 06:59:59 2012 UTC = Sun Mar 11 01:59:59 2012 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000

/etc/localtime  Sun Mar 11 07:00:00 2012 UTC = Sun Mar 11 03:00:00 2012 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400

/etc/localtime  Sun Nov  4 05:59:59 2012 UTC = Sun Nov  4 01:59:59 2012 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400

/etc/localtime  Sun Nov  4 06:00:00 2012 UTC = Sun Nov  4 01:00:00 2012 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000

2012 is a leap year, which means today is February 29th instead of March 1st.  Many people probably simply accept leap years as one of those weird little curiosities in life, without really knowing why they occur.

Once upon a time, the “year” was quite malleable, with days and even months being inserted into the calendar by priests when they wanted to keep their favourite politician in power. Julius Caesar found the chaos this caused highly annoying so he decided to sort it out once and for all and introduced the Julian calendar in 45 BC.

His solution did away with much of the chaos, but there was still a certain amount of “slippage” caused by the difference in the length of the calendar year and the tropical year (aka the solar year), which was roughly 365.25 days long.  This “slippage” resulted in an error of 1 day every 128 years, meaning the tropical year started a day earlier every 128 years.

To compensate for this, the Romans added a “leap year” every four years to get things back in sync.  However, due to a counting error, the first few years the calendar was used, a leap year was took place every three years rather than every four.  The emperor Augustus compensated for the extra days by skipping a number of leap years, which resulted in the 8th month of the year to be named after him.

By the mid-1500′s the difference between the calendar year and the tropical year had become about 10 days and calculating when Easter took place was quite difficult.  So,  in 1582 Pope Gregory XIII decided to remove the extra days and align the vernal equinox with March 21st because that’s when it occurred during the Council of Nicaea in AD 325.

Leap years under the Gregorian calendar occur every year that is evenly divisible by 4, except centuries (eg: 1600, 1700, 1800, 1900, etc) unless the century was evenly divisible by 400.

The last day of the Julian calendar was Thursday, October 4, 1582 and the first day of the Gregorian calendar was Friday, October 15, 1582.  However, the Gregorian calendar was not adopted by everyone at the same time.  For example, Spain, Portugal, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and most of Italy adopted it on Friday, October 15, 1582, but other countries waited.  Sweden transitioned to the Gregorian calendar sometime in the early 18th century.  One of the last countries to adopt it was Greece in on March 1, 1923, which followed February 15th.  China seems to have adopted in 1929, after first adopting it in 1912.  (There was a certain amount of chaos between 1912 and 1929.)

None of the national Orthodox churches, however, recognized the Gregorian calendar when it was introduced and many instead adopted a Revised Julian calendar in 1923 which saw 13 days dropped and a different leap year rule.  This will see the two calendar systems in sync until 2800, at which point it will be someone else’s problem.

Other Orthodox churches didn’t accept the Revised Julian calendar, either, so they’ll continue to celebrate Christmas on the 7th of January (until 2100).

Other orthodox churches use their own calendars to set their religious holidays.

With respect to Easter, the eastern Orthodox churches still use Julian Easter.  Except the Finnish Orthodox Church, which uses the Gregorian Easter.

So, all this is to say that it’s Wednesday, February 29, 2012.