In just over an hour we North Americans are supposed to turn our clocks back an hour in the vain quest of pursuit of saving energy.

I say “vain pursuit” because although daylight saving time is promoted as leading to an overall reduction in energy consumption, there hasn’t been any proof that this has ever been accomplished. 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. It’s actually more interesting than it sounds.

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 2011

/etc/localtime  Sun Mar 13 06:59:59 2011 UTC = Sun Mar 13 01:59:59 2011 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000

/etc/localtime  Sun Mar 13 07:00:00 2011 UTC = Sun Mar 13 03:00:00 2011 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400

/etc/localtime  Sun Nov  6 05:59:59 2011 UTC = Sun Nov  6 01:59:59 2011 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400

/etc/localtime  Sun Nov  6 06:00:00 2011 UTC = Sun Nov  6 01:00:00 2011 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000

With the beautiful weather Friday in Ottawa, you can be forgiven if you forgot that today is the first day of Autumn. Hopefully it’s the first day of a nice long warm fall because I know I’m in absolutely no rush to move into the next season.

So, what makes it the first day of autumn anyway? (more…)

I took advantage of the clear skies in Palm Beach to take some pictures of the moon earlier this evening.

The moon’s orbit is not perfectly circular. If it was then it would always be the same distance from the Earth and there wouldn’t be times when the low and high tides are lower and higher than usual.

This evening the moon is both a full moon and it’s within one hour of perigee, or the closest point in its orbit, which makes it a supermoon. According to NASA, it’s going to appear to be about 14% bigger and 30% brighter than when it’s at apogee (the farthest point in its orbit).

Very high tides accompany supermoons and this evening some nearby fishermen commented that the tides were higher than usual.

Gaius Julius Caesar learned a valuable lesson on the 15h of March in 44BC: Never tease a haruspex.

Titus Vestricius Spurinna, an Etruscan haruspex (a soothsayer or astrologer), warned Caesar a week or two before his death that some danger would befall him no later than the Ides of March. The 15th of March arrived, so Caesar couldn’t leave well enough along and resist teased Spurinna saying “The Ides of March are come”, to which Spurinna replied “Yes, they are come, but they are not past.”

Unfortunately for Julius Caesar, Spruinna’s prediction came true later in the day when he was assassinated by a group of senators shortly before he was due to appear at a session of the Senate. Among the group of assassins was his friend Brutus Albinus. Shakespeare’s version of the assassination has him utter the phrase “Et tu, Brute?”, though other possibly more reliable reports have him saying either “καὶ σύ, τέκνον?” (Greek for “You too, child?”) or nothing at all.

Happy birthday to one of my very good friends, who celebrates her birthday on the anniversary of the death of Julius Caesar. 🙂

I had queued this up to be published yesterday morning, but decided that grumbling about losing an hour of sleep when Japan had just been hit by a magnitude 8.9 earthquake really wasn’t appropriate.

This is the weekend that we fall forward through time. Specifically, at 2am Sunday morning, everyone should set their clocks forward by an hour – unless you’re in Saskatchewan in which case you can stay asleep. That right – I’m  talking about changing to Daylight Saving Time.

The US Energy Policy Act of 2005 defines when most of the US switches its clocks forward and back in an attempt to maximize useful daylight hours save energy. Most of Canada changes its clocks at the same time to minimize the amount of chaos caused by this.

The province of Saskatchewan, along with little parts of British Columbia, Nunavut and Quebec, however, does not switch to daylight saving time, which really isn’t surprising given its agricultural heritage (translation: cows don’t understand daylight saving time). Apparently, the provincial government has been mulling holding a referendum to determine whether they would start switching to DST. According to a story in the Leader Post, they did some opinion polling and found that the majority of people are happy with the status quo, so they’re not going to hold a referendum and save the roughly $500,000 it would cost for something else. Good decision!

As I’ve mentioned before, there’s been no evidence that daylight saving time has resulted in the saving of a single watt of power. Australia tried to use it to offset power consumption during the 2000 Olympic games and found the demand did not decrease as a result.

Accidents also tend to go up in the days following setting the clock forward, probably because everyone’s a little sleep deprived while waiting for their circadian rhythms to adjust to the change in the clocks.

(more…)

Yesterday, I posted a short video I took of the ISS passing over Ottawa this past Tuesday evening, so I thought I’d post a copy of long exposure photos that I took.

I used my digital Canon Rebel on a tripod that I sat on the roof of my SUV. Generally, I had the ISO set to 1600, stopped the lens down to about f/20 and manually selected a 30 second exposure. The autofocus was turned off and I manually set the focus to ~infinity and confirmed it the stars were in focus with some test shots. I have a small wireless remote that I used to trigger the shutter. To avoid condensation problems, I set things up about half an hour before the pass to allow the camera to cool down.

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I headed out Tuesday evening to watch the space shuttle and International Space Station pass overhead. Both of them appeared on schedule and I was able to capture them in some long exposure photos.

About a minute before the ISS disappeared from view I grabbed my Canon SD850IS and captured a short video of the pass. I’m quite happy with the results and have posted the video to YouTube. It’s probably best viewed in full screen mode.