I had an email exchange with a few friends from grad school a few days ago. It began as a tirade against Daylight Savings Time by Sean, who was suggesting that the way to make it better for morning and evening people was to take away hours during the work day, and add them back during the dead of night, thus increasing the productivity of night workers (though college students might have more trouble staying up all night), having more hours of daylight after work, and just going ahead and skipping that hour after work when nobody gets anything done anyway.
Sean was rebutted by Scott, who suggested that the better way to do it was to distribute naps throughout the day, shortening the lunch hour and distributing the breaks more evenly. His exact quote was something like,
"You argue that an afternoon nap increases productivity, which I certainly agree with, but you can't cut the workday short by an hour and then expect an afternoon nap to fit in there as well (especially if you want the public to exercise also.) I recommend splitting the one-hour lunch break and additional coffee breaks into three equal (more or less) 25 minute breaks spread throughout the day. Take a ten to fifteen minute nap during one of them, eat a little at each of the other two, and walk or something else good for the heart and mind. You will be more productive AND healthier."
I first misread Scott's solution to re-distribute the wealth of the lunch break and coffee breaks as,
"let's divide the 1-hour lunch break into three equal breaks of 25 minutes each"
While I chuckled at this Reaganomics solution as a whimsical nod to the Escher-esque solution presented by Sean, it did get me thinking: why is it that we go onto Daylight Savings Time anyway? I mean, the days don't actually get longer, it just seems that way. As my college calculus teacher put it, "we might as well switch to Celcius at the same time, because 39 seems cooler than 102".
What we need to do is actually make the days get longer. I see a few possibilities:
- Change the tilt of the earth. This might be a challenge, but those crazy kids at MIT are building a space elevator, so probably we could just tie a bunch of National Geographics to the end of it, and it'll twirl us away. Maybe a few "paleo-climatologists" would complain, but I reckon it's gonna get a little colder in the southern hemisphere, so more stuff'll freeze down there by, say, the day after tomorrow.
- Reduce the spin of the earth. If we can do this, I kid you not, then both you and Sean can have your way: we can have longer evenings, AND longer daylight. My best guess on reducing the Earth's spin is to try to get Superman to fly around it--but get this, fly around it backwards. His increased mass will reverse the spin by tiny fractions, plus we'll finally have a ring around earth because he'll be going so fast. I think he'll pretty much have to keep doing this the whole time we need longer days in the summer, so we'll have to use that space elevator again to send up Lois lane and balogna sandwiches and what-not.
- Move the earth further away from the sun. I read about this in a scientific journal that I saw at the Pilot Truck Stop once: if all the people in China jump up and down at the same time, it could push the earth out of its orbit. I figure since there's a bunch of people in India too, we could do this once or twice a year and push ourselved back and forth. While this doesn't give us longer days, we *do* have more days in the year, so we'll be able to have those few extra days at Christmas. Or over 4th of July in the Southern Hemisphere.