It is this time of year that sometimes we tend to fool ourselves about things. We use all sorts of gimmicks let us say we have done one thing when we have done something entirely different.
If you ask anyone how many hours there are in a day they will answer twenty-four. Those 24 hours are divided into daylight and night time. Some persnickety folks might argue there are four divisions and add the morning and evening twilights.
That set aside we can agree that between Sunrise and Sunset we are in daylight. Most of us would agree we have no real control of that time. It was common in ancient times to talk in terms of working from “can till can’t”. This meant when there is and isn’t enough light to work.
Over the years man developed methods of creating light other than sunlight. We now use electricity that does most of the lighting of the night. If one looks at satellite pictures of, say the US, we can see lots of that light in the night. This tends to cluster around cities and is much dimmer in rural areas, In fact many astronomers complain about how hard it is find a place dark enough to watch the stars.
Man has also invented ways to measure time. The latest technology is to count the vibrations of certain atoms to determine time. This leads to incredibly small divisions of a second. This is often sent to our cell phones and in some cases has replaced wrist watches. Some of those clocks can even tell you the exact time of Sunset or Sunrise.
However, only the slowest folks would believe a person who said that they could shorten or extend the number of hours between those two exact times. Mother Nature and the ecliptic are in complete control of that.Even so we fool ourselves by using what we call daylight savings time. Here we call it CDT. No daylight is saved. The net effect is that the clock says that sunset is quite an hour later in the day than it would in what we call Standard time.
This is merely a change in the clock time. When we reset the clocks, we Spring forward by getting up an hour earlier. We Fall back by sleeping an hour later next Fall. So we just balance the hours we sleep several months apart.
Now don’t get me wrong as a sort of night owl I like the later time of sunset. This was especially true when I had to get up to go to work at an early hour but had more daylight time after work.. I would have complained vigorously if I was forced to get up an hour earlier with the clock set on standard time. We fool ourselves by the trick of changing the clock setting and do learn to live with that hour earlier. I hope it isn’t so easy to fool ourselves on more important matters.
