Ah, November the month where we once again try to talk ourselves into thinking we are no longer going to save any daylight. It is relatively foolish to think that daylight can be saved. Daylight is from Sunrise to Sunset, discounting any lengthening by twilights unless of course there are too many clouds to see the sun. We do know that the sun does not have a clock don’t we?
In fact it is the time the Earth takes to revolve around the sun that is our fundamental clock. The Sun only apparently rises or sets because the Earth revolves around our poles and we get our North from the fact that the one pole points to the Star Polaris. That could be our fundamental minute hand.
We call all the tom foolery around daylight savings time for reasons of supposedly saving electricity by it getting dark later. It is more accurately called getting up earlier and going to bed later. I prefer to think of it as shorter mornings and longer afternoons. Personally I like the longer afternoons. I am naturally a go to bed later person.
I don’t like the sudden shift when we fall back into standard time, It is suddenly darker when we eat supper or drive home from work. Some statistics say there are more accidents on the road in those times. I prefer the slow natural shifts through twilight.
In ancient times days were just sunrise to sunset. Then Galileo noticed that pendulum kept pretty good time and clocks were born. We progressed through more accurate quartz clocks and now we use atomic clocks. They vibrate something over 9 million times a second and drive all our phone, TV, GPS and other critical timing devices. Along with time zones they help keep trains, planes and us on time.
One problem is that our base clock the revolution around the sun is slowing down along with the rotation of Earth around its axis. We used to just keep track of that with leap years. Now with super accurate atomic clocks we are dealing with leap seconds Our day is slowing down a second or two a year. They just slip in a 61 second minute every once in a while. I hope they do it at night so I get a little more sleep.
All that being said there is a good thing about November. That is at the later part of the month we begin all the Holidays. Thanksgiving is a good one for eats and family and, for those of us who don’t work in retail, all the black Friday Christmas sales. Actually the folks in retail are getting anxious to start it sooner so Thanksgiving is turning to a Grey Thursday. Late November to New Year seems to be turning into one long sale. Even so Holidays, in general, are good things. This is especially true when we don’t forget to remember the reasons for the season.
