Daylight Saving Time in Equestria · 2:17pm Nov 1st, 2015
The last week has been the biannual temporal anomaly when the time difference between Europe and America is one hour different than usual due the fact that the clocks go back a week earlier on this side of the Atlantic. Which leads to no end of confusion and missed telephone meetings for everyone working in international collaborations. Is it really beyond the competence of the authorities to agree a common date for the time change? I guess Daylight Saving Time has such a long history of causing arguments that no civil servant would dare to propose such a dangerously radical idea.
The benefits of daylight saving are clear as we humans generally prefer to stay in bed until we are obliged to get up due to the scheduled hours for work and school. So by shifting the clocks an hour forward in summer we are coerced out of bed earlier and forced to make better use of natural lighting, waste less energy on lighting, and reduce the risk of being killed in a road accident on a dark street. Damn those interfering bureaucrats forever meddling with our everyday lives.
Would Equestria use DST? Presumably not – why go to the trouble of getting everypony to reset their clocks when you can just ask the Celestia to raise the sun an hour late? Of course that rather messes up the celestial order, but it must be pretty messed up anyway.
In Time on Their Hooves, I pictured that the Order of the Time Turners keeps track of Equestrian Standard Time using an atomic standard, and instructs Celestia on the times for sunrise and sunset based on a schedule which would change with the seasons to modulate the length of day as required. If ponies so wish, they could ask the princesses to make sunrise an hour later than the nominal schedule in summer. But why introduce such an abrupt change? A more logical pattern would be to keep sunrise at the same time each day, and just lengthen the evenings.
In effect that would fix the movement of the sun to a timetable such that dawn is always the same time each day. If we wanted the same effect in our world, we would need to synchronise our clocks to the time of sunrise. Which is traditionally how it was done. The Canonical Hours followed by the monastic orders which were my model for the Order of the Time Turners were listed as consecutive periods after dawn. From Wikipedia:
- Matins (during the night, at midnight with some); also called Vigils or Nocturns or, in monastic usage, the Night Office.
- Lauds or Dawn Prayer (at Dawn, or 3 a.m.)
- Prime or Early Morning Prayer (First Hour = approximately 7 a.m.)
- Terce or Mid-Morning Prayer (Third Hour = approximately 9 a.m.)
- Sext or Midday Prayer (Sixth Hour = approximately 12 noon)
- None or Mid-Afternoon Prayer (Ninth Hour = approximately 3 p.m.)
- Vespers or Evening Prayer ("at the lighting of the lamps", generally at 6 p.m.)
- Compline or Night Prayer (before retiring, generally at 9 p.m.)
Writing this story has made me a Christian Liturgy nerd.
Living above the 60th latitude, I really appreciate DST. It extends the light in autumn evenings in a way that matters a lot. (Also, I've never been bothered by the clock shifts at the start or the end of DST, but then again, I sleep well and deep.)
What practical jokes have Celestia and Luna played using the sun? Say, seeing how short they could make the days before somepony noticed?
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The Night! Will Last! Until Noon!
I can't see Equestria needing DST, being a much more technologically laid-back world. I also appreciate the idea of accepting the natural changes of day-night cycles as they occur, but how natural are they really when the gods are able to bounce the big lights around in the sky? I'll have to read Time on Their Hooves before I comment further. It looks interesting...
3512781 Celestia discovers a unique use for Daylight Saving in this story. It's a bit fluffy, but I think you might find it amusing.
If I had my way, not only would I abolish DST, but I would abolish timezones too and use only UTC.
I for one would abolish changing the time. Heck the US doe snot all use it right now. Arizona, Hawaii, and many of the island territories do not use it. Personally looking at the stats (which are often contradictory and disputed) it is hard for me to see evidence that make it worth the trouble. Now whether we should use DST or standard I leave up to others.