Spring Forward on Sunday
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Forget which way the clocks go? Spring forward in spring, and fall backwards in fall (that's autumn, silly).
This Sunday at 1am, British Summer Time begins, which is a pretty good reason to have a party. Except that the party would be cut an hour short when 2am becomes 3am, and who wants that to happen?
Far better would be to throw the party when the clocks go back in October and you have an extra hour in the night, but no one wants to celebrate the depressing shortening of the days. (Although during uni, the club in which I used to live - which closed at 2 a.m. - would stay open for an extra hour every October, and we all rather appreciated that.)
In our last analysis of the semi-annual time-change, we looked at a the history of British Summer Time, called Daylight Savings Time.
Now we're going to look at a few of the international facts.
Is there not a brain teaser somewhere in that last fact?
Far better would be to throw the party when the clocks go back in October and you have an extra hour in the night, but no one wants to celebrate the depressing shortening of the days. (Although during uni, the club in which I used to live - which closed at 2 a.m. - would stay open for an extra hour every October, and we all rather appreciated that.)
In our last analysis of the semi-annual time-change, we looked at a the history of British Summer Time, called Daylight Savings Time.
Now we're going to look at a few of the international facts.
- For the second year, the US has beat us to the punch. They sprang forward at 2am on March 9, so in the past few weeks when you were calculating the time difference between here and New York as five hours, it was actually four. This year they'll end on the 2nd of November, and we'll finish a week earlier, on the 26th of October.
- Hawaii does not observe Daylight Savings Time, and neither does most of Arizona. The entire state of Indiana only started observing it in 2006.
- Iceland, which is also on GMT, does not observe Summer Time, presumably because they don't need to.
- Russia and Belarus change their clocks at 2am, not 1am.
- Asia and Africa generally do not observe Summer Time, nor do many countries on the equator where little difference is made.
- European countries simply adds 'Summer Time' to their time zones, so Central European Time (GMT + 1) becomes Central European Summer Time (GMT + 2). Only the UK and Ireland call theirs British Summer Time and Irish Summer Time, respectively, no doubt because we need to find summer where we can.
- And although Ireland and the UK are always on the same time, Ireland is technically on CET (GMT + 1), so they really "fall back" so we line up.
Is there not a brain teaser somewhere in that last fact?
