April 1, 2005

What I noticed about daylight savings time through Site Meter.

I've been getting up too early all week, and I suspect it's because daylight saving time is needed to get the daylight out of the early morning and put it in the evening where we can use it instead of having it interfere with our sleep. Checking my Site Meter hour-by-hour graph this week, I'm thinking this sleep disturbance is quite common. Until this week, it was clear that the lowest traffic hour of the day was the four o'clock hour. Now the distinctive dip in the graph keeps hitting the three o'clock hour.

Here's a relevant piece, an op-ed in yesterday's NYT by David Prerau, who wrote a book about daylight saving time:
Under the present law we have daylight time in October but not in March, even though the sun rises at similar times in both months. The European Union starts daylight time on the last Sunday in March, with few complaints. Adding one spring week of daylight time would synchronize us with Europe. Adding two weeks in the spring would double the benefit while not making a single sunrise later than those we already experience in October, thus reducing concerns about dark mornings for farmers and children heading for school.

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