Category: History

Get Rid of Daylight Saving Time! (Rant)

I’m sitting in my office at 7am and it is completely dark outside. Why?  We have “sprung forward” on that biannual experiment called Daylight Saving Time. They’ve stolen my morning again, the bastards! DST is an anachronism that should be abandoned. According to Wikipedia…

Modern DST was first proposed in 1895 by the New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson, whose shift-work job gave him leisure time to collect insects, and made him aware of the value of after-hours daylight.

1895? New Zealand?! Bug collecting?!! What on earth were we thinking?

In my view the first few hours of daylight are precious. I try to be “solar” and get up with the sun each day. Problem is, they keep moving the goal posts back and forth. If you live in Florida in the summer this is particularly unfair. Early morning is the only part of the day that is clement and suited for activities outdoors in the fresh air! Old Ben Franklin had the right idea, “If you want to save energy, get up earlier!”

There is little evidence that DST saves energy (or anything else for that matter). It does favor certain sports and retail interests, but honestly, are those minor concerns enough to subject an entire society to such disruption twice a year?

Hans Rosling’s 200 Countries, 200 Years

This is an absorbing visualization of progress made in the past two hundred years. It seems to confirm the notion that “a rising tide lifts all boats”. He shows the relationship of wealth to health over time in a very intuitive way. His presentation allows us to “see” the benefits of the industrial revolution (early) and the agricultural “green” revolution (mid-twentieth century).

Human Capacity for Killing at a Distance

Source: duke.edu

Anthropologist Steven Churchill from Duke University recently gave a fascinating lecture [listen] on the discovery of projectile weapons by early Homo sapiens and subsequent effects on large carnivores (extinction!) and human evolution.

His basic premise is that sometime in the past 250,000 years humans discovered how to kill at a distance. This allowed us to crowd-out the various carnivore “gilds” including our co-evolved cousins the Neanderthals. In this photo he holds a spear-throwing projectile weapon (atlatl) in his right hand and a reproduction of a Neanderthal thrusting spear in his left.

These weapons have also had a profound effect on modern human conflicts. When we fight with thrusting weapons, the probability of injury is a linear function of the number of combatants: 0.5 with two on one, 0.33 with three on one, 0.25 with four on one, etc. So the strategy is to bring lots of friends to a fight! With projectile weapons and the function becomes exponential with the probability of injury decreasing by the square: 0.25 with two on one, 0.11 with three on one, and 0.06 with four to one!