Spring forward

An interesting Wired article on Daylight Savings Time and the increasing number of tweaks to the system, and, in turn, their risks and impacts. Some of this was touched on here recently.

Regarding, for example, the tweaks to Indiana’s notoriously complicated system (now being somewhat simplfied):

“This is like Y2K except this one is really happening,” said university IT spokesman Steve Tally.

Currently, most Indiana computer users set their PCs to a special “Indiana East” setting — Eastern time that doesn’t spring forward every April. Starting this April, however, they’ll change their PCs to Eastern Daylight Time. The few who observe Central time set their computers to Central, and will also make the switch. Tally predicts the changeover will create havoc with the widely used Microsoft Outlook calendar application. When the time changes, he said, appointments will still be listed according to the old Indiana East time. The calendars of Central time Outlook users, in turn, will continue to list appointments according to Central time.

With a nationwide shift in daylight-saving scheduling slated for next year, Indiana’s experience offers a preview of potential glitches in store for the rest of the country. Starting in 2007, daylight-saving time will begin on the second Sunday of March rather than the first Sunday in April, as it does today. Daylight-saving time will end the first Sunday of November, a week later than it does now.

David Prerau, author of a book on the history of daylight-saving time, said past time changes have not caused major technical glitches. However, the last major time change was in 1986. Since then, Americans have become more dependent on computerized and automated technologies.

And that’s important. Back in 1986, the assumption was that, when the time zone shifts, people would manually change their clocks, or intervene in automatic systems to change a setting. Today, people just assume that calendaring systems and computers and even clocks will be magically aware of these sorts of things and change on their own. It’s not quite to that point yet — and a lot of what those systems do today are based on rules, and that the rules are not being willy-nilly changed on an annual or semi-annual basis.

(via BoingBoing)