 permanent daylight savings time. The law now passed through US Senate, still not passed through the House. It is getting some pushback, but if it is adopted then Canada is sure to follow. So what is this all about? In some ways it seems like a very, very small thing. We're changing the clock by an hour. So it's really in some ways insignificant, yet I find it very symbolic of the way that we interact with nature. Now when we look at time, since the beginning of time you could say since long before anything that we know. Clearly every day the sun goes up and then the sun comes down. And there's been many different ways to count time and I find it all fascinating different kinds of time reckoning, but I won't go into all that. One of the most popular ways since ancient times is to have 12 hours of the day and 12 hours of the night. And then what took over as the popular system is to have have everything start at midnight. So you have 12 hours of the sun rising and then 12 hours of the sun going down. And then in modern times we had standard time where you know because if you base everything on the sun you know every time you move east or west you get a different time. So in order to get things a bit more more regular you could have a large area sharing the same time so you don't have to change your clocks every time you go to another town. Then we had standard time zones and some of them can get pretty wacky when we start to warp the boundaries so that they're really stretched. But for the most part you're never going to be much more than half an hour off whatever the true local noon is in your area. So at 12 o'clock that's considered to be the end of the morning. The sun is at its highest point and 12 o'clock at night that's midnight the lowest point of the evening and then the sun starts coming back. But then someone had a clever idea that we could actually pretend that the time is different than what it is. We could actually just change the clocks completely arbitrarily. The sun isn't changing still doing the same thing but we can when it's actually 12 o'clock we can pretend it's one o'clock. And the idea being that people don't like to wake up at 5 a.m. and so they're sleeping through all that beautiful sunshine in the summer so if we tell them at 6 a.m. maybe they're more likely to wake up or at least a little bit earlier than they would have. And at night people don't like to go to sleep at 9 p.m. most people. So what if you tell them it's 10 p.m. oh well then it seems a little more reasonable. So the entire idea of daylight savings time is all based on pretending. Pretending that the time is something different than it is. So this has been happening for around a century now and people really get tired of this whole changing the clocks it adds a whole new level of complexity having to change your clocks twice a year and then when you're dealing with multiple time zones dealing with people around the world it adds a whole new layer of confusion because the the dates of the daylight savings change can be different and so that causes the time zone different changes to be different and so leads to a lot of confusion of dealing with times. And so for all the clear reasons why nobody likes to do this twice a year clock change and it seems completely unnecessary now there is a strong movement to get rid of it. But then I was surprised to learn that we're not getting rid of it they're actually suggesting that we keep it permanently in place permanent DST and the idea well you know maybe we'll get people to use less energy because they can be out during the sunshine and you know maybe they'll be out later at night and do more shopping or something. So I mean the arguments for why we should have permanent seem to be pretty dubious but the idea is now that we're simply going to pretend permanently that when the clock says 12 the clock says 12 well it's actually 11 o'clock in the sky and so we're actually counting 12 we're counting 12 hours from 11 p.m. to 11 a.m. and then as the Sun mostly goes up and then 12 hours from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. as the Sun mostly goes down. So I spent five minutes talking about this it seems completely insignificant and it really doesn't matter and so that's certainly true but it seems to me very symbolic because we are pretending that that the time is different than what it is. It's one level of disconnection from nature and I know it's just a number 12 o'clock is just a number but if we have 12 hours counting up the Sun's going up 12 hours counting down the Sun's going down that in some very very small way connects us to the natural environment around around us what's actually happening in the sky. We see when it's 12 o'clock every all the a.m. hours the Sun's going up all the p.m. hours the Sun's going down roughly within the you know a few minutes off because of our time zones and standard time but basically we have that connection a.m. is Sun going up p.m. is Sun going down and it just gives that very simple bit of connection to what's actually happening in the sky. But when we pretend that 12 is one well now the Sun is actually at its peak at 1 p.m. and so you know we sometimes call 12 noon and 12 at night midnight but now 1 p.m. would be noon and then 1 a.m. would be midnight. So why do why do we think it's okay to simply pretend what's happening in the sky simply to you know declare that nature is something other than it is. It seems to be it could be seen as an act of arrogance on the part of human society of just saying that we can redefine nature to be whatever we want it to be or simply an expression of this disconnection that it actually doesn't matter because we are so disconnected from the natural environment that it really doesn't matter what time we say it is. Those electric lights are going to be on and you know it's only one hour difference so why not why not just say it's whatever time we feel like it being. So once again very small point but I feel like it's a sign of how disconnected that we can easily become from nature and I wonder what other ways has this been happening where we've been sort of redefining away nature and sort of pretending that we can sort of living in an imaginary world in a way where we can define things to be what they want what we want them to be and maybe this is actually good because you know it's certainly not ideal to be living in a pure state of nature and it's wonderful to have walls and roofs and wonderful systems to live comfortably and all that could be argued as being disconnected from nature. I'm inside a room right now with walls and a very nice roof which is keeping keeping the snow off and that could be seen as being disconnected from nature but I'm okay with it. So is this another example of it just being okay to kind of create this imaginary environment for ourselves or is this just one little step too far in the direction of moving away from the nature around us. So I'd be curious to hear what you think about it.