What Time Is It?

With the weather being so non-eventful at present, and the weekend that so many have a love-hate relationship with is upon us, that being the onset of standard time (and an extra hour granted to us by...??), I thought I would discuss time this time while contemplating the wonderful November wx that will be ours to enjoy for the upcoming several days of time.  Look at the cloud free satellite shot over the country and the sprawling area of high pressure as per the surface map.

Here is the current surface map and the huge area of clear sky; fine sailing wx for any atmospheric interest.

So the wx is clear, cool, very dry....can't you tell with all of the static electricity in the air?  My oh my, I must have been lit up at least 10 times yesterday afternoon & evening thanks to donning my winter woollies for the East High football game.  So lets briefly discuss Time here this morning.....since the wx has little need for discussion over the next several days; although a 70ºF day for election day would merit some discussion.  But this weekend, specifically this Sunday morning at 2:00 am EDT, we will turn our clocks back one to then 1:00 am EST.  As was told by a classic educational film produced by Bell Laboratories from 1962, we learned in "About Time" it can be whatever time you want it to be.  Just set the time keeping device and keep it there, until all agree to change it to whatever time you'd like to change it to!  So, this weekend, we as a society are moving back to standard time from savings time.  Unless you live in Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands or the state of Arizona (but not the Navajo Indian Reservation, which does observe DST). Thanks to a recent act of congress, we now switch our clocks on the 2nd Sunday of March and the 1st Sunday of November at 2:00 am.  I for one will have my internal clock messed up for many days hence.  Here is a map of our standard time zones across the US.

Each time zone is roughly 15º wide longitudinally thanks to the rotation of the earth.  The 75th meridian west of the Prime Meridian marks the center of the Eastern Time Zone.  Then, add 15º for each subsequent zone across the US.  Thanks to the US rails, we now have standard time zones.  You see, train schedules were kept by local time keepers based on the solar time...different type of time, which led to much confusion.  To keep it simple, since Pittsburgh is west of Philly, the sun rises there later....20 minutes later to be precise.  Take a look in your hunting guide for the shooting times which are based on sunrise/set times across the state.  Here's the map....

The sun rises 20 full minutes later in steel city as opposed to the city of brotherly love.  Since Pittsburgh is 5º west of Philly, and the sun rises 20 minutes later, that equates to ~4 min/degree of longitude. Due to the earth's rotation, that is how much the celestial objects move in the sky...including the sun.  Thus everyone has a different solar time if they are located on a different meridian.  So, thanks to an act of Congress in 1918, all of the US adopted standard time zones that was in use by the railway systems in U.S. and O Canada since November 18, 1883.  The use of standard time gradually increased because of its obvious practical advantages for communication and travel. Now that Congress has created the Department of Transportation in 1966, time zone tinkering has become their puppy.  This is crucial, unless of course you have a smart phone which will tell you the time anywhere in the world which is kinda neat and you don't have a life like me and simply wonder about these things from time to time....no pun intended!  Here is the daylight distribution over our earth as of this writing.....

Or maybe you prefer this more hi-tech version thanks to an iPad app.....the circle of illumination is clearly 2 hours+ east of the east coast of the US.  The blue dot marks my locale.

So by looking above, the noon time position is somewhere through the Middle East, the eastern Mediterranean, and eastern Europe, approximately where the bisecting north-south line would split into 2 equal portions the daylight distribution from the top picture.  We can look at a world time zone map and see how close our approximation was geographically using that rudimentary approximation.  Seeing that it is ~ 5am here or ~ 7 hrs shy of "noon", then we would look for a time zone that is 7 hours ahead of us here in the eastern US!

I could go on and on as most of you know (different stories for different days), but I'll stop at this point and simply share with you one of my favorite ditties about Time.  It comes from Pink Floyd's classic "Dark Side of the Moon" album from 1973, where within one week sprinted straight to the top of Billboard's top albums and remained in the top 100 for 741 weeks from 1973-1988, arguably the most successful music album of all time!  One of my favorite, albeit somewhat depressing poems, comes from this album appropriately titled...."Time".  Here are the lyrics....

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
And you are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say

Then....Breathe Reprise....

Home, home again
I like to be here when I can
And when I come home cold and tired
It’s good to warm my bones beside the fire
Far away across the field
The tolling of the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spells

And here is the song!

Enjoy your hour longer than normal  weekend...which will allow us to contemplate the 1st round match-ups of the PIAA District 3 AAAA football; namely East High vs CD next week. 

Smitty

AA:  Nice weather and a great song along with the poem about time!