Saturday, March 10, 2012

10 March 2012 Burning Daylight



          Defined as wasting time that might better be spent in productive labors generating income or other things beneficial to the individual or the enterprise.
          Daylight Savings Time descends upon the nation, or most of it, at 0200 tomorrow morning.  This is earlier in the calendar year than DST once went into effect.  In my youth, DST began in April and ended in October.  There was also no official national statute from 1945 – 1966.  States and locales could inflict or prevent time adaptation. 
          There have been several Congressional intercessions since 1966.
http://www.webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/e.html will provide a history of DST in the U.S. and other nations. 
          In a local application of “burning daylight”, I just reset my watches.  I have two solar-powered titanium wristwatches.  One is a dual read-out analog & digital Citizen product.  The other, also a Citizen, is an analog chronometer. 
          I reset these watches twice a year, when we change to and from DST.  The accuracy of both watches is tight enough that I have never noticed more than a 10-second variation from the U.S.N.O official time clock.  It takes me about 30-45 minutes to maintain and reset these watches, 
          In all honesty, I require more accuracy from my watches than most people will ever need or demand.  When I began in medical lab analysis, we were still performing many functions manually against stopwatches and timers.  A second or two of error could invalidate many procedures and necessitate a lengthy repeat for a whole series of patients.  Burning daylight generally indicated a loss of attention or a non-functioning timer had caused an entire run to fail.  Having a highly accurate watch on one’s wrist often removed an external variable and wasted time. 
Don’t forget to set your watches and clocks ahead one hour tonight.  Don’t forget to change your smoke detector batteries.  Ours are hard-wired, so all we have to do is change clocks. 
          That’s the watchword for the day.

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