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The phrase “Daylight Saving Time” never made much sense to me. You’re not saving any daylight—you’re just moving it around in the day. When I told this to N-san, he suggested the phrase, “Evening Daylight Extension Time,” which makes more sense.

DST has never really affected my life too much. I tend to wake up earlier in the summer naturally anyway, when the sun starts rising earlier, so when DST comes around I usually just change both my clock and my alarm, so I’m waking up a nominal hour later, but at the same unadjusted time. (And usually about an hour earlier than I do in the dead of winter.)

I was contemplating the usefulness of DST today, and I realized that most people don’t work like this. Either they don’t really have as flexible a schedule, or they just don’t have the fortitude to wake up earlier without a lying clock, but either way, I think the foundational principle of DST is that people wake up at the same time year round. Once I realized this fact, the other pieces started falling into place.

See, if the time zone is perfectly adjusted, then noon falls at the exact middle of the daylight hours. At a relatively extreme latitude, the variance in daylight hours might be, for example, 9 hours of daylight in the dead of winter, and 14 hours in the middle of summer. That would put sunrise and sunset 4.5 hours on either side of noon in winter—7:30 am and 4:30 pm—and 7 hours on either side in summer—5:00 am and 7:00 pm in winter.

If we make two reasonable assumptions—that people wake up at the same time year round, and that people don’t like waking up before sunrise—then we should find people waking up around 7:30 am throughout the year (and going to bed around 11:30 pm). In the winter months, this is perfect—but by the time summer rolls around, people are sleeping through several hours of sunshine in the morning. Since people (according to our assumption) aren’t going to naturally wake up earlier on their own, we introduce the “lying clock” to pretend that 6:30 is really 7:30. So now people are waking up at 6:30 am and going to bed at 10:30 pm, and they get an “extra” hour of sunlight during their day.

Note that, with this model, switching to use Daylight Saving Time year-round doesn’t help any, because now you’ve put sunrise in the winter at 8:30 am. People don’t want to wake up in the dark, so you’re back to square one.

It’s too bad they don’t, though. I read an intriguing (if tongue-in-cheek) proposal on Slashdot during my reading on the subject. The idea was that, instead of tying winter sunrise to 7:30 am (and the sun’s zenith at noon), instead stick it around 1 pm (with the summer sunset falling around 10:30 am). The thought is that if people could be persuaded to get out of bed and do their daily commute in the dark (which many people do in the winter anyway), they’d be treated with a beautiful sunrise on their lunch break every day, and after they get off work they’d still have plenty of sunlight even in the wintertime (the sun would set around 10 pm), and in the summertime they’d be going to sleep with sunlight to spare even if they partied until midnight. You’d have the core sunlight hours of the day during the hours when you’re most likely to be outside enjoying them.

I’m not quite sure I’m ready to switch to such a novel scheme (as I’m one of those stubborn folks who hates waking up when it’s dark outside), but it certainly would be nice to have as much daylight as I cared to spend, every day, 365 days a year.

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Nothing much interesting today, just Human Tetris. Enjoy!

Today I got my braces adjusted for the first time. I say “adjusted” because that’s what I’ve always heard people call it, but I think because my braces are “self-ligating”, it means they actually don’t have to be adjusted. All they did was take out the old wire (which involved them pushing lightly on the brace on each tooth to snap the “door” open, then taking the wire out) and put in a new wire (the same process in reverse).

The assistant asked if I wanted to brush or floss while the wire was out. I wasn’t expecting that. “Is that, um, normal?” I asked. “Yeah, it just makes it a lot easier to brush without the wire in. But you don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

“Oh,” I said. “I guess I don’t really care.” I figure one special brushing every seven weeks isn’t going to really make that much of a difference in my dental hygiene. I’ll probably try it next time just for the experience, but it just seemed weird this time since I wasn’t expecting it. The assistant happily put the new wires in and that was that.

I had to wait for a while for the actual orthodontist; she was busy pulling the braces off another patient’s teeth. Oh, how I long for that day! Straightened teeth and no more wires! But, unfortunately, that’s still several years away for me.

Once the orthodontist came over, she poked at my teeth, checked out my bite, and that was about it. All in all the visit took about half an hour! She did say that there was little chance of my top teeth moving out of the way enough to get braces on the bottom teeth. So, as I had feared, they’ll probably have to put spacers on my molars while the bottom teeth straighten out. She said she won’t do that for at least another couple of months, though, but once they’re on they’ll be on for four to six months most likely. I’m not looking forward to that.

After work, I played Go at Uwajimaya for the first time since last October. Not only was it the first time playing at Uwajimaya since then, I haven’t played Go at all—not even online—since then. Surprisingly I wasn’t too rusty, but I only played a pair of 13×13 handicap games. I won by exactly three points both times. I hope I can play again next week, maybe even on a full size board!

The potato is my favoritest food ever. I eat potatoes in some form nearly every day. I haven’t met a way of preparing potatoes that I haven’t liked. Shredded, sliced, frenched … baked, fried, steamed, boiled … with meat, with cheese, with spices, with ketchup, or just by themselves … no matter what, I feel happiness when I eat a potato.

Last week’s round of posts were all written the week before (although not in the order I posted them—I moved them around and edited the transitions after I had them all completed, which might help explain some of the repetition or lack of flow). All of that batch is posted now, but I still have thoughts on the subject that didn’t squeak into any of those posts.

First, I wanted to make explicit the connection between the “irrationality” of the Ultimatum Game and the iPhone early adopters. The reason why the early adopters were upset about the drastic price decrease is that it revealed a huge disparity in how the economic profit from the transaction was shared. They had assumed that Apple was not raking in $200+ of economic profit on a $600 item, and when they discovered that the margins had been so huge, they were understandably miffed.

I don’t think they were particularly concerned about the fact that it was “unfair” that other people were able to buy them cheaper than they were at a later date. For example, if Apple had announced that they had figured out some revolutionary breakthrough in manufacturing iPhones that enabled them to sell them for $200 cheaper, I don’t think the early adopters would have been anywhere near as disgruntled, despite the fact that the outcome for them was the same (they paid more for an early model, and later purchasers got the same thing for cheaper). The vital difference is that of economic profit.

And while I’m on the subject of the Ultimatum Game, I discovered the other day that autistic individuals are much closer to the Nash equilibrium for the Ultimatum Game. They are both much more likely to offer much lower sums as the Divider, as well as accept very low sums as the Decider. The former behavior seems questionable, but the latter behavior is eminently rational. I can imagine a person thinking, “Hmm, if I say ‘accept’, I get one dollar, and if I say ‘reject’, I get zero dollars. Which one do I pick? Duh!”

Finally, I wanted to advance the hypothesis that, when an average person suggests market controls, it is almost always because of a perception of unfairness in economic profit. From last Tuesday’s example of Farmer Joe and Rancher Bob, if there were some “price ceiling” for cows, or a “price floor” for potatoes, they could potentially reduce the amount that Rancher Bob is able to “unfairly” take of that economic profit. Of course, if the market controls are at the wrong price (or the prices of the underlying good change), that results in a market inefficiency and a surplus of either demand or supply.

These desires may be (and in fact most probably are) misguided at best, but I’ve never heard the economic profit angle addressed by economists. They seem to always assume an ideal market with a large number of buyers and sellers, with economic profit approaching zero. Perhaps by taking the irrational “unfairness” factor into account, economists could better advocate their desired free-market approach? (Or perhaps they already do!)