Thursday, October 23, 2014
You'd think....
After all these decades of absurdity, it's amazing that anyone still thinks you can accomplish anything by moving clock hands.
Children’s health would benefit if Britain switched to continental time by moving the clocks forward an hour, say researchers. Lighter evenings would increase the amount of time children engaged in moderate to vigorous physical activity each day by an average of two minutes, a study showed.Two minutes! Yes! Huzzah! Calloo callay! Instant salvation! There's a serious problem with kids lacking sunlight, as Polistra noted plaintively here. Rickets has returned to London. But you aren't going to touch the problem by fiddling with clocks. Bad culture and misused science cause the problem. The bad culture needs no description; the misused science is an overemphasis on melanoma. In fact melanoma from typical outside play is almost nonexistent. Recent increases in melanoma come specifically and solely from artificial tanning. (This should be obvious from simple logic. Kids no longer play outside, and melanoma among young people is increasing. Therefore sunlight is not the cause of the increase.) If you really want a clock-based solution, change school hours. You can do this far more flexibly than the crude DST crap. In high-latitude cool places like England or Wash, you could expand and contract both ends of the school day. Run school 7AM to 1PM in summer, and 9:30AM to 2PM in winter. Improve traffic safety and give more illuminated outside play. ¶ 1:54 AM
