Florida's "Other Weird Law"

Getting nowhere near enough attention from the media in the aftermath of the Democrats getting the Republicans to enact their gun control proposals for them, is that the State passed a law making Daylight Savings Time permanent, all year round.

By overwhelming, bipartisan majorities, the normally fractious Senate and House agreed this week to make Florida the first in the nation to adopt year-round daylight saving time statewide. It would mean later sunrises and sunsets from November to March, peak tourist season for many beach cities.

I've searched for news of whether or not Governor Voldemort has signed this into law, but haven't found any indication.   All reports say that after his signing, we would require permission from the Fed.gov to enact it.  Assuming the Fed level at this time is inclined toward letting states do what they want in such minor things, the bill is supposed to take effect this summer, meaning this morning's clock resetting will be the last of those.

Not really.  Staying on DST forever makes me wonder if I'm going to have to go around the house un-setting all the things that automatically set themselves.

Most of the clocks in the house are self-adjusting.  The PCs, phones and tablets get the correct time from a server.  Just three or four clocks require manual intervention.  Several clocks, including the watches Mrs. Graybeard and I both wear, are so-called "atomic clocks": they synchronize to the NIST radio station WWVB between midnight and dawn (when conditions are the best for radio propagation for them).  Those all auto-update for the daylight/standard time transitions.   

We have one clock, now banished to the bathroom, that's sort of a "short bus"/"special needs" clock.  It routinely thinks it got its radio sync from WWVB and is within milliseconds of the right time, yet it's anywhere from minutes to months from the correct time and/or date.  We have a couple of things that used to "automatically" set to DST by using a perpetual calendar, but since the Fed.gov extended  the start and stop dates, we have to change them manually four times a year: once to start DST early, once when it adds another "spring forward", and a similar two times when DST ends late.

I actually wrote a piece about this idea last October when DST ended - although it was about some New England states and not Florida. 

It's unavoidable that we'll face longer days in the summer and shorter in the winter.  That change in sunlight hours is part of the change of seasons  caused by the 23.5 degree inclination of Earth's orbit.  I'd guess that most of us have traveled enough to notice that day and night length vary with latitude at any time of year, and it gets more extreme the farther toward the poles you go.  Here in the southernmost reaches of the US, (I'm not in the tropics - none of Florida is) we have less variation.  On the summer solstice, our day is just short of 14 hours long - 13:55:30.  On the winter solstice, our daylight is 3 hours 34 minutes shorter, 10:21:43. (source)  In Minneapolis, MN, the longest day lengthens to 15:36:48, and the shortest day shortens down to 8:46:12, virtually seven hours shorter than their longest day.  Nothing can be done about that.  All DST does is change what we call those hours.

 (Day length vs. Latitude for the year.  Source)

I've got to say that if I wrote such ninny legislation, I would have made Standard Time the standard time.  Solar noon is when the sun is on the meridian, that line that goes from north to south passing directly overhead.  With DST, solar noon occurs at 1PM, not 12.  Maybe I'm anal-retentive, but having solar noon at 1PM forever is just wrong.