Comment by exDM69 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by exDM69 | Hacker News Reader

Greetings from 60 degrees northern latitude. We just turned our clocks back an hour a week ago. That means that there's an hour more sunlight before I wake up and it's dark by the time I'm out of work. I have to say, I don't really like the arrangement of daylight saving time.

Today the sun rises at 07.52 in the morning and sets at 16.14 at the afternoon. It's going to be getting worse for two more months and that means it's 4 months before it's any better than today. For a six month period most of my life is walking through these orange tunnels that appear when sodium lights illuminate wet asphalt and concrete. The first symptoms of limited sunlight exposure are starting to show around this time of the year and supplemental vitamin d has to be taken or wild mood swings start to appear.

When I used to live at a student campus, I had a period of "hibernation" every winter. I lived an ascetic lifestyle in the one square mile around the campus and the uni. I only left to go home for xmas. I re-emerged when the catkins started appearing on the willows.

In these latitudes, it would make sense to be in permanent daylight saving time ("summer time"). During the summer and the winter there's really no difference since the sun is practically constantly up or down. It's the fall and the spring that make the difference.

And if anyone knows of good software engineering career options a little closer to the equator, drop me a line :)

The problem isn't daylight savings.

The problem is that the spread of timezones throughout the world throws up some awfully odd things. There's very few places in the world where noon is actually true noon (ie, sun at highest point of day).

Where I live, we have no summer DST. In the height of summer it is bright at 4 am, and dark at 7pm. However, the timezone is so ridiculously wide that any change to create a later summer evening means that for some people, it would be blazingly hot at 7pm and not dark until closer to 9pm.

Society adopted timezones as a measure of co-ordination for things like rail timetables and telephone calls. Prior to that, everyone set noon to 'true noon'.

In reality, more timezones should be introduced, possibly sliced down to the 30 minutes. Because society is a lot more computerised, dealing with multiple timezones is a lot less hassle than it once was. I can get the exact local time for any place on earth in a nanosecond on the internet. Scheduling software automatically calculates it for me.

Personally, I want daylight savings so I can claw back some of that unused daylight that gets wasted early in the morning. But I don't want to force someone who lives 600 miles away from me to deal with the consequences of that. But a more fractured set of timezones would help immensely.

Have you considered going to a tanning bed? I have heard this works very well, improving mood and general outlook during the dark times. I plan on doing this 1-2 times a week when the winter gets going hardcore here as an experiment.

In reading up on this subject, just a few minutes is all that is needed, the point is not a tan, just exposure to UV and brightness.

Let's see how your mood is when diagnosed with skin cancer! Not that I would wish it in anyone, but intentional exposure to damaging UV when there are safer alternative treatments for SAD does not seem like a sensible course of action.

Are you aware that Vitamin D supplements don't actually give you proper levels of activated Vitamin D? It turns out there is a balance of too much UV and too little UV. If you go to a tanning bed for a few minutes a couple times a week, you aren't doing damage, but are activating Vitamin D. It isn't even enough to have a tan.

I know it is tricky, but there are situations where there is no such thing as 0 risk, you have to optimize for minimal. Making 0 risk of one thing frequently increases risk for others. In this case, improper active vitamin D levels increase risk for lots of ailments, far more than a few minutes of UV exposure does for skin cancer.

A few minutes exposure to UV isn't harmful, and is on balance likely benficial.

Put it this way - I would get more UV collecting my mail in summer than you would on a tanning bed for a couple of minutes. And I haven't dropped dead. But a bright sunny day does make my mood brighter.

Vitamin D deficiency and depression are much bigger issues than UV over exposure.

No I have not considered using a solarium tanning bed, nor a bright "sunlight" lamp. Various studies have associated solarium tanning with increased skin cancer risk and bright lamps with damage in the eye cells that sense light. Then there is the bright-light-in-your-ears hoax (funded by ex-nokia execs and powered by questionable "scientific" evidence).

I don't think that these miracle cures for darkness have an overall positive effect. One study may show that they help with the symptoms of limited sunlight exposure but other studies show that they cause harm as well. These cures seem to attack the problem by fixing one aspect of the problem, usually by bombing you with photons in the visible light spectrum. I don't believe there is a replacement for full-spectrum sunlight.

I don't know if it's related, but my domestic cats live largely in a light cycle dominated by my daily business, which is not related to time of year changes in any way. Yet they shed their fur every fall and every spring. I think the amount and period of daily sunlight through the small windows of my appartment is the key factor inducing these changes in the animals (and even more so with my indoor plants).

I prefer getting my daily intake of photons the good old nuclear fusion way.

Of course I explicitly stated that tanning is not the point. I explicitly suggested less exposure than that point. To my knowledge there have been no studies on the effects of limited exposure like this that suggest they cause cancer any more than normal (not burning/tanning level) exposure to the sun.

Nor is it a miracle cure, from my understanding it isn't even a cure, just a symptom reducer, because you know, proper levels of vitamin D that are actually activated are not achievable via supplement. It actually takes UV to do that.

And if anyone knows of good software engineering career options a little closer to the equator, drop me a line :)

There is no visible contact info in your profile. (Not that I know of any jobs for you. Just sayin' -- assuming you are at all serious.)

I don't know about the "good" part (salaries here are pretty low), but we do have a shortage of software engineers here in Uruguay, and it's far easier to get a job permit than the U.S., plus we have very nice summer weather.

(winter, not so much - cold isn't the only dreadful thing, I'd rather have snow and dry cold than our humid cold. People actually perceive it as colder).

(low being U$ 1.500 after taxes plus free socialist-style healthcare)

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