Indistinguishable from Fraud

Bill Clinton's biggest mistake was not his involvement with Monica Lewinsky. His biggest mistake was firing Joycelyn Elders.

If he had listened to Joycelyn, though, maybe he wouldn't have made the second (more embarrassing) mistake.

It seems that some people are angry that a Kurdish-language version of Firefox exists. The mozilla.feedback newsgroup has been full of posts about Kurdish, many of them similar to this message.

Who knew that making it possible for volunteers to translate a web browser into multiple languages could be controversial?

Daylight Saving Time seems to serve three major purposes:

• Health: keeping sunrise roughly constant relative to when work or school starts makes modern routines easier on our circadian rhythms, improving our pyschological health and perhaps also our physical health. In addition, the daylight "saved" by not "sleeping in" hours past sunrise during the summer makes more outdoor activity possible, increasing the amount of exercise we get without conscious effort.
• Energy use: By using less artificial light and spending less time inside watching TV during the summer, America saves about 1% on total energy use by using Daylight Saving Time.
• Safety: Daylight Saving Time tries to keep both morning and evening commutes in daylight when possible. But when that isn't possible, it tries to ensure that at least the morning commute is during daylight. This reduces car-accident injuries are reduced by thousands or tens of thousands per year.

I think a time system could improve health, energy use, and safety even more if it were to make small adjustments throughout the year instead of large adjustments twice a year. For example, a small amount of time might be added or taken away just before 2am every morning, in order to keep sunrises at 6am at a latitude of 40 degrees. The daily changes would be small enough for most people to ignore -- less than two minutes per day even around the equinoxes.

Interestingly, switching to continuous time change would also address the main criticisms of DST:

• Lost productivity and an increase in fatal auto accidents twice a year due to disruption of sleeping patterns.
• Lost productivity fiddling with clocks.
• Farmers are forced out of synchronization with the rest of society.

It seems like my favorite kind of compromise, one that reveals a false trade-off and makes both sides happier than they would have been with their previous preferred solutions.

Of course, there would be new drawbacks. Certain time calculations would be more difficult: night-shift workers might find themselves needing to keep track of the changing length of each day, instead of being confused only twice a year. Planning a weekly meeting involving people in different hemispheres (or DST regimes) would become more difficult, especially if people on each hemisphere have tight schedules.

We would also have to replace our clocks and watches. I'm not about to pretend that forcing everyone to purchase new clocks would be a good thing by itself, but at least it would only be a one-time cost; computing power is cheap enough that the the price of clocks would not increase permanently. When we upgrade our clocks to deal with days that vary slightly in length, we should also give them all the ability to update themselves; this would be more pleasant than requiring you to enter the date in addition to the time after each power outage. We could also dramatically improve the user interfaces of most alarm clocks with respect to how often they fail to wake people up, but that's the subject for another blog post.

This "Continuous DST" proposal is not to be confused with the proposal known as "Year-round DST". The advantages of DST arise from the twice-yearly changes to our clocks corresponding to the changes in the seasons. While "year-round DST" might make sense as a short-term response to an energy crisis such as World War II, in the long term it equivalent to not having DST at all: over a period of several years, everyone will shift their hours back to when they are comfortable being awake unless the government also legislates working hours, store hours, and prime-time television.

I'll admit to being atypical when it comes to sleeping schedules. I work from home and can keep almost any schedule I want. I tend to be most productive at nights, when there are few distractions, so I often sleep during the day. I prefer to be outside during the evening and night, when I don't have to wear sunglasses. (As an added bonus, when I go grocery shopping, my dairy products will take less damage from the walk home). On the other hand, in college, when many students wouldn't even consider taking a class before 10am, I didn't mind having an 8am MWF class as long as I also had a 8:10am class on Tuesday and Thursday.

I'm sure many readers do keep "normal hours", whether by coercion or choice, so what do you think of Continuous DST?

Fox News may have a point with its "War on Christmas" meme. It's hard to explain a paragraph I saw while ordering a gift for my girlfriend through Amazon:

Jesse Ruderman, some of your items will arrive after December 24, 2005. If you haven't already selected faster shipping options, doing so might help get your items there in time for the holidays.

Fox is missing the big picture, though. The use of the phrase "the holidays" instead of the word "Christmas" is the least of the threats against Christmas. Some of the larger threats:

• Christmas muzac. Every Christmas song has been made into a hundred boring versions, which department stores, supermarkets, and airports play exclusively for about a month leading up to Christmas Day.
• Hanukkah Bushes disguised as Christmas trees. (The giveaway is usually the Star of David at the top.)
• In Switzerland, kids can no longer sit on Santa's lap at the mall due to fears of pedophilia.
• Consumerist gift-giving distracts us from other aspects of Christmas and may be an overall deadweight loss.
• Many parents tell their kids that Santa is real, causing all kinds of problems when they find out he isn't.
• One can no longer wish people "Happy Holidays", "Season's Greetings", or "Merry Christmas" without offending someone and taking a side in a pointless acrimonious debate.

Keepers of Lists rejected this list I wrote, so I'm posting it here (without yay/nay voting, unfortunately).

1. They're not with us, so they must be against us.
2. Once we control Geneva, we can modify the Geneva Convention.
3. When was the last time Switzerland won a war?
4. To see how long they remain neutral.
5. They refuse to refund us for the holes in their cheese.
6. Zurich and Geneva recognize gay marriage.
7. Four percent of Switzerland is muslim.
8. To freeze (and take) ill-gotten funds in Swiss bank accounts.
9. Their army keeps supplying small knives to terrorists.
10. To send a message to all the other "neutral" countries.
11. They would never expect it.
12. Easiest way to go to war with the entire rest of the world.
13. Retaliation for tricking us into signing the Geneva Convention after WWI.
14. To sieze control of lucrative domain names such as getri.ch and coo.ch.

If I worked for Diebold and wanted to help republicans win, I wouldn't do something easily detectable like changing 2% of votes to be for my candidate or making some machines break down at 5pm to give the the working class a difficult time. Instead, I would work harder on usability for machines going to friendly districts.

With this scheme, blame for any election-tipping would mostly go to "user error" rather than poor design. Even better, the voters who committed the errors will mostly be democrats, which will make democrats look dumb once again.

I saw a UCSD student wearing a "Make cows, not war!" shirt from Cowparade Prague. It made me think of the phrase "guns and butter" from economics.

The LA Times had an article about the war between "Merry Christmas" and "Happy Holidays": This Season, Greetings Are at Issue. The article was followed by commentary, an editorial, and letters.

Virgin Mobile picked the right year for its "Chrismahanukwanzakah" ad campaign.