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this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
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standard time more closely aligns noon with the sun reaching it's high point. That's generally regarded as healthier for our circadian rhythms, aligning with the sunlight.
Maybe for you. Solar-noon only aligns with human-noon at specific longitudes (and iirc only really on the equinox). The further out from the longitude (and the further out from the equinox), the more drift the there is between solar noon and human noon.
Grab a straight stick and a compass. We got a couple hours to test this the old fashioned way.
Try spending a winter in New England and only seeing the sun on your commute and on weekends. EST is a bigass timezone and New England is the furthest east.
I'd be happy if we were on permanent AST (GMT-4:00), but permanent EDT I guess is the same.
Huh? Solar noon is exactly the same for everyone on the same longitude. People at the equator have noon at the same time as someone in the north. The only difference is the zenith of the sun and how long the forenoon and afternoon are.
Unfortunately the timezones are pretty wide so only in the center of the zone would be the closest to the solar mean.
I think people fail to realize that Northern latitudes always have bigger changes in day/night time than southern latitudes. Changing the time zones doesn't change the fact that Northern latitudes will always have more daylight in summer and more darkness in winter than the Southern more equatorial latitudes.
Longitude != Latitude.
I get them confused sometimes but then I just think of Jimmy Buffet..."Changes in attitude...changes in latitude".
But yes. New England gets doubly-boned for being both on the far North and far East stretches of a very large time zone. Not as boned as, say, Halifax..or maybe Quebec or Montreal...but there's as many people in just Rhode Island as there are in Nova Scotia.
Think of it like a ladder, the long part of the ladder is the longitude and the ladder rungs are the latitude.
Seriously, summer days in Calgary were long as fuck compared to Texas compared to Panamá.
I spent 12 years living in actual England and Canada. And I've also spent plenty of time in Pamaná and Costa Rica. The real problem is the year-round work/school schedule. We should be changing that to match the sun instead of changing our definition of time of day.
I won't say the time zone system we have is perfect, far from it, but they way to fix the problems with it isn't to shunt every single time zone 15 degrees east.
The time zones themselves now aren’t even that aligned, the closest solar noon ever gets to actual noon in my time zone is 12:40. Also people are way too different from each other to say that everybody is better with solar noon being at noon. It’s pretty well documented that at least half of humans are night owls.
Well sure people are different. I'm definitely a night owl. But coming up with time divisions and time zones at all were ways to give a reasonable reference to the sun's position in both nearby and far away regions. It's of course never going to precise everywhere. But I don't really think a deliberate seasonal redefinition of the time to suit corporate whims is really the most logical solution, either. We could instead socially agree to have summer/winter business hours, for example. We already do that for days of the week. Just agree to adjust work from 9-5 to 8-4 instead of saying 9 is 8 for the next 7 months. You still get your after work sun while being more honest about where we are in the rotation and it will have the same physiological impact. We already have 38 time zones instead of 24. So we can make them more granular if we need to re-align closer to solar min/max within the population centers where it would matter most.
edit: probably relevant to add that I also think we should switch to a 13 month calendar of 28 day lunar months with a global holiday at the end, which goes for two days on leap years.