By fnord12 | April 13, 2011, 11:45 PM | Ummm... Other? | Link

Down with Daylight Savings

I hate having to change the clocks twice a year. It's stupid. And it never seems to be a good change. It always seems to result in it being darker either when i'm waking up or when i'm driving home or both. I keep hoping the US will eventually realize it's a stupid practice and just stop doing it altogether. So, yay, Russia!

Russia puts forward its clocks for the last time this weekend.

Leading the way in an incipient global trend that rejects the notion of changing the clocks in spring and autumn, the Russian authorities believe the move will reduce human - and animal - misery.

It means Russia, which stretches across nine time zones from Kaliningrad in Europe to the Kamchatka peninsula in the Pacific, will stay permanently on summer time from this Sunday, gaining extra daylight in the afternoons during its seemingly interminable winter.

The president, Dmitry Medvedev, said Russians were fed up with the time changes because they caused "stress and illnesses" and "upset the human biorhythm".

"It's irritating, people wake up early and don't know what to do with themselves for the spare hour," he said. "And that's not to mention the unhappy cows and other animals that don't understand the clocks changing and don't understand why the milkmaids come to them at a different time."

...
Arkady Tishkov, a geography professor and member of the working group that advised cancelling twice-yearly time adjustments, said they provoked a litany of problems, including disruption of sleep patterns, aggravation of chronic diseases and increased traffic accidents.

"During the period of the clocks changing, the number of heart attacks increases by 50% and the number of suicides by 66%," he said. Crime will also drop when the clocks are not put back in October because thieves are less active during daylight hours, Tishkov added.

Do you know how many time zones there were in the Soviet Union? Eleven: