Daylight

Remember Y2K? That temporal computer glitch is a hazy memory today, but there's another one on the horizon that could cause us grief in less than three weeks: Call it the Daylight Saving Devil. Y2K, you'll remember, was the result of years of neglect by programmers who cut corners by using two digits for the year in date calculations - threatening worldwide crashes when the clock ticked into the year 2000. This time, Congress created the Daylight Saving Devil by approving the U.S. Energy Act of 2005.

25 years ago: The Board of Education of Carroll County today announced its policy for free lunches and free milk for school children unable to pay the full price of meals and milk served in schools under the National School Lunch and Special Milk Programs. -- the Community Reporter, Sept. 27, 1974.50 years ago: Daylight Savings Time will end Saturday night, or rather 2 a.m. Sunday. So turn your clocks back one hour early Sunday morning to the sensible time. Brunswick has voted to use the old time and not the Daylight Savings Time next year.

When Americans go off daylight-saving time at 2 a.m. on Sunday, they will need to set their clocks back an hour. That's easy. Harder for many is setting their body clocks back an hour.To the rescue: Dr. Alfred Lewy, a professor at Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland and an expert on resetting biological clocks.In April, Lewy proposed a system for speeding the adjustment to daylight time. Now he has a regimen to help people shift their body clocks the other way. It relies on the body's two main zeitgebers, or time keepers -- sunlight and the hormone melatonin, which is produced by a tiny gland at night.

150 years ago in The Sun Sept. 19: The city, yesterday morning, was rife with a rumor that a dreadful accident had happened on the Philadelphia Railroad. As far as we could learn from the railroad office, a collision took place about twelve o'clock on Sunday night, between two trains, near Wilmington.100 years ago in The Sun Sept. 23: HAGERSTOWN, MD., (Special Dispatch to the Baltimore Sun) -- William James, aged seventy-five years, killed himself with chloroform this evening. He purchased two ounces of the drug, saying he needed to clean some articles at his home.

Tired and cranky? Did you have to blast the kids out of bed HTC this morning? Sleep experts say you can blame the arrival of Daylight-Saving Time, our annual form of stay-at-home jet lag.If you thought sleeping later on Sunday would carry you through the time change, well, wrong, according to internist Thomas Hobbins, director of the Maryland Sleep Disorders Center in Towson. Losing an hour of sleep is no small matter, especially after the weekend has already tinkered with your sleep habits.

Frankly, it's up to you to remember to set your clocks back an hour tonight. You're big boys and girls.Until then, perhaps we could take one second -- based (as you know) on the microwaves emitted by the vibrations of hot cesium atoms -- to ponder the profoundly metaphysical and timeless questions of the universe:1. What is time?2. What is a "good" time?3. What does "metaphysical" mean, exactly?But there's no time for these timeless questions. 'Tis high time to move forward in time. Time is on my side.

25 years agoSt. Joseph's School will close following this semester. The school, on Route 194 in Taneytown, has been hit by a lack of teachers, which is affecting the Maryland parochial system. -- The Carroll Record, March 9, 1972.50 years agoBy defeating the statewide Daylight Savings measure, the House of Delegates left the "time" question up to individual towns and cities. Baltimore City has already determined that it will have daylight savings and Baltimore County will probably adopt the city's time.

Earlier this month, most of the country switched to daylight-saving time. The idea for extending the hours of sunlight that could be enjoyed during normal waking hours was first suggested by Benjamin Franklin in 1784. It was not until 1907 that Englishman William Willett tried to persuade the House of Commons to move the clock forward by one hour in the spring. The idea was rejected.During World War I, England, the United States and some other countries began to use daylight-saving time to save fuel used to power lights.

Remember to set your clocks ahead one hour before retiring tonight. Eastern Standard Time enda at 2 a.m. tomorrow when Eastern Daylight Savings Time resumes.Pub Date: 4/05/97

Earlier this month, most of the country switched to daylight-saving time. The idea for extending the hours of sunlight that could be enjoyed during normal waking hours was first suggested by Benjamin Franklin in 1784. It was not until 1907 that Englishman William Willett tried to persuade the House of Commons to move the clock forward by one hour in the spring. The idea was rejected.During World War I, England, the United States and some other countries began to use daylight-saving time to save fuel used to power lights.

It's the last Sunday in October, time for Europe to switch its clocks back an hour to standard time. We used to do the same thing, but since 2007 we've waited until the first Sunday in November to "fall back." We'll remain on Eastern Standard Time in Maryland until the second Sunday in March, when we'll "spring forward" again. Almost two-thirds of our year now falls within Daylight Saving Time.

John Polyniak in Lake Shore notes that on Sept. 22 - the fall equinox - daylight lasted nine minutes longer than the night. "So how can it be a true equinox?" he asks. The center of the sun's disk set 12 hours after it rose on the 22nd. But "sunrise" and "sunset" occur when the top of the disk is on the horizon, adding a few minutes of sunlight to the day. Day and night are most equal here on Sept. 26.

In case you're keeping track, 2009 will be exactly half over today at 8 a.m. That assumes you're going by Universal Time. If you run your life on Eastern Daylight Time, as most of us around here do, the midpoint of the year comes at 1 p.m. Did you make any New Year's resolutions back on Jan. 1? If so, half the time available to make good on your promises has now slipped away.

News item: Auditors uncover $39.7 million in an obscure city tax collection account that had been left untouched for years. Baltimore finance director says he is embarrassed by the oversight, which is blamed on staff turnover and poor communications. To: Edward J. Gallagher, director of finance Fm: Baltimore taxpayers Re: Some helpful reminders No offense, but have you checked all the city's collection accounts? Replaced the batteries in the calculators? Read every bank statement?

Feeling better? We're now a week past the year's latest sunrise, and Old Sol is already climbing above the eastern horizon about a minute earlier than he did on the 4th. We'll gain 12 minutes more morning sunshine by month's end, and we'll add 22 minutes in the evening. So get out there. Enjoy the increasing daylight. Rejigger your circadian rhythms. Expose your skin and try to manufacture some vitamin D.

Raymond Fielding chronicled the last great convulsion between old and new media a half-century ago. It ended in the only modern extinction of a major type of news media. He does not believe what's going on now between print and the Internet will end like that. (Insert huge hopeful sigh from print journalist here.) Fielding wrote The American Newsreel: 1911-1967, which laid out the rise and fall of a now-forgotten form that delivered news to the masses in moving pictures and sound in movie theaters through the first half of the 20th century.

I was sure I'd missed it. You know, the "fall back" part of the "spring forward, fall back" time changing that we do every year. I was sure it got by me somehow. As we moved through the month of October, I kept looking for the little clock on the front page of my newspaper that reminds us that this is the weekend to turn the clocks back, but I never saw it. Turns out, we don't do it in October anymore. We do it during the first weekend in November, so yesterday was the big day. We did it in November last year, too, but it apparently didn't leave much of an impression on me because I spent all of last month waiting for that extra hour of sleep.

September arrives tonight, the longest month of the year (count the letters). It's also Baltimore's wettest (3.98" on average), probably thanks to a century of passing tropical systems. Average high temperatures at BWI slip from 82 degrees to 73. Average lows dip from 61 to 51. Records range from a high of 101 degrees on Sept. 7, 1881, to a low of 35 degrees, on Sept. 25, 1963. We'll lose 74 minutes of daylight.

It's pretty simple, actually: Whether or not you believed he was grandstanding or using gamesmanship (and, seriously, why would you?) all last weekend, if that U.S. Open playoff hadn't included Tiger Woods, would you have paid any attention to it? It took the Boston Celtics six more years to win their next NBA championship after Len Bias died than it took Maryland to win its first national championship afterward. Nobody would have guessed that 22 years and three days ago. More people cheered and supported Rafael Palmeiro after his return from flunking an actual steroid test than cheered last week for Miguel Tejada, who is only suspected, not proven to have used performance enhancers.

My 220-year-old townhouse has a formal dining room with a pair of tall windows opening onto a busy street. The room gets plenty of daylight but presents privacy issues. We have therefore covered the windows with heavy floor-to-ceiling draperies. But there's little wall space for stacking the draperies and under-curtains when they are not drawn across the windows. Can you suggest a less ponderous treatment that would allow daylight to enter the space while still preserving our privacy? Yours is a situation in which both practical aims can be achieved without resorting to a treatment of questionable stylistic integrity.