I did some mathematical jiggery-pokery and came up with this pretty little graph.

You will need to click on that to get it big enough to read.

The graph shows sunrise, sunset, waking hours, and business hours through the course of the year. Solar noon is at the center, sunrise is above, and sunset below. It makes some pretty wild assumptions, too. It is based on an average observer at 40°N latitude. It assumes that the average observer wakes at 6am and goes to bed at 10pm. It assumes business hours of 9am to 5pm. It assumes that the observer is longitudinally situated in the center of an ideal time zone, so that local dynamical noon (of the clock) coincides with local apparent solar noon (when the sun is at its zenith). It also assumes that the average observer desires never to wake earlier before sunrise than he does on the winter solstice. According to my calculations, the average observer wakes approx. 75 minutes before sunrise on the winter solstice. The black curve above represents this time carried throughout the year. Notice that at the end of DST, as it is currently practiced in the United States, the observer wakes earlier than 75 minutes before sunrise for about three weeks - the last three weeks of Daylight Saving Time - before standard time resumes and he again wakes less than 75 minutes before sunrise. Also notice that a similar situation does not occur at the beginning of DST. In fact, DST could start up to one week earlier than it currently does and the observer would still wake no more than 75 minutes before sunrise - no earlier than he does on the winter solstice.

Therefore, there is a morning-light saving inefficiency at the end of DST, but not at the beginning. Assuming that it would be inefficient to have the observer spend more time awake in the dark in the morning than he does on the longest night of the year.

In 1966, Daylight Saving Time started six weeks later than it does now, and ended one week earlier. There was still an inefficiency of two weeks at the end, but none at the beginning. In 1987, DST started three weeks later than it does now, and ended one week earlier. Same inefficiency. The 2006 amendments increased the inefficiency at the end of DST to three weeks, but still did not create an inefficiency at the beginning. In fact, DST could start up to one week earlier than it currently does and still not result in morning-light inefficiency.

The problem is at the end. Daylight Saving Time runs three weeks too long, resulting in a wake time of nearly 2 hours before sunrise on the second to last day of DST. (The last day of DST is a Saturday - the observer will in all likelihood sleep in.)

Of course, the other problem with DST is that it is forced on us by Congress. Aside from that, though, the most efficient practice of DST would have the clocks set ahead one hour from the first Sunday in March to the second Sunday in October. Apologies to trick-or-treaters.

Posted by Qwertz at 1:02am on 12 Mar | No Comments

I have discovered the secret of high blog traffic!

Since I posted about this week’s episode of House, M.D., my hits have quadrupled. Apparently, many people want to know about the phrase written on the chalkboard behind House in the classroom where he grilled his 40 or so candidates:

Tesla was Robbed!

The phrase appears alone on the board early in the episode. But later in the episode, House writes the following above it:

SYN
RBC
TACH
PANIC

for synesthesia, red blood count, tachycardia and panic attacks.

These latter are part of House’s diagnostic procedure. He’s using the chalkboard instead of the old whiteboard in the office. But the Tesla remark, which appears, on a cursory examination, to be written in a different hand (though the style of the R is similar), is incongruous.

Nikola Tesla was born in Croatia in 1856 and emigrated to the United States and became a citizen there. He was a prolific and eccentric inventor. Among his more enduring inventions are fluorescent light bulbs and alternating current. AC is the operating standard for all major electrical distribution the world over, and Tesla’s AC generator design is used to generate very nearly all of the electricity on the commercial market. Having revolutionized the world with AC, Tesla next tried to move into wireless transmission of electricity. Tesla constructed large air-core resonant transformers for the purpose, and was extremely successful in getting them to transmit high voltages great distances without wires. Tesla invented long-distance radio communication in 1897 and was awarded US patents on the technology in 1900.

An upstart Italian, named Guglielmo Marconi, was working on achieving a similar feat. He was initially successful only in transmitting electrical signals a short distance. Nothing compared to what Tesla had been able to accomplish at his Colorado Springs laboratory. Marconi applied for patents on radio technology beginning in late 1900, after Tesla had been awarded his patents. Naturally, the US Patent Office denied Marconi’s applications.

Tesla is rumored to have once quipped,

Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents.

That Marconi used technology that was covered by patents held by Tesla is a matter of historical record. Whether Marconi actually got the ideas from Tesla, or developed them on his own, is debatable. What is also known, however, is that Marconi’s major American investor was a man named Thomas Edison. Edison was also a prolific inventor, and was a proponent of direct current electrical transmission. The electric chair was invented by Edison, using Tesla’s alternating current, as part of the two inventors’ ongoing and often bitter feud. But so long as Tesla held the patents on the technology Marconi was using in his radio experiments, Marconi could not obtain a patent.

That changed in 1904 when, for reasons unknown to history, the US Patent Office reversed its decision not to award Marconi a patent on the radio. Marconi also eventually won the Nobel Prize for his “invention.” Tesla never won one, even though he made a much more lasting contribution to electrical science than any other inventor of his time. Tesla eventually went broke and died in massive debt.

This is, I believe, what “Tesla was Robbed!” refers to. Not only the loss, during his life, of his radio patent, but the loss of the Nobel Prize to Marconi.

But Tesla wins in the end. In the same year as his death in 1943, the United States Supreme Court finally upheld Tesla’s prior patent on radio technology. To this day, as a matter of US law, Tesla, not Marconi, is the inventor of the radio. Tesla has even triumphed over Edison. Edison’s most celebrated inventions (phonograph, movie projector, light bulb) have largely been replaced by technologies that rely more heavily on Tesla’s contributions (CDs, digital video projectors, fluorescent bulbs). Today, Tesla’s inventions touch and improve every corner of modern Western Civilization.

Posted by Qwertz at 12:59am on 4 Oct | 9 Comments