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Too Much Sunshine
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A recent post in The Lounge on CodeProject had quite a number of us maybe slightly puzzled, but nonetheless quite amused. A linked site yields a letter written to an Arkansas newspaper, in which a concerned reader suspects that the early start of Daylight Saving Time, due to a "plot by a liberal Congress", is the cause of unusually warm conditions in Arkansas for March, because of the extra hours of sunlight.
I visit to Snopes reveals that the the letter was written tongue in cheek, but the intentions of the author are secondary to what really is funny, and that is the response to the letter by other esteemed readers of the newspaper. The full texts are available on snopes, but I present what matters:
"There is no more daylight than usual, regardless of the time."
"Nature and weather are, of course, unrelated to our choice of how we divide the day."
"In
March, we had the exact same number of hours of daylight as we do every
March. While Congress has the power to change many laws, it cannot
change the laws of nature. All the members did was change the time on
our clocks. They did not actually add any hours of daylight."
"Anyone
with even a basic understanding of reality knows that the number of
hours of daylight we have on any given day isn't altered by simply
resetting a clock."
"What
I am confused about is, no matter whether our clocks are set forward
one hour or back one hour, don't we continue to have the same amount of
daylight hours every day?"
What I find amusing is how the readers that responded deemed it necessary to explain why the first letter was wrong. Do they genuinely consider themselves the intellectual guardians of Arkansas on the grounds that they understand the relationship between the Earth and the Sun? Is this the moment they have been waiting for to shine, to rise up and be counted among Thinkers?