Daylight Saving Time - Is There a "Better" Way?

Daylight Saving Time

If it's tradition, we humans love it.
Even though it may hurt us, sting us, frustrate, annoy, or confuse us, if our hallowed, never-incorrect ancestors did it, by all the powers that be, we'll continue to march into whatever happiness-devouring chasm necessary.
For example: Daylight Saving Time.
Each year, the time switch seems to sneak up on us - yes, it sneaks up on us. Nobody is ever prepared for Daylight Saving Time. If it weren't on the calendar, no one would even be aware of it happening apart from that horrible feeling one gets when one wakes up on that terrible Monday morning wondering where the hell one's life went.
Anyway: after the time switch is done sneaking up on us, we begin to debate about the possibility of not doing this insanity any longer. Health concerns are cited; studies are quoted; people whine and complain and liken adapting to the time change like becoming accustomed to contracting a new, incurable disease.
Then, after we have those bitter feelings off our minds and the anger off our chest and we've taken enough naps, we calm down...in order to do the same thing again next time.
Is there another, better way to handle this?
Yes, easy: don't do it. Stop doing it. Just leave it alone. Don't change the time. At all. Full stop. Period.
The problem is that this solution is too easy.

So, keeping in mind that some people want to be trifling and make life more difficult for the rest of us, here's my contribution to the DST debate with a mind and demeanor to please all:

The ancient Romans divided up their nights into four equal vigiliae - "watches" (cf. Eng. "vigil", in keeping with the Greek practice of dividing the night into φυλακή - "guardships") and their days into twelve equal horae - "hours".
Assuming a sunrise at 6:00 AM and a sunset at 6:00 PM, this can be illustrated in the following manner:

Assuming this 6:00 AM - 6:00 PM daytime setup, each hora will be sixty minutes in length, each vigilia one hundred-eighty minutes (three hours) in length.

Now, here's the tricky part: the Romans retained the same equal division of the daylight hours into twelve horae, regardless of how much daylight there actually was. Remember, the Earth doesn't orbit the Sun in such a way that daylight starts a 6:00 AM and ends at 6:00 PM every day, year-round.
Let's check out what happens to the above diagram during different parts of the year:

At Rome, on the Vernal Equinox (March 20th, 2015)...

• the sun will rise at 6:14 AM 


• the sun will set at 6:22 PM


• daylight will last for 12 hours, 7 minutes, and 25 seconds


• For the ancient Romans, each hora would be (727.25 minutes/12 =) 60.6 minutes in length.


• For the ancient Romans, each vigilia would be ([1436.4 minutes - 727.25]/4 =) 177.3 minutes in length (or 2.9 hours).

At Rome, on the Summer Solstice (June 21st, 2015)...

• the sun will rise at 5:35 AM 


• the sun will set at 8:49 PM


• daylight will last for 15 hours, 13 minutes, and 48 seconds


• For the ancient Romans, each hora would be (931.48 minutes/12 =) 77.62 minutes in length.


• For the ancient Romans, each vigilia would be ([1436.4 minutes - 931.48]/4 =) 126.23 minutes in length (or 2.1 hours).

At Rome, on the Autumnal Equinox (September 23rd, 2015)...

• the sun will rise at 6:58 AM 


• the sun will set at 7:06 PM


• daylight will last for 12 hours, 8 minutes, and 26 seconds


• For the ancient Romans, each hora would be (728.26 minutes/12 =) 60.69 minutes in length.


• For the ancient Romans, each vigilia would be ([1436.4 minutes - 728.26]/4 =) 177.04 minutes in length (or 2.95 hours).

At Rome, on the Winter Solstice (December 22nd, 2015)...

• the sun will rise at 7:35 AM 


• the sun will set at 4:42 PM


• daylight will last for 9 hours, 7 minutes, and 38 seconds


• For the ancient Romans, each hora would be (547.38 minutes/12 =) 45.62 minutes in length.


• For the ancient Romans, each vigilia would be ([1436.4 minutes - 547.38]/4 =) 222.26 minutes in length (or 3.7 hours).

Imagine trying to keep your sundial up-to-date; or calculating how much sand you would need to put into an hourglass to keep track of the hour - the length of the daylight hora is dependent on the time of year.

Given the difficulty level (above a layman's knowledge) and the dedication needed to keep track of such subtle minutiae (literally), we can expect the average ancient Roman citizen to have little or no interaction with such a system - one imagines the average Cornelian or Julian to have looked at the position of the Sun in the sky in order to get a general idea of the time of day: morning, midday, evening being the most important (such as the hora sexta - "the sixth hour" which meant either midday [roughly six hours after sunrise] or midnight [roughly six hours after sunset]. The Spanish word siesta is derived from sexta).
Priests and officials were given the duty of calculating the calendar and the fasti ("The Divinely Allowed Days" - days considered lucky or appropriate in which business could be conducted, courts could convene, &c).
But if we were to adopt this ancient Italic (slightly Hellenic-influenced) system (a move which, by the way, is as stupid as the current system we already have: another superfluous and anachronistic way to keep track of time - therefore, no win, no loss.), then we all would be invested in learning the various degrees (literally down to the minutiae) of how much daylight we have on an in diem basis. There are so many trains, meetings, buses, classes, assemblies, courts, and work schedules in our post-Industrial Age society which require us to know, on a rather in diem level, the general and the exact time. Of course, the tech exists to make this work; but hot damn, think of the logistics of the switch-over - for one, one would have to convince snowball-flinging Senators to enact the damn thing.
Furthermore, we post-Industrial Age humans work at night, and through the night, and on an in noctem basis. This ancient system is well adapted to humans living without much capacity for cheap and effective artificial lighting and working under predominantly agrarian conditions - unlike our own Daylight Saving Time, which is an on-again, off-again hodgepodge of (supposedly) energy-saving initiatives, originally enacted by Germany as a fuel-saving effort during World War I (Sommerzeit). In such a system of time-keeping as detailed above, the day just ended more or less for most people when one couldn't see well outside anymore - the night is quite dark and extremely dangerous; however, why would the division exist anymore?
Lots of things happen at night in 2015, and with some degree of normalcy, during those once deadly Roman vigiliae.
Regardless of the drawbacks, is it really as bad as what we have now?
Let's do it.