Word of the day

Eosin – a red fluorescent dye C₂₀H₈Br₄O₅ obtained by the action of bromine on fluorescein and used especially in cosmetics and as a toner; a red to brown sodium or potassium salt used especially as a biological stain for cytoplasmic structures; fluorescent acidic compounds which bind to and form salts with basic, or eosinophilic, compounds like proteins containing amino acid residues such as arginine and lysine, and stains them dark red or pink as a result of the actions of bromine on eosin.

Sowell says

If you want to spend your life nursing grievances, you will never run out of grievances to nurse, regardless of what color your skin is. If some people cannot be rotten to you because of your race, they will find some other reason to be rotten to you.

— Thomas Sowell Quotes (@ThomasSowell) June 17, 2024

Woman of the day

Woman of the Day SOE agent Pearl Witherington born OTD 1914 in Paris, head of the SOE Wrestler Network, the only woman to lead an SOE network as well as an active Maquis group of over two thousand men. Her codenames: Marie and Pauline. So effective was she that the Germans put a… pic.twitter.com/jOnwWaBpSK

— The Attagirls (@TheAttagirls) June 24, 2024

Keep standard time

If you were  up early looking for the stars that form Matariki this morning, you might also have been up early enough to see the sunrise.

The further south you are, the later that would be.

I took this photo at about 7:40am last week, a day after the winter solstice.

The sky was just starting to lighten, the sun didn’t rise until 8:15 and it set again around 5pm.

I raise this because every time the clocks go forward and back for daylight saving, there’s calls to have the same time all year.

I’d support that if clocks didn’t go forward but a lot of people wanting no change want daylight saving to become standard time.

It’s bad enough being so dark, and cold, in the mornings for the first few weeks when the clocks go forward and the last few before they go back.

If daylight saving time lasted all year it wouldn’t get light until after 9am here in the middle of winter and there’d be nothing to gain from it staying light until 6pm when it’s cold.

We live fractionally south of the 45th parallel which puts us closer to the South Pole than the equator.

The sun would rise even later and sink earlier further south.

Children would be walking and biking to school in the dark, roads would be icier an hour later and we’d be using heating for longer in the morning because it would take an hour longer before the sun warmed things up.

Darker mornings would also pose problems for farmers, tradies and everyone else who works outside.

People who want more daylight saving seem to work on the theory that if some of it is good, more would be better.

In doing so they either don’t know, or don’t care, that we don’t get the same amount of daylight all year. Days are longer in summer and shorter  in winter

Moving clocks by an hour has the same disruption to body clocks as jet lag, without the fun of travel.

Getting rid of daylight saving would prevent the disruption to circadian rhythms that accompany it, but my support for that is conditional on sticking to standard time.