Making the Count (or, What’s So Standard About Standard Time?)
November 3, 2007 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
There’s been a discussion going on in the comments to my post on So That’s What Happened to the Clock on the Computer (aka a post on Halloween and trick or treating). The discussion has been about Daylight Saving Time, with asides about how life in the modern world (and after the wake of the Industrial Revolution) contributed to efforts to standardize time. Changes in technology have changed our understanding and even experience of time: Whoever invented the sundial was not worrying about nanoseconds.
Also earlier this week I posted about the “Brainbow,” a new genetic technique that makes it possible to visualize the complete neuronal circuits in great detail; scientists hope that by studying neuronal diagrams produced by the “Brainbow,” more can be learned about the different neurological wiring of an autistic person. And yesterday’s Eye on DNA quotes Dr. George Church, professor of genetics, Harvard University and founder of the Personal Genome Project, about bringing down thecost of sequencing a genome down to $1,000 by 2008: What more might we then be able to learn about autism genetics?
“One reason for the higher rates of many diseases is that researchers are being more thorough in their methods and many of the records they analyze are computerized and better organized,” professor Roy Richard Grinker wrote in an October 30th Washington Post article. Today’s USA Today notes that a “surge in special education services” and changes in diagnostic practices have contributed to a highly noticeable rise in cases of autism: We have the technological means and savvy to detect more cases of autism, and so there are more. We’re a society that puts faith in counting and statistics, in numbers and the results of tests and we can count so many cases of autism because we can.
And if you’re looking to count cases of autism, chances are (these days) you’ll find then.
Remember to set your clock back………
I live in Arizona and lived in Indiana for three years when they didn’t observe Daylight Savings. The only problem about not observing is that everyone else does and it makes phone calling and tv schedules confusing. People also never include what time zone they’re discussing or give the incorrect one. They say “standard” when they mean “daylight” and vice versa. In the summer, people refer to AZ in Pacific time but we’re not, it’s Mountain Standard. Then there is the Navajo rez that observes daylight savings and the state of Sonora that is in Central and observes daylight savings.
One of the complications of daylight savings is how hard people take it when it changes back. People blame all sorts of things, illness, tardiness, confusion, depression on the time change. For us here in Arizona, it just creeps up on us. Then it creeps back.
On little cat feet?
I didn’t know all that about Arizona—I think that would be too much for our household (not in terms of the clocks).