Clocks are turned back an hour from shifted time to standard time (approximately natural Sun time) in Europe on Sunday October 30, and in America on Sunday November 6.
It’s easy to be confused by the clock-shifting mess. When we’re on shifted time, is it like being one time zone to the east or to the west? Are we calling true 8 o’clock “7” or “9”? I got this wrong in a letter I sent to the Guardian and which they accepted (for their website), and I got up in the middle of a night to send a correction.
Confusion is compounded because Standard, Summer, Saving all start with s. Is BST British Standard Time? No, it’s British Summer Time, which in America would be called Daylight Saving time! British standard time is GMT.
Mexico’s Senate on October 6 voted (56 to 29 with 12 abstentions) to abolish clock-shifting, which was adopted as recently as 1996. The reform will not apply to the country’s northern area (its northern states?), bordering the USA. Yet another complication for the clock-shifting wilderness!
Which kind of time will Mexico stay on, standard or shifted? As usual, the journalists, and probably the politicians, are confused. The article says that the reform is “signaling a preference for more daylight in the mornings.” Does this mean it will stay on shifted time, when 7 AM is called “8,” so people get up earlier? But it also says that passage of the bill means that Mexico “would change its clocks for the last time next week,” implying that it will change to and stay on standard time.
As you can see in this portion of the time zones map in Astronomical Calendar 2022, Mexico divides into three zones, corresponding to the USA zones north of them. If they stay on shifted time, it will be as if they have moved 15° eastward: Mexico’s red zone will have to be changed to green.
Practical tips department
In September 2016 I wrote to a friend who was in need of cheering that I think about “small techniques in how to feel wellbeing, such as lifting the corners of the mouth, and Berenice’s pulling back of the shoulders” (in my novel about her). I had noticed that simply raising the corners of the mouth, which also lifts the cheeks against the eyes – an action of some facial muscles, a merely mechanical smile – becomes a felt smile. It can make the circumstances around you look better, or funny. It can calm away worse thoughts when you’re trying to get to sleep.
It’s good to find oneself backed up by science. A large international team of psychologists, led by Nicholas Coles of Stanford University and calling themselves the Many Smiles Collaboration, reports in Nature: Human Behaviour, 20 October 2022, that their “multi-lab test” using 3,878 subjects in 19 countries has confirmed this part of the “facial feedback hypothesis.”
Do our close relatives, the bonobos, chimpanzees, and gorillas, smile? I think not. Dogs, far more distantly related, smile, especially when jumping up your front to get your attention, or on hearing “Walk!” in a certain tone. I wish I could find the scores of sketches I once made of a dog called Benny, but this puppy will have to do.
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Mexico is quite far south so I can’t see the point in daylight saving time even in the northern parts.I use to live in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa which was 29 degrees south and I never noticed much difference in day length between winter and summer and the main difference was winter was colder with frost in the morning if it had been a clear night.