It’s time for ThURLsday to return

ThURLsday (ThURLsday XI, if I’ve counted right)  returns after a long sojourn, inspired by my running across a website of a social reform group from Indiana.  We all know that parts of the country don’t observe Daylight Savings Time, which started Sunday morning at 2:00.  But which parts?  Arizona and Hawaii don’t observe DST at all.  Sections of a few states with two time zones observe in one zone but not the other, so that for half the year the entire state is on the same time zone, and for the other half it isn’t.  The most troublesome state, chronometrically, is Indiana.

Eighty-one of Indiana’s 92 counties are in the Eastern time zone.  Seventy-six of them don’t observe DST, so that in spring and summer the 11 counties on Central time (the areas around Evansville and closest to Chicago), which do observe DST, set their clocks to match the 76 Eastern counties that don’t.  (They are not in the same time zone, as the eastern 76 remain on Eastern Standard Time while the western 11 switch to Central Daylight Time, but CDT is the same thing as EST.)

Five counties in the Eastern time zone (the areas of Cincinnati and Louisville) do observe DST and move their clocks ahead one hour in April and back in October.  And in the parts of Indiana that are next to a time zone boundary, some agencies observe Central time for some purposes and Eastern time for others.  The result is that the question "What time is it in Indiana?" often has no definite answer.  Werner Heisenberg would have been overjoyed to know about Indiana time.

One group working to rationalize Indiana time is the Hoosier Daylight Coalition, which believes that Indiana’s patchwork time system is discouraging high-tech companies from moving there.  I enjoyed, but did not quite understand, its description of Indiana’s times.  Check out its links to other sites on Indiana time.